Conor Friedersdorf thinks Kermit Gosnell’s trial should get more attention:
Inducing live births and subsequently severing the heads of the babies is indeed a horrific story that merits significant attention. Strange as it seems to say it, however, that understates the case.
For this isn’t solely a story about babies having their heads severed, though it is that. It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers. Any single one of those things would itself make for a blockbuster news story.
Conor’s piece is a must-read; and his examination of the Grand Jury report is what blog-journalism can do at its best. As Dish readers know, we ran a long thread on late-term abortion, but this case seems to me not about that issue as such. It is about how not to do it, rather than whether in some cases, it may be the least worst option available to a few tortured mothers. What this story is about is horrifying brutality, extreme incompetence, mass murder of innocents, and a complete, consistent and continuous failure of government oversight. That the details may have been buried by a free press because of squeamishness about portraying abortion in a bad light is worrying, to say the least.
(Image and caption from the Grand Jury Report (pdf))
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