The pro-abortion movement seems to have reached a new extreme in the wake of the Kermit Gosnell murder trial. In a piece for The Daily Beast, columnist Michelle Goldberg argues that the real lesson of the Gosnell horror show is the need for “freely available and fully subsidized” early-term abortions.
That's right, she wants you and me to pay for early-term abortions, so as to prevent the demand for the sort of late-term abortions Gosnell performed and, in many cases, botched.
The vast majority of abortions—98.5 percent, according to the Guttmacher Institute—are done before 20 weeks. There’s not very much research about the 1.5 percent of abortions that happen after 20 weeks, but a significant number are done when a wanted pregnancy goes horribly awry. If my 20-week ultrasound had revealed a baby without prospects for a tolerable life, I would have joined the sad sorority of women for whom a late abortion is hardly a choice at all.
Goldberg then blamed “lack of access to decent reproductive health care” as a reason why some women are so desperate that they seek a late-term abortion. She cited Diane Greene Foster, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology ant the University of California-San Francisco, who found that:
Looking at more than 200 women who had abortions after 20 weeks for nonmedical reasons…two thirds of them were delayed while they tried to raise money to pay for a termination. Twelve percent were teenagers, some of whom went months without realizing they were pregnant. These are people who were failed by our health system. “Public financing and private insurance coverage would make abortions happen faster,” says Foster. “We’re moving in exactly the wrong direction from that.”
This is why, Goldberg argues, “We would be far better off with a system like that in France, where abortion is limited after 12 weeks but freely available and fully subsidized before then. Late-term abortion can be truly problematic. That doesn’t mean that the anti-abortion movement is the solution.”
Goldberg's article is a slap in the face to millions of pro-life Americans -- as well as many pro-choice Americans who disdain the notion of taxpayer funding for abortion -- and is cynically pegged to make the best possible spin out of the Gosnell atrocity in service of a heretofore elusive leftist agenda: widespread taxpayer funding of elective abortions at the federal level.
