Abortion, in many cases, is about poverty. Ms. Blackburn is completely wrong about the circumstances surrounding the Gosnell Clinic. They received no funding from anywhere. He performed later term abortions because it sometimes to time to raise the money for abortion for the women who came to his clinic.
These horrible circumstances only prove further how desperate women become when they are faced with an unwanted pregnancy. It proves how women need to have options in their lives.
The Gosnell Clinic is about poverty in the USA and women with very few choices or opportunity in their lives.
Marsha Blackburn is self-righteous and cares little about poverty, what causes impoverishment or the outrageous welfare Wall Street receives everyday from the federal government. I've had enough of her self-righteous religious dogma when it causes these tragedies. Gosnell's clinic is a prime example of why Roe v. Wade exists. It also stands in testament to the legacy of The Hyde Amendment.
...All these factors (click here) helped explain why women came to Gosnell’s clinic, in spite of its location in Philadelphia, a city with several reputable abortion facilities. Among the saddest things I have read in the wake of this disaster is the account of a Philadelphia social worker, pointing out that the community health center which serves the same low-income neighborhood in which the Gosnell clinic was located is considered to be one of the city’s best facilities. But as a recipient of federal funding, of course this center could not offer abortion care.
So why did Gosnell’s patients not go to a better, i.e. safer, abortion clinic, for example, the Planned Parenthood in downtown Philadelphia, no more than a few miles from Women’s Medical Society? One very poignant answer to this comes from a statement that one of Gosnell’s patients made to the Associated Press. The woman had initially gone to this Planned Parenthood for a scheduled abortion, but “the picketers out there, they scared me half to death.”
Another reason women came to Gosnell’s clinic is that he undercut everyone else’s prices. As numerous abortion clinic managers have told me over the years, for very poor women—who are way over-represented among abortion patients—differences of even five or ten dollars can be the deciding factor of where to go. The price list at Women’s Medical Society, listed in the Grand jury report, shows that in 2005, a first trimester procedure was $330.00, while the average price nationally then was about one hundred dollars higher. For a 23-24 week procedure, Gosnell charged $1625.00, while the relatively few other facilities in the Northeast offering such abortions would have charged at least one thousand more.
Still another reason drawing women to this clinic was that it became widely known that Gosnell was willing to flout the law and perform post-viability (i.e. post-24 week) abortions even in cases where women did not meet the very strict legal guidelines of a life-threatening or serious illness or were carrying a fetus with a lethal anomaly. In a horribly unfair vicious cycle, the poorest women often take time to raise the funds for an abortion, and then find themselves past the cutoff for procedures available early on—and facing a higher cost for an abortion. When women in these situations realize that they neither have the funds to pay for a later procedure, and/or can’t find a reputable provider that will perform their procedures after 24 weeks, they end up at places like Women’s Medical Society....
There isn't anything else to say about these circumstances. This clinic existed as a legacy to The Hyde Amendment. Just that simple. Poor women are trapped should their contraception fail or could not afford contraception in the first place.
