The Case for Regime Change on Abortion

An amazing review and analysis of Kermit Gosnell and abortion rights, from James Taranto, at the Wall Street Journal, "From Roe to Gosnell":

The reductio ad absurdum of the pro-abortion side is Kermit Gosnell. That is why the Gosnell case has crystallized our view that the current regime of abortion on demand in America is a grave evil that ought to be abolished. It is murderous, if not categorically then at least in its extreme manifestations. Maintaining it requires an assault on language and logic that has taken on a totalitarian character. And it is politically poisonous.

Some pro-abortion commentators have denied that the horrors of the Women's Medical Society implicate their ideology. While they have little to say about the babies Gosnell allegedly killed, they certainly don't approve of the way he treated his pregnant patients, at least two of whom, according to the grand jury, ended up dead, with untold others mutilated or infected. No, these advocates assure us, they want abortion to be "safe and legal." (The Clintonian "rare" is not heard anymore. In a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed last month, Kate Michelman of NARAL Pro-Choice America came right out and said that she wants abortion to be "common.")

But the grand jury--which described its members as covering "a spectrum of personal beliefs about the morality of abortion"--directly blamed "pro-choice" politics for the regulatory failure that allowed the clinic to remain open for decades. The Pennsylvania Department of Health had conducted occasional inspections of the clinic starting in 1979, although it failed to act on the violations it found...