No, that’s not a misprint in the title. In the role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons, a trog was a character who belonged to a race of humanoid monsters. Thus the word trog is an apt descriptor for Kermit Gosnell, the “doctor” who ran a house-of-horrors abortion mill in Philadelphia for over thirty years and is currently on trial for numerous violations of Pennsylvania abortion laws. The 281-page grand jury report reads, “Gosnell flagrantly violated virtually every regulation and law Pennsylvania has to the operation of abortion facilities.”
Aside from numerous technical violations, the grand jury filed the following criminal charges:
- Murder of Karnamaya Mongar
- Murders of babies born alive
- Infanticide
- Violations of the Controlled Substances Act
- Hindering, Obstruction, and Tampering
- Perjury
- Illegal late-term abortions
- Violations of the Abortion Control Act
- Abuse of a Corpse
- Theft by Deception
- Conspiracy
- Corrupt Organization
- Corruption of Minors
The trial for Gosnell began in mid-March and is still in progress. If there is any justice in this world, he should get the death penalty or life in prison.
Like the mainstream media, the pro-death crowd will ignore the trial or, if pressed, will claim that Gosnell and his clinic were the exception; that most clinics are clean, staffed by a competent staff, and run by doctors who care deeply about their patients. Or they might blame Gosnell’s carnage on . . . wait for it . . . racism! “No way!” you say. “Gosnell is black.” It doesn’t matter.
David A. Love, writing for Grio.com, begins his article by admitting that “the crimes for which he [Gosnell] is accused of (sic) are horrific, gruesome and unspeakable.” But then he swiftly moves on to a key point: “. . . there is a story behind the story that some are missing in this case, and that is the issue of race.”
Love’s evidence of a race factor comes from the grand jury report. One of Gosnell’s employees testified that he treated white clients better than black ones: “(W)hite patients often did not have to wait in the same dirty rooms as black and Asian clients. Instead, Gosnell would escort them up the back steps to the only clean office . . . and he would turn on the TV for them.” Apparently, Gosnell also handled all the medication for white clients but had no qualms about his unqualified staff medicating all others. (For the record, there is no evidence that Gosnell treated the unborn children of white women differently. Thus, we can assume he butchered them in the womb, almost out of the womb, or snipped the necks with a scissors to sever the spinal column just in case they accidentally were born alive. No racism there.)
Mr. Love then moves on to express concerns that the Gosnell case may cause some people to consider banning abortion and that some states are passing regulations that are interfering with a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. From there he comes to his main theme: “This war on women’s reproductive freedom is also a war on low-income women, including poor, black and brown women. Denial of access has placed their health in danger.”
War on women? Where have we heard that before? Hey, if it worked during the presidential campaign, why not use it again?
Mr. Love places a large portion of the blame for this “war on women” on the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prohibited federal Medicaid funding for abortions, except for rape, incest, and a threat to the life of the mother. According to Love, Medicaid covers 16 million women, twenty percent of whom have low incomes. Thus, the Hyde Amendment unfairly targets poor women. Love then quotes the ACLU: “In practice, these women do not have the same rights as other American women who can finance an abortion out-of-pocket or through private insurance coverage.”
Mr. Love finishes his attack on the Hyde Amendment by asserting that, since its inception, over a million women have been unable to afford an abortion, and 25% of them have actually been forced to carry their child to term.
For Mr. Love, it all gets down to access. Poor women are forced to go to a guy like Gosnell because there is a dearth of abortion clinics in this nation and inadequate access to contraception. So, when they get pregnant, many are forced to make dangerous choices.
Well, let’s take a closer look at access. Gosnell reportedly made almost $2 million per year. He did not kill babies for free. His sliding scale ran from $330 for a very early pregnancy to as much as $3000 for a baby over 24 weeks. That’s a lot of money, but apparently his clients were able to pay in cash. If Mr. Love is so concerned about poor women and their inability to afford an abortion, instead upon insisting that the taxpayers foot the bill, perhaps he should persuade abortionists to volunteer their services or significantly reduce their fees. After all, is it right for abortionists to make millions from the vacated uteruses of poor minority women?
And speaking of making millions, last year Planned Parenthood (PP), the largest abortion provider in America, received $542 million of taxpayer money. This amount is 45% of their total income, which means that its income was over a billion dollars. PP reported last year that it earned $150 million last year by performing 334,000 abortions. That comes out to nearly $450 per abortion. Where is the compassion here? With all the money PP has, and with all its compassion for women, why wouldn’t they offer free abortions or, at the very least, why not abortions for $100?
By the way, I wonder if Mr. Love is aware that Cecile Richards, the CEO of PP, makes nearly $400,000 per year and that thirty of the top PP executives have salaries over $200,000. If Ms. Richards and the top executives would cut their salaries in half, and if PP would charge poor women only $100 per abortion, over 30,000 women would have that access Mr. Love so cherishes.
Or how about this? Mr. Love could organize a national crusade to urge women to practice abstinence until they are married. Not only would the “need” for abortions significantly decrease, but millions of women would actually escape poverty. Now that would truly help poor women.
If there is a war on women, it’s not from the right. Instead, it’s the left that sees women as nothing more than animals who cannot control their sexual impulses, who need their bodies filled with powerful chemicals to prevent pregnancy, and, should that fail, have their children brutally ripped from their wombs. By any serious definition, that is a real war.