Legal Abortion Didn't End Back Alley Abortions

It's a canard. It's a falsehood. It's a lie.

Quick aside: For those who've had abortions: Women, others have gone through the same thing and lived to regret it. There is forgiveness, there is healing, there are people willing to walk with you through your grief. There are people who will pray with you, and cry with you, and know your pain.  See Resources for Help After Abortion or Hope After Abortion for some place to start finding the help you need.

Now, back to the regular post.

Heck, even the estimates of "back-alley abortions" used by NARAL and others in the years before Roe v. Wade were a lie, according to Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL.

Now, as Mark Steyn so searingly points out, the back-alley is licensed and unregulated by the agencies charged to protect the lives and safety of patients. It's not about a woman's right to choose. It's about abortion on demand--anyone's demand: the boyfriend, the parents of the mother, the pimp with all the underage prostitutes, or the abortionist who, confronted with a woman who has changed her mind, shouts "I don't have time for this", sedates her, and aborts the child.  Mark Steyn gathers together a mountain of testimony and lays into the whole affair.  Excerpts:

As I was leaving Fox News last night, I glanced up at the monitor and caught Juan Williams expressing mystification to Sean Hannity as to why Republicans in Congress were wasting the country's time on a "little thing" like abortion.

Gee, I dunno. Maybe it's something to do with a mass murderer in Pennsylvania, or Planned Parenthood clinics facilitating the sex trafficking of minors. From the Office of the District Attorney in Philadelphia:

Viable babies were born*. Gosnell killed them by plunging scissors into their spinal cords. He taught his staff to do the same.

This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale - and it barely makes the papers. Had he plunged his scissors into the spinal cord of a Democrat politician in Arizona, then The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC and everyone else would be linking it to Sarah Palin's uncivil call for dramatic cuts in government spending. But "Doctor" Kermit Gosnell's mound of corpses is apparently entirely unconnected to the broader culture...

[extensive links and clips from recent news stories here--see the original piece, but be warned--you'll need a strong stomach.]

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.

It's not about choice.  It's about abortion on demand, abortion without limits, abortion totally available to anyone, everyone, nunc et semper.  It's about the restoration of child abandonment and infanticide as a normal practice in human society--in other words, a rejection of Judaism's teaching on the widow and the orphan, and of Christianity's teaching about the least among us, as well as a rejection of what every ultrasound, every embryology textbook, every glimpse inside the womb on Nova or Discovery or pick-your-channel that's run one of those "Miracle of Life" programs (like National Geographic - In the Womb or Miracle of Birth or From Conception to Birth or Intimate Universe - The Human Body [VHS]) has ever shown us.  It's about being able to kill the child.
 
It's not about a woman's right to choose.

At times like these, there's only one thing to do, one place to go.

Kermit Gosnell, meet...Sweeney Todd.

I wonder if they had the same affection for the tools of their trade?

Perhaps a similar tragic backstory. Pray for everyone involved in the culture of death, in the business of abortion, mothers, children, doctors and nurses, everyone.