Looking Under the Rock of Abortion

Two stories in recent days have brought home, to me anyway, the reality of the abortion issue.... the vermin living under the rock that most of us dare not pick up.   The first was the arrest for murder of a Philadelphia doctor whose "practice" apparently consisted of providing late-term abortions to women under the most gruesome conditions; he's charged with homicide of one woman patient and seven babies, who were born alive and then murdered.   Here is a photograph of this miscreant, "Dr." Kermit Gosnell:

The DA in Philadelphia is reported as saying the following about the good Doctor:

I am aware that abortion is a hot-button topic.  But as district attorney, my job is to carry out the law. A doctor who knowingly and systematically mistreats female patients, to the point that one of them dies in his so-called care, commits murder under the law. A doctor who cuts into the necks severing the spinal cords of living, breathing babies, who would survive with proper medical attention, is committing murder under the law.

Sickness.   Dr. Gosnell is reported as having made as much as $1.8 million a year performing these atrocities.

The second story comes from Robert Verbruggen at National Review, who digs beneath the data that was recently reported that upwards of 41% of pregnancies in New York City are terminated by abortions to ask, in essence, "why so many?"

The single most damning statistic about abortion in America was presented in Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book Freakonomics: Following Roe v. Wade, conceptions rose by almost 30 percent, while births decreased by 6 percent. This quite clearly indicates that some women (and men) took the existence of legal abortion as a license to be less responsible in their sexual behavior; indeed, it suggests that a large majority of terminated pregnancies wouldn’t have existed in the first place if abortion hadn’t been legally available as a backup.

And the overwhelming majority of women who have abortions did behave irresponsibly. According to a survey by the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of them didn’t use any form of contraception at all in the month they got pregnant. Of those who did use contraception, three-quarters of pill users and half of condom users admit they used their method “inconsistently.” Only 13 to 14 percent of pill and condom users claim they got pregnant despite “perfect” use.

It’s not as if they don’t know better. In the Guttmacher survey, most women who didn’t use contraception in the month they got pregnant had used it in the past. And as Benjamin notes, “comprehensive sex ed” classes that encourage contraception seem to have no effect whatsoever.

The prevalence of multiple abortions is another indicator that women who have abortions do not see the practice as a highly regrettable but sometimes necessary option. If they saw it that way, one imagines, they would be particularly careful after needing a first abortion. And yet each year, of the 2 percent of women aged 15 to 44 who have an abortion, half are not having their first.

To summarize:  on the supply side, the abortion industry is just that:  an industry in which profits are the paramount purpose, regardless of the impact on the "health" of mothers or their babies.   On the demand side, the vast majority of women seeking abortions have become pregant because they "chose" not to use birth control, even though fully aware of the consequences and, often, even though they'd been through abortions before; in other words, through their own recklessness and with callous disregard for their babies.  

It's an ugly, ugly underbelly of an increasingly ugly America.

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UPDATE: 

Ace at Ace of Spades makes the brilliant point that while the mainstream media was quick to tell us, without evidence, that the Tucson shootings were the inevitable product of a "culture" of "extreme rhetoric" and "incivility" in political discourse, the same mainstream media is at pains to inform us that, despite all of the evidence, the Gosnell murder story is not about the "culture" of abortion rights.   Ace takes them to task in high style:

Are you quite sure it's not about abortion? Because, if'n I have this all right, women sought abortions from an abortion mill and received them from an abortion doctor who performed abortions and is charged with 33 counts of illegal late-term abortions (in addition to other double-secret abortions which have been charged as murder) and the grand jury stated that abortion politics -- specifically pro-abortion politics -- caused the state medical and health bureaucracy to stop inspecting abortion clinics and not pursue complaints about negligence in conducting abortions because of their fear of how such scrutiny about abortions would play within the pro-abortion community.
 
I'm just an ordinary workin' feller but I'm gonna take a flyer and posit that maybe this had something to do with abortion.
 
Here's a test: If you are unable to explain the facts and charges without mentioning the word "abortion," guess what, it's a story about abortion.