Why wasn't Gosnell stopped sooner?

I spent quite a bit of time today with NARAL’s website, and frankly, a lot of it is troubling. The complaint about excessive regulation of abortion clinics is one of a number of items under the “anti choice laws” section . . . including a lament that healthcare workers cannot be forced to provide abortions. This is a rather astonishing use of the word “choice”. The general philosophy animating their list of “anti-choice” and “pro-choice” regulations seems to be that the state should pay for abortions, as well as forcing private insurers to cover them and healthcare workers to provide them, but otherwise take no interest in any other aspect, such as whether the decision to abort is informed, or the clinic is, clean, safe, and reasonably close to an emergency room that can take a patient who experiences complications.

Of course it’s true that health and safety regulations can be used as a backdoor means to achieve a de-facto ban on a constitutionally protected right. But that doesn’t actually seem to be the issue in Pennsylvania, does it? Planned Parenthood alone has 41 clinics, and even if you think there should be more, it’s clearly not Pennsylvania’s excessive sanitary standards that are holding them back.

Back when I was out there marching on City Hall, I thought we were out there to make sure that no more women died from incompetent abortions performed by quacks in filthy surroundings. Instead, it seems we may have inadvertently facilitated it, along with Gosnell’s murder of live infants. The responsibility for these grave crimes of course lies with those who committed them. But those of us who want to keep abortion legal also have a special responsibility to make sure that it is safe, and that viable infants are protected. We should never have been fighting tough inspection standards in order to preserve access. Instead, we should have been fighting for the high standards that make access meaningful–and politically viable. If we don’t take the lead on policing the quacks and the outlaws, then it will be done for us. And we will not like the results.