If the famous pro-choice litany is “safe, legal, and rare,” the logical endpoint of a culture of abortion on demand is none of the above.

Legal abortion was supposed to end “back-alley abortions,” both their dangers and their entanglements with shady characters. But the practice and the mores of the back alley are with us still, tolerated by people for whom the ready provision of abortion trumps all else.

Pro-choicers have long invoked the dignity of women. The nightmarish case of the Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell and the sting video of a counselor at a Planned Parenthood clinic cooperating with a supposed pimp show the dignity of women is decidedly secondary.