

Philadelphia doctor’s case proves need for safe, legal and accessible abortion

By Laura Chapin
Battleground Colorado

As the details of the Kermit Gosnell case emerge — the Philadelphia doctor accuses of mistreating and injuring dozens of women, as well as possibly infanticide — there are two conclusions to be drawn: one, this is a horrific case of medical malpractice and regulatory negligence visited upon desperate women who felt they had nowhere else to go. And two, abortion and contraception need to remain safe, legal, affordable and accessible. [1]

The Gosnell case, as Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America puts it, gives us a peek into era before Roe vs. Wade. Roe didn’t legalize abortion as much as it stopped women from dying from it and hacks from practicing it. There’s a reason Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, was working class: Wealthy women have always had access to abortion if they needed it. If you had the means, a doctor could find a reason to terminate the pregnancy or you could travel to another country.

For poor women before Roe, if you couldn’t see a doctor and couldn’t afford to have another child, the Gosnells of the world were your only option. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive policy organization, before the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, thousands of women died every year from illegal abortions. By the 1960s, thanks to better medical treatment for injured women, those numbers had dropped into the hundreds, but dangerous illegal abortion still remained a race and class issue.

According to Guttmacher, “A study of low-income women in New York City in the 1960s found that almost one in 10 had ever attempted to terminate a pregnancy by illegal abortion; almost four in 10 said that a friend, relative or acquaintance had attempted to obtain an abortion … . In 1968, the University of Southern California Los Angeles County Medical Center, another large public facility serving primarily indigent patients, admitted 701 women with septic abortions, one admission for every 14 deliveries.”

Medicaid doesn’t cover abortions, nor does the Affordable Care Act. Since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, at least 17 states have enacted legislation to restrict coverage for abortion in their insurance exchanges. And for those who object to taxpayer funding for things of which they do not approve, I ask: Why do such conscience clauses only apply to women’s body parts? When do I get my money back for Blackwater?

Guttmacher reported last week that 694 state proposals on reproductive care been introduced this year, about half of them to restrict abortion. A number of states have enacted increasingly more humiliating measures, including invasive and medically-unnecessary sonograms designed to punish women for seeing a legal, constitutionally protected procedure. Kansas just passed what’s been called the “Women’s Right to Be Lied to Act,” which requires doctors to mislead patients with debunked myth about a link between abortion and breast cancer.

These are state and federal laws designed to make abortion more difficult, more expensive, and possibly less safe for women. As Philadelphia social worker Jeff Deeney points out, the city health center serving low income women in the same Philadelphia neighborhood as Gosnell’s did not offer abortion care because it receives federal funding. And the protestors at a nearby Planned Parenthood clinic scared at least one patient into going to Gosnell.

For poor American women, not having money means your choices are made for you, not by you, with the clock ticking the whole time. As Deeny put it, “You can see how a mom might wind up in a situation where getting the money together would take so long she would have no choices left but to seek out a back alley scumbag like Gosnell.”

The Gosnells of the world existed before Roe and they will continue to exist as long as politicians put safe, accessible reproductive health care out of the reach of women.

Laura Chapin is a Denver-based Democratic strategist.