Originally posted at David Horowitz’s Newsreal:

One of the biggest news stories this week has been the exposure of Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors masquerading as an abortion clinic in Philadelphia, PA. Since the grisly reality of what was happening behind those closed doors came to light, there was an immediate firestorm of outrage and controversy surrounding the issue. Pro-life activists have argued that legislators were willing to overlook the massive issues that repeatedly came to light because they are afraid of the backlash from the abortion lobby. Pro-abortion activists among the feminist left, most notably Amanda Marcotte, have given only the tiniest condemnation while excusing the abortion atrocities in the name of choice. But is a murderous butcher posing as an abortionist really the best argument for choice, and how entrenched in an abortion agenda must one be to make excuses for these abuses?

Operation Rescue published heart-wrenching photographs from Gosnell’s butcher shop. Looking at them was immensely difficult for me — these children were barely older than my son is now.

I had a 4D ultrasound this week, and posted some of the videos on my Facebook page. Last night, I got an e-mail from Kate at Blatherings Blog asking if she could post one of them on her blog. I told her yes, and here is the video she chose to post:

That’s my son, Ben, at 29 weeks yawning. I have other videos of him sucking his thumb and moving around. On other ultrasounds I’ve seen him kick his little feet and wave his little arms. I’ve not only heard his heart beating, I’ve seen it. I look at those images and wonder what he’ll look like when he’s born, I wonder if he’ll want to play soccer and hockey like his dad did, if he’ll follow his dad’s footsteps and join the Marine Corps, if he’ll get married, what his children will look like. I look at those images and see an entire future, a lifetime of hope and promise, spread out in front of me. I could never look at those images, hear that heartbeat, and feel him moving inside me, and consider killing him. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could make that choice. I’ve always been pro-life, but I can’t understand how someone who has carried a child can remain pro-abortion.

I caused a firestorm of controversy back in October when I pondered this, daring to ask how pro-abortion extremist Jessica Valenti felt about abortion now that she’s carried and birthed a child of her own.

When Valenti heard her baby’s heart beating, did she think it was just an abortable clump of cells? When she saw her daughter moving in her uterus, was it a fetus or a baby? When she felt her baby kicking, did she have any doubt about what she was carrying? If she had miscarried (and thank goodness she didn’t), would she have thought she lost some fetal tissue or would she have thought she lost her baby? A pregnant woman knows the truth. It’s why so many women feel they need to lie to themselves or avoid an ultrasound before an abortion. If they were to admit the truth to themselves, they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves.

These are questions she’ll probably never answer. (She blogged about her pregnancy only once.) To answer truthfully would be to undermine what she’s spent years fighting for. After all, when you see the little baby squirming and moving on that ultrasound screen, there’s no doubt about what it is. But to admit that a pregnant woman is carrying a baby, and not a meaningless clump of cells, would be to open Pandora’s Box for pro-abortion radicals like Valenti. If it’s a baby, then to abort it is murder. Quite a sticky situation for a femisogynist to get herself into, isn’t it?

It’s the same situation pro-aborts like Amanda Marcotte, Jill Filipovic, and Vanessa Valenti find themselves in now as they struggle to defend abortion rights in the wake of the Gosnell controversy. To let themselves be as outraged as the rest of decent society is would undermine everything they’ve been fighting for. And who cares if a few infants and one woman died for abortion rights? They’ve got an agenda to push.

Interestingly, NARAL celebrated Blogs for Choice Day yesterday. Is this an example of the choice we’re supposed to fight for as women? To pretend that this is some kind of an aberration is a joke. How many other hospitals, medical departments, health boards, and DAs are looking the other way in the name of protecting abortion rights? Abortion advocates refuse to even address the possibility. This is a one-time problem, one wackjob who has nothing to do with abortion and all other abortion clinics are “safe”. The question is, if this really has anything to do with women’s rights and freedom of choice, then why can’t we ask these questions? Why the lack of regulations for abortion clinics? If this was really a question of choice and women’s rights, abortion extremists like Amanda Marcotte would be outraged and demanding to know the answers to these questions. After all, it is women who are suffering, and it is women who extremists like Marcotte claim to be fighting for.

If you want to know how soulless the abortion movement really is, then just look at their response to Gosnell’s House of Horrors. What kind of person must you be to see the atrocities that took place at this clinic and argue for more abortions? It says a lot about abortion advocates, that they would brush the murder and abuses of women and children under the rug to protect the right to have an abortion. But before we can understand the depths of the pro-abortion feminist left’s depravity in their reaction to the Gosnell case, we need to understand just what went on behind those closed doors.

The grand jury report is ghastly. Dr. Gosnell is charged with eight counts of murder, seven of which were infants. These infants were delivered alive and viable, before Gosnell murdered them by snipping their spinal cords. In addition to letting mothers give birth to their babies and then murdering those babies, the grand jury report shows that Gosnell had no concern for the health of the mothers, either. The introduction of the report shows that this man is a sadistic monster.

This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.

… One woman, for example, was left lying in place for hours after Gosnell tore her cervix and colon while trying, unsuccessfully, to extract the fetus. Relatives who came to pick her up were refused entry into the building; they had to threaten to call the police. They eventually found her inside, bleeding and incoherent, and transported her to the hospital, where doctors had to remove almost half a foot of her intestines.

On another occasion, Gosnell simply sent a patient home, after keeping her mother waiting for hours, without telling either of them that she still had fetal parts inside her. Gosnell insisted she was fine, even after signs of serious infection set in over the next several days. By the time her mother got her to the emergency room, she was unconscious and near death.

A nineteen-year-old girl was held for several hours after Gosnell punctured her uterus. As a result of the delay, she fell into shock from blood loss, and had to undergo a hysterectomy.

One patient went into convulsions during an abortion, fell off the procedure table, and hit her head on the floor. Gosnell wouldn’t call an ambulance, and wouldn’t let the woman’s companion leave the building so that he could call an ambulance.

Why did no one at the hospital report these incidents? As Michelle Malkin pointed out, it likely wouldn’t have mattered if they had reported him. The Pennsylvania Department of Health knew of clinic violations for decades, and did nothing. The Pennsylvania Department of State was repeatedly given evidence of the horrible conditions at Gosnell’s clinic and did nothing. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health inspected Gosnell’s clinic multiple times and did nothing. There was decades worth of oversight on multiple levels where officials willingly closed their eyes to the abuses and violations going on at the Gosnell House of Horrors.

Even an evaluator from The National Abortion Federation visited Gosnell’s clinic and called it “the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected”. Gosnell even told her about the death of Karnamaya Mongar. Was any action taken? No. The goal of NAF is allegedly “to ensure safe, legal, and acceptable abortion care, and to promote health and justice for women”, yet they turned a blind eye to Gosnell’s clinic, just like Pennsylvania authorities. They were more concerned about protecting their agenda than they were concerned with protecting the lives of women.

While pro-lifers have rightfully demanded to know why it is state officials let these atrocities continue on for decades, pro-abortion extremists have somehow decided that this case has nothing to do with abortion — and demands less regulation in the abortion industry. If only pro-lifers didn’t make abortions so difficult to obtain, then none of this would have ever happened, or something.

The lack of outrage from the political left and from pro-abortion activists is disturbing. As The Anchoress noted, the hypocrisy is overwhelming.

While many pro-aborts claim that this has nothing to do with abortion, to truly believe that boggles the mind. After all, how different is partial birth abortion from what Dr. Gosnell was doing? The only difference is that part of the baby remains inside the mother’s body — and that abortion extremists defend the “right” to perform late-term, partial birth abortions on babies that are viable and able to survive outside the womb. It’s also worth pointing out that, if Barack Obama had his way, what Dr. Gosnell did would be considered legal.

Meanwhile, femisogynists (rather than being outraged at the abuses women were forced to endure at Gosnell’s hands) are scurrying to excuse this. They pay lip service to the outrage of the situation, and then quickly go right into abortion-defense mode.

Amanda Marcotte begins by quickly contorting herself into an intellectual pretzel trying to blame the pro-life movement for this madman.

That shady abortion providers get patients at all is something we can safely blame the anti-choice movement for. Most doctors in this country are pro-choice, and many would like to provide abortion, but as Slate’s Emily Bazelon demonstrated in the New York Times, the stigma of doing so makes it that much harder to do. Good medical care costs money, but very few women seeking abortion can get coverage, in no small part because of anti-choice initiatives like the Hyde Amendment. If you’re seeking an abortion but can’t afford it, going to a doctor who provides substandard care on the cheap is certainly going to be an attractive option.

These particular charges involve late-term abortion, and all I could think upon reading the news story was, “I wish these women could have gone to Dr. George Tiller,” because he was renowned for the quality of care provided at his Kansas clinic. But sadly, that wasn’t even an option, even for those who could afford it, as Dr. Tiller’s life was taken by an anti-choice extremist in 2009. When vacuums are created, we shouldn’t be surprised when they suck in a bunch of junk.

Amanda’s premise is flawed on virtually every level. First, Dr. Tiller was murdered in 2009. The violations at Dr. Gosnell’s clinic go back decades, so many of the women violated at his clinic could have gone to Dr. Tiller. Also, this wasn’t a case of women choosing to go to an abortion butcher like Dr. Gosnell because it was cheap, or because better options weren’t available. As Rachael Larimore pointed out in her rebuttal, Philadelphia houses several abortion clinics, one of which offers financial assistance. Pennsylvania offers no-cost birth control and emergency contraception to women who qualify. And while Planned Parenthood charges less than $1,000 for first trimester abortions, Dr. Gosnell was charging his patients $2,500 or more for his late-term abortions.

Jill at Feministe tried to pretend that he was just a murderer and not an abortionist, and therefore this has nothing to do with abortion.

Contrary to what Great Moral Authority On Abortion William Saletan has to say about the matter, I think we’re all pretty well agreed that if the charges against Kermit Gosnell are true, then dude is a criminal and needs to go to jail. Killing a baby after it’s born and has taken breaths? Is not abortion. It should be, and is, a crime punishable by law. And Kermit Gosnell is being criminally prosecuted.

Also, women don’t get late-term abortions for fun. Seriously. No one is like, “I think I will continue this pregnancy for as long as legally possible before I undergo an invasive medical procedure that is rendered longer, more expensive, and more complicated because I waited six months to have it.” No. It’s actually more like, “I really wanted this baby but now it turns out that there’s a fetal abnormality incompatible with life, and if I continue this pregnancy I risk my own health and/or life to give birth to a baby that either will not live or will only live in extreme pain for a very short while.” Fun stuff like that.

That’s a falsehood, of course. Most late-term abortions are actually not done to save the life of the mother or because the baby won’t survive. There have been virtually no studies done on late-term abortions, with the exception of the Guttmacher Institute over 20 years ago. In a survey of 1,900 women who had abortions, 420 had late-term abortions. Of those 420, only 2% had a late-term abortion due to a fetal abnormality. Most women just claimed they didn’t know they were pregnant or misjudged their gestation. And what is Jill’s point? That killing a baby when he is delivered is murder, but doing it moments beforehand when he’s still partially in his mother’s birth canal is A-OK? To someone like her, there’s no difference. And it wasn’t as if Dr. Gosnell was only killing babies in the “bad” way. He performed many, many, many “acceptable” late-term abortions. He’s being charged with 33 illegal late-term abortions, but killed hundreds in this manner.

Vanessa Valenti at Feministing basically regurgitates Jill Filipovic and Amanda Marcotte’s nonsensical arguments. It’s not about abortion, but even if it was, this never would have happened if women had better access to abortion clinics anyways. Nevermind the 33 counts of felony abortion and exorbitant prices patients were charged. Gotta tread carefully here, because if they express too much condemnation, then it could infringe on abortion rights!

The pro-abortion feminist left is going to great lengths to brush this controversy underneath the rug in order to protect abortion rights. They claim to be fighting for women, but are willing to overlook instances where women are abused and injured, and even killed. Yet somehow, we’re supposed to believe that these are today’s champions of women’s rights — women who can barely muster more than a shrug of the shoulders over the murder of one woman, the murders of seven infants, and the butchering of countless other women who were fortunate enough to survive a visit to Gosnell’s clinic. If one ever needed an example of just how far these women who call themselves feminists are willing to go to protect their sacred cow, you would need only look at their reaction to Kermit Gosnell butcher shop.