Weekly Standard: Excellent article addresses the real issue of abortion being the gutter business of American Medicine

Weekly Standard has an excellent article pointing out the late term abortionist Gosnell seemed befuddled by his arraignment and had good reason to be.

The activists at NARAL and Planned Parenthood are not exactly wrong to worry about what they call TRAP laws (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers). And yet, there’s a more serious reason that medical supervision threatens the abortion license in this country.It’s what ordinary medical regulation and supervision would reveal: the fact that the abortion business is the gutter of American medicine.

Make no mistake: Abortion genuinely is a business in the United States, and a big one. The grand jury estimated that Gosnell was bringing in nearly $1.8 million a year, mostly in cash, by performing ordinary (or “just a little illegal”) first- and second-trimester abortions with his untrained staff every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday night. No one knows how much more he made from the operations he apparently performed most Sundays: the abortions so late in the third trimester that he allowed only his wife to help with them.

Many people knew what was going on at his Philadelphia clinic; several filed complaints with state and local agencies. But nothing was done, and at the time of his arrest, he hadn’t been visited by a medical examiner for 17 years. As the grand jury noted, with the change of governors in Pennsylvania in 1995—when the pro-abortion Tom Ridge replaced the pro-life Bob Casey—“the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all,” as “officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions.”
Who could wonder why Kermit Gosnell was confused at his arraignment? No one had stopped him before. No one in more than 30 years had questioned him. No one had ever given him a signal that he might be prosecuted for performing abortions by inducing overmedicated third-trimester labor and then chopping through the spinal cord of the living result. No one had ever dared call his abortion business murder.