Fact-Checking the Right’s Latest Lie About Kermit Gosnell and Abortion

By Akiba Solomon Apr 12, 2013

Over at Salon, Irin Carmon [reports on](http://www.salon.com/2013/04/12/there_is_no_gosnell_coverup/) what appears to be a coordinated strategy by Brietbart.com, Michelle Malkin and FOX News to amplify and redistribute a false claim about "liberal media" and reproductive health activists concealing details of the ongoing trial of Kermit Gosnell, proprietor of West Philadelphia’s deceptively named Women’s Medical Society. According to the 280-page, 2011 indictment filed by Philadelphia DA Seth Williams, the 69-year-old and his staff of unqualified medical assistants and fake doctors routinely took patients who were well over the legal limit of 24 weeks pregnant, overdosed them with Demerol, induced labor, delivered their babies, then "ensured fetal demise" by cutting their spinal cords with scissors. Over the past couple of months I’ve noticed that the anti-abortion portal Lifenews.com has been claiming a liberal media and feminist coverup. Since the claim didn’t even attempt to examine *why* poor African-American, Latina and Southeast Asian immigrant women were using this ghastly clinic to terminate unwanted pregnancies, I considered it a red herring. Now that, as Carmon reports, mostly white, male journalists from relatively mainstream outlets have legitimized this false claim, let’s reiterate: In 2011, in the first [Colorlines.com](https://colorlines.com/archives/2011/02/how_alleged_butcher_kermit_gosnell_got_over–and_poor_women_of_color_paid_the_price.html) Gender Matters column, I detailed accusations from the indictment (and cried after filing it). The piece was called "How Kermit Gosnell Got Over–and Poor Women of Color Paid the Price." > Predictably, abortion foes are using this scandal to fuel their rhetoric. And choice advocates are (rightly) citing the continued need for safe, affordable family planning options. But the way I see it, Dr. Kermit Gosnell, his staff, and his filthy clinic are just another example of how profit parasites feed on the bodies of poor women of color and how the agencies funded to protect them don’t really give a f@#k. As Philadelphia D.A. Seth Williams states in the grand jury report: > >" Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion." > Let me put it more bluntly: Politics and profits do not belong in a woman’s uterus. Period. End of story. H/T to Jill Filopovic of [Feministe.us](http://www.feministe.us/blog/).