America, We Have a Roe v. Wade Opportunity

‘I felt like a fireman in hell. I couldn’t put out all the fires.” That’s a quote from Stephen Massoff, an employee of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortionist. Massoff was operating illegally as a doctor in Gosnell’s clinic. At Gosnell’s trial, Massoff was testifying to being without Gosnell in the clinic routinely as they were overmedicating women for late-term abortions. Babies were born alive and necks were snipped and women died there. It was, in fact, a hellish scene.

I revisit the 2013 trial because of the remarkable timeliness of a play in New York City, Oh Gosnell: A Show about the Truth. The title is a response to the abortion comedy also in the city, Oh God, A Show about Abortion, from one of the writers of the Amazon production The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Amazon just announced that it will be paying for employees travel from states that choose to put some protections in law for the unborn and women, so that’s not much of a leap.

Gosnell is currently serving three life sentences and still maintains his innocence last time I heard. He believes himself a hero for poor women, whom he would treat cruelly, photographing them, for example, while they were under.

Oh Gosnell is based entirely on the Gosnell grand-jury report and trial. It’s a difficult but necessary hour. In response to the outrageous leak of the draft of the the putatively majority  opinion in the Mississippi abortion case being decided by the Supreme Court, NPR ran online a fact-check that included debunking the supposed pro-life lie that only cis-gendered women have abortions. As someone who has been a pro-life activist ever since I learned there was such a thing as abortion, I assure you that most pro-life activists and laborers on the front lines don’t even know the term “cis-gendered.” But, by all means, tell us about the women who say they are men having abortions. The fevered rhetoric around abortion isn’t about most abortions. It isn’t about the pressure that suffocates girls and young women. Abortion isn’t a laughing matter for the vast majority of women who wind up at abortion clinics — or worse, with pills, left to have abortion without any human interaction except for the remains of her baby in her bathroom.

Gosnell, of course, is a crime case, about a serial killer, who even showed off his trophies of dead babies to the lead detective who investigated him, first about illegal drug trafficking. But it’s the logical conclusion of a culture that has accepted that severing the bond between a mother and a child is fine and good and necessary for freedom and just another aspect of women’s health care. To do that, we have to erase the humanity of the unborn. When a child is wanted, there are Facebook posts and sonograms on refrigerators. If the child comes at an inconvenient time, we pretend there is no child. We pretend there is just a woman’s body and her choice. But her body knows otherwise. So does science. Roe v. Wade has lied to girls and women for almost 50 years.

The presumptive overturning of Roe v. Wade is a tremendous opportunity. A leading, logical theory for the leak is that it’s an effort to bully the justices into rejecting the draft by Samuel Alito. But that’s not how the judicial branch is supposed to work. There’s been a significant population that has opposed Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in all three trimesters of pregnancy. What have we done?

We’ve marched on Washington annually. A network of women’s care centers and maternity homes has been established. Nonprofits dedicated to legislation, lobbying, and education were established. We pray. A group of Catholic religious sisters dedicated to protecting life was founded 30 years ago and now has missions in a number of major U.S. cities and in Toronto. We have done the things you do in a democratic republic. We’ve tried to persuade. And despite much of the disingenuous media coverage, polling has consistently made clear that Americans are not enthusiastic about abortion — contrary to many politicians and others, in their reaction to the leak. But most Americans who describe themselves as pro-choice want to know that there is help for women who are pregnant and without resources. Check out the directories at Hearbeat International or Care Net, for a start.

Should Roe be reversed, in a sane country, we would band together, whatever our views on abortion, and help women have choices. Under Roe, many girls and women feel they have no choice except abortion. Women are capable of extraordinary things — abortion suggests otherwise. Given that, abortion actually should be an affront to feminism. There are couples who long for babies they can’t have biologically.

Abortion isn’t the only way. As has been said before and couldn’t be truer: Women deserve better than abortion. And women who have had abortions deserve better than people screaming at one another and lying and forgetting we are talking about mothers and children and real human pain. I’m writing this before heading to an abortion clinic to pray, an abortion clinic that has increased its number of abortions, including for women in states that have started to set up protections for the innocent. Prayer is regularly protested against there. Could we at least agree that pregnant women deserve a prayer? The United States, too, and where it goes from here. Are we on the side of Gosnell, or of life?

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.