Gosnell: Still a local crime story

[DonViejo]

In the end, the criminal justice system worked, punishing a lone outlaw. It had nothing to do with legal abortion

BY IRIN CARMON

In the end, the case of Kermit Gosnell, convicted today of first-degree murder of three babies and numerous other charges, is a local crime story.

That, of course, was the phrase famously used by Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff to respond to questions about why she hadn’t covered the case. She was widely pilloried by the right for it, and she later said, “I was clearly wrong.” But she wasn’t.

There are, of course, national implications to the case because policy shapes so many aspects of our lives, including how we access healthcare and under what terms. And Gosnell’s dangerous clinic was inexcusably allowed to continue operating despite numerous complaints to state authorities. But if you’re horrified by what Gosnell did — along with the major pro-choice organizations, according to their statements today — you should be satisfied that the criminal justice system did its job. He broke the law, and he is being punished. (Quite possibly with the death penalty, which one self-identified pro-life scholar, at least, opposes for Gosnell out of a sense of consistency.) In the meantime, there is no reason to think the case has changed much about the world outside Gosnell’s.

What this case is not is a referendum on all abortion, a conflation the political strategy around the case has attempted. Gosnell has been convicted of murder because women gave birth to live, viable (or arguably viable) babies that were then murdered. The anti-abortion movement has argued that this is the same as abortion, and the difference is inches inside or outside “the womb,” a word that erases the woman bearing it altogether. But such difficult calculations only apply to around 1 percent of all abortions, since 98.7 percent of abortions are conducted before 21 weeks, itself a few weeks before viability. Forty-one states ban abortion after viability except in the direst cases, and most lack a provider to perform one. In poll after poll, Americans are invariably more comfortable with first-trimester abortions – 91.4 percent of all abortions — than later ones, and that makes sense if you think life occurs on a spectrum from a blob of cells to a fully formed person, or some version thereof. People, including pregnant people, have complicated feelings about all this — another reason why the decision should be a personal one — but the law tends to keep in mind the difference between a woman’s autonomy over her body’s gestation and labor of an embryo or fetus and a living, independent person out in the world.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/13/gosnell_still_a_local_crime_story/