Late abortion: the new clash in the Choice Wars

This article was published in Spiked Online 3 March 2011

Ann Furedi says Philadelphia’s ‘Baby Butcher’ scandal shows exactly why we need a principled defence of abortion – as late as necessary.

Anti-choice campaigners were handed a gift last month in Philadelphia, when a Grand Jury indicted Dr Kermit Gosnell for murder in the deaths of one woman and seven infants at an abortion clinic.

Dr Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia carried out very late abortions – badly and unlawfully. This is how Katha Pollitt described it in the Nation: ‘Blood-spattered floors. Cat faeces. Broken equipment. A 15-year-old giving anaesthesia. Two women dead and countless more maimed and injured. Third-trimester fetuses delivered alive whose spines were then severed by the doctor… This is what illegal abortion looks like.’