The Patriot Post® · The Lie of 'Safe, Legal and Rare'

The Supreme Court on Monday issued a contemptible abortion decision striking down Texas’ restrictions. It was a sweeping ruling, and we thought we’d further highlight the background for the law itself.

The trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell a few years ago revealed just what houses of horror many of the nation’s abortion clinics are. Gosnell was convicted of murdering three newborn babies in the minutes after they survived his botched late-term abortions. He took the helpless, crying, wiggling babies and cut their spinal cords with scissors. He also killed a woman, a 41-year old refugee, who bled out after he punctured her insides during an abortion. Prosecutors say there was ample evidence that he’d killed hundreds of other surviving babies, and at least several more women.

The grand jury report describes the atrocities thusly: “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. … 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.”

Following the Gosnell case, revelations of similar cases began pouring out of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and other states. Not only were unborn children being slaughtered in these clinics, but newborns were murdered, and women were dying or contracting diseases, sometimes being literally scarred for life. The Texas law would have protected women from such dangers. The abortion clinic chain in the Texas case had been routinely cited for code violations, including a lack of licensed nursing staff on premises, using rusty equipment, and worse.

But the Supreme Court decided the risk of death for women seeking abortions is not nearly as important as reducing their drive time to the clinic. And now we know that the decades-long leftist mantra of abortion as “safe, legal and rare” is a flat-out lie. With nearly 60 million abortions since Roe v. Wade, they clearly do not care for abortion to be “rare,” and with pro-abortion fanatics fighting tooth and nail against any restriction on their murderous secular sacrament, we now know unequivocally that they also don’t care whether it is safe.