The trial of Kermit Gosnell — and the media silence on it for much of the proceedings — have shone a light on lat-term abortions that abortion advocates have hardly welcomed.  In response, the abortion industry has argued that Gosnell was an aberration, a rare instance of inhumanity for a service that is critical to the health of women.  How true is that?  Live Action conducted an undercover operation to allow people a look into the late-term abortion business, and we discover that the lawless approach we saw in Gosnell’s clinic was at the very least not unique.

Live Action’s undercover journalist went to  a Bronx abortion clinic to discuss the potential outcomes of a 23-week abortion — that’s nearly 6 months along — and got the kind of advice that one would expect from Kermit Gosnell himself:

What happens, the young woman asks, if the baby is moving and breathing when it comes out?  No worries, says the abortion-clinic saleswoman — the toxic solution will make it “automatically stop.”  If the baby spontaneously delivers, she advises the mother to “Flush it!” Or, failing that, stick the baby in a plastic bag and bring him or her to the clinic for the toxic solution.  Don’t go to the hospital, she warns, because the hospital might actually try to save the baby.

Kyle Smite writes in today’s New York Post that this and the Gosnell trial tell the real truth about late-term abortions:

The employee assigned to take note of medical history reassured the woman, “We never had that for ages” (a seeming admission that a baby did survive abortion at the clinic at least once) but that should “it” “survive this,” “They would still have to put it in like a jar, a container, with solution, and send it to the lab. . . . We don’t just throw it out in the garbage.”

Oh, and this innocuous-sounding “solution” was, of course, a toxic substance suitable for killing an infant.

“Like, what if it was twitching?” asked the pregnant woman.

“The solution will make it stop,” said the clinic employee. “That’s the whole purpose of the solution . . . It will automatically stop. It won’t be able to breathe anymore.”

As for any qualms a woman might have about seeing her newborn child being poisoned and drowned in a jar, the employee advised her “patient” not to worry: She’d be under sedation, and the murder would take place in another room anyway.

The employee said, humorously, that “the doctor” is “not gonna wake you up and be like, ‘Hey, excuse me, you have—’ ”

The sentence was left unfinished, too unthinkable even for a euphemism. There’s no polite way to say, “You have just given birth, but we will murder the child.”

Smith also notes that the 24-week limit in New York will be under no threat as long as the media keeps silent about these operations:

Gosnell “is not an aberration. He is not alone. There are abortionists all across the country who are performing [illegal] late-term abortions and killing babies,” Rose says. “The inhumanity is business as usual.”

But a primary reason the Gosnell case has received amazingly scant and grudging attention from most of the major media outlets is that it’s impossible to discuss illegal abortions without thinking more about legal ones.

It’s necessary (unless you think abortion should generally be illegal) to declare an arbitrary cutoff point. But is 24 weeks the right one? Fetuses that old have an excellent chance of surviving once born. By contrast, at 21 weeks or less, viability outside the womb is virtually nil.

You can bet that Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice groups that enjoy strong support from the media would raise an unholy ruckus at any suggestion that the 24-week limit is not strict enough.

Yet when the 23-weeks-pregnant woman told the Bronx clinic, “It actually looks like a baby,” she was told by a different counselor, “It is at this point.”

Not to worry, though: all that would be left after the abortion, she was told, would be (those disturbing euphemisms again) “pregnancy parts” and “tissue.”

The New York Times, in the sole article it published on the Gosnell trial before it grudgingly admitted the story was an important one and reversed course, incorrectly and revealingly referred to the murdered babies who had survived abortion as “fetuses,” The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto pointed out.

Fetus? No. That’s misinformation meant to downplay what happened. Once born, you’re no longer a fetus. And ending your life is infanticide, not abortion.

Be sure to read it all.