It would be difficult to overstate the impact of Kristen Powers’ April 11 column bemoaning the absence of coverage of the Kermit Gosnell murder trial. This is not to say that once “We’ve forgotten what belongs on Page One” ran in USA Today there was a collective mad rush to Philadelphia.
But Powers did get the ball rolling that the rest of us had found immovable. Suddenly it was semi-obligatory to at least explain why your outlet ignored the trial or parachute in a reporter for a few days coverage.
(Her column can be read here. Our take on what she wrote can be perused here.)
Powers returned to the scene of the crime, so to speak, yesterday in a follow up column, “Gosnell’s abortion atrocities no ‘aberration‘” in USA Today.
Powers begins with the devastating account of 20-year-old Desiree Hawkins who had an abortion at Gosnell’s West Philadelphia abortion clinic in 2009. Contacted by authorities this year, she was told that “one of the severed feet found in jars at the clinic belonged to her aborted baby,” Powers wrote.
In preparing to testify Hawkins discovered from reading her file that she was further along when she aborted than she thought. (Hawkins was to be called as rebuttal witness to Gosnell, but Gosnell chose not to testify in his own defense.) She also told Powers of being humiliated by Gosnell’s staff.
As we start to absorb the “lessons” of the Gosnell murder trial, the one given we can count on is that the Abortion Industry will never budge from its talking point: Gosnell was a “renegade,” an “outlier” not in the least bit representative of the industry. Thus no need whatsoever for abortion clinic regulations. They can self-regulate.
Indeed, requiring minimal standards will drive women into the hands of people like Gosnell, we’re told. Nice trick, if no one bothers to think it through
Unfortunately for them, Powers has. She asks the question that virtually never gets attention:
“But how could they possibly know that this is an aberration?”