by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• At the Daily Caller, our own Jill Stanek writes about President Barack Obama’s history of “blind faith in abortion doctors” like Kermit Gosnell:
  

  Note Obama expressed concern that saving abortion survivors “might impact… the relationship between the doctor and the patient,” and that this [Illinois Born Alive] legislation was “really designed to burden the original decision….”

  … Obama apparently cannot fathom that an upstanding abortionist who had been paid to kill a baby wouldn’t turn around and try to save a viable baby’s life in the event of a botch.

  Kermit Gosnell would have been one of the abortionists in which Obama had “confidence.”

• Also at the Daily Caller, Michael J. New discusses how New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s new Reproductive Health Act would overturn certain safeguards put in place in NY state abortion law from 1970 – three years before Roe was passed. These safeguards include requiring that only physicians – not nurses or midwives – may perform abortions, as well as allowing abortion only through 24 weeks. Cuomo’s Act clearly puts women at greater risk.
• Michelle Malkin sums up the “lack of access led to Gosnell” meme quite well. She also notes that Gosnell isn’t an exception – citing Stephen Brigham, Andrew Rutland, and the Delaware Planned Parenthood currently under state investigation:
  

  Gosnell’s enablers have concocted all sorts of excuses for themselves.

  The billion-dollar abortion racket says “lack of funding” and “access” to “health care” is the real problem. But expanding “access” is exactly how Gosnell got away with murder after bloody murder. As the grand jury revealed, pro-choice bureaucrats in liberal GOP governor Tom Ridge’s administration concluded that increased inspections “would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”

• The USA Today editorial on Gosnell’s trial includes this line:
  

  Unless evidence emerges that clinics like his exist in other parts of the country, the case looks like an appalling anomaly.

  They say this after noting how a simple internet search could have found other Pennsylvania abortionists willing to perform abortion up to 24 weeks. An internet search or having contact with a couple of people in the pro-life movement could have provided ample evidence that the filthy, unsanitary conditions in Gosnell’s clinic are not an anomaly and that there are plenty of incompetent, dangerous abortionists. Gosnell is an anomaly in the sense that he snipped the necks of babies who survived abortion and there was so much evidence against him, but pro-lifers have been chronicling shady abortionists for decades.

• Ross Douthat notes how abortion advocates have failed to put forward arguments which embrace the goriness of late-term abortion without helping the pro-life cause:
  

  To respond effectively to the doubts about abortion that fetal snipping summons up, pro-choice advocates would need arguments that… acknowledge and come to terms with the goriness of third-trimester abortions while simultaneously persuading the conflicted and uncommitted of their validity, and that somehow take ownership of the “violence” and “gruesomeness” of abortion… without giving aid and comfort to the pro-life cause.

  And in the absence of such arguments, the pro-choice response to Gosnell feels either evasive and euphemistic, or else logically consistent in ways that tend to horrify the unconvinced….

  But of course it’s possible that those arguments are absent because they simply don’t exist.

• James Taranto points out how Roe v. Wade didn’t make abortions safe for women. Instead of hiding in the back-alleys, shady abortionists can now bring the back-alley to main street (or 3801 Lancaster):
  

  Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Gosnell and have already obtained guilty pleas from eight of his former staffers. The grand jury’s report should also be seen as an indictment of America’s post-Roe abortion industry. Its indifference—at best—to legal limits made possible the deaths of untold numbers of babies, lending credence to the argument that legal abortion is a slippery slope to infanticide.

  Meanwhile, the claim that Roe v. Wade made America safe from back-alley abortion stands exposed as a cruel hoax, and a deadly one for women and children alike.

[Gosnell photo via philly.com]