I have been reading about the case of Dr Gosset with increasing horror. I have a pile of personal reasons for disliking abortion. As a child adopted in the 1960s, there is a reasonable chance that my nursing student mother would have terminated me. She didn’t — and she calls me kin now.

Like Grerp I see terminations as something that we will no longer be able to ban. I think that this society wants to disavow the consequences of sex — which include pregnancy, child support, and a pile of nasty diseases (at least two of which _HIV and syphilis — still cause people to present with psychiatric illnesses if luck and irreversible dementia if not). And I note that the male partner has no choice as to if he will support the child — he as at the mercy of the woman.

Anyway, the quote:

The District Attorney’s office this week charged an abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell, with murder and infanticide. Nine other workers at the abortion clinic, the Women’s Medical Society, also face charges. According to the prosecutors, Gosnell and his associates not only broke state law by performing abortions after 24 weeks—they also killed live babies by stabbing them with scissors and cutting their spinal cords. Law enforcement officials found blood-stained furniture, unsterilized instruments and fetal remains scattered about the clinic. At least one woman, a refugee from Nepal, had died under Gosnell’s care after being given repeated injections of a dangerous sedative. Prosecutors said Gosnell made millions from treating and sometimes maiming his patients, who were mostly low-income, minority women [3].

But perhaps most frightening of all? The atrocities were discovered by accident [4], as the Philadelphia Inquirer points out. Warnings—from patients and their attorneys, a doctor at a Philadelphia hospital, women’s health groups, pro-choice groups, and even an employee of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health—failed to prompt state and local authorities to investigate or take action against the clinic.

The grand jury report said that one look at the place would have detected the problems, but the Pennsylvania Department of Health hadn’t inspected the place since 1993. Here’s the grand jury report, in surprisingly strong language:

The Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions.

“Even nail salons in Pennsylvania are monitored more closely for client safety,” the report states. “Without regular inspections, providers like Gosnell continue to operate; unlawful and dangerous third-trimester abortions go undetected; and many women, especially poor women, suffer.”

Now I commend the people from the pro-choice groups who did their duty and reported on the poor standards of this service. They were at least concerned about the service have minimal standards. There are many things that can go wrong –ranging from uterine rupture to post termination sepsis — that require standards of hygiene and sepsis. We have more regulations, in NZ, for ECT (which is basically benign — the risk relates to the anaesthetic) and we inspect and certify places doing terminations. We also requre all doctors audit their practice.

What gets me is that the usual systems — set up to ensure that there is asepsis and that systematic errors are not used in any surgery — were not used and that this was a poltical decision. It should have not been so. The service should have been run by doctors with the spine to insist on infection control and audit of complications. This is as much part of any service as assessment of patients and follow-up.
>But abortion is special. It should not be. It should be rare — as a termination implies something has gone so horribly wrong that a fetus has to die. From J. Durden:

Pregnancies are completely avoidable. Women have the regular pill, the morning after pill, the power to discriminate among their sexual partners, the power to insist upon condoms only when having sex, or the power to not have sex altogether if pregnancy is so scary and life-threatening. (The highly unlikely cases include instances where both the condom AND the pill fail – almost statistically impossible – or in instances of ACTUAL rape which end in pregnancy,…,

But abortion is protected by the constitution. Only in the USA — where Roe vs Wade has as much relevance to the aforementioned document as Dredd Scott — the rest of the world is more sensible.

Special cases make for bad medicine. If we are going to do terminations as a society — I for one refuse to bow to Baal but I’m aware that I am in a minority — then they should be regulated and done along with any other gynecological procedure. And this service — from the data we have was unsafe. Back street abortionists would have had more hygiene.

Hat tip Thomas Lipton