What Difference Did Roe Make?

Mark Steyn talks Gosnell back in February 2011. Many links and graphic details in original.  Excerpts:

With Planned Parenthood aiding and abetting child prostitution, my friend Rich Lowry argued that the back alley is back:

Legal abortion was supposed to end "back-alley abortions," both their dangers and their entanglements with shady characters. But the practice and the mores of the back alley are with us still, tolerated by people for whom the ready provision of abortion trumps all else.

Rich is right. Ever since Roe v Wade, proponents of a woman's "right to choose" have warned us against going back to the bad old days of rusty coat hangers and unsterilized instruments from money-grubbing butchers on the wrong side of town. Now, happily, the back alley is on the main drag, and with a state permit framed on the wall...

For years, the supposed regulators averted their gaze - as a matter of policy. For abortion's ideological enforcers, the official euphemisms trump reality. For those on the receiving end of infection, mutilation, sterilization and death, reality has a way of intruding...

The back alley is back, and supersized: The above New Jersey clinic performs 10,000 abortions a year. When the pro-choice rally ends and Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd and other celebrities d'un certain age return to Hollywood, and the upper-middle-class women with the one designer baby go back to their suburbs, a woman's "right to choose" means that, day in, day out, the blessings of this "right" fall disproportionately on all the identity groups the upscale liberals profess to care about - poor women, black women, Hispanic women, undocumented women, and other denizens of Big Government's back alley.

A government back alley, licensed and supposedly regulated, is worse than the old kind, because it implies the approval of the state, and of society. That's what Gosnell thought he had, when he murdered those babies and mutilated those teenage girls. That's what Planned Parenthood think they have, when they facilitate the sexual exploitation of Third World children. And, given the silence of the PC media, maybe they're right. Aside from the intrinsic evil of not only Gosnell but a state that knowingly colludes with him, these "little" abortion stories reveal an almost totalitarian mindset in the "pro-choice" movement's determination to brook no intrusion of reality upon the official myths. You may be one of those wealthy suburban "feminists" or "new men" indifferent to the fate of eight-pound "blobs of tissue" or 14-year old "women", but the gulf between propaganda and truth, between the fatuous feelgood bumper stickers and the rusty crochet hooks, is profound - and, in a world where statists and social engineers serve as ruthless enforcers for the prevailing ideology, its deep moral corruption will eventually swallow you, too. America should be at the very minimum deeply disquieted by these revelations. That it is not - that it is dismissed as a "little thing" - is even more disquieting.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL, once discussed the reason why abortion tends to attract the worst doctors--why the Gosnell case is unlikely to be the last such.  He listed a number of reasons, both personal and professional, including the technical ease of the procedure, the distaste amongst many younger physicians who'd rather not perform it, the effect of ultrasound on people who could now see what it was that they were killing, and the high profits to be made by those willing to perform abortions quickly.  Gosnell is not alone.  Update:  Gosnell is not alone.

If these conditions are persisting, even after abortion is legalized, we need to start asking whether illegal abortions were awful because desperate women were being taken advantage of by people willing to do the illegal for money, or whether they were awful because women were being taken advantage of by people willing to do the unthinkable for money.