Powers cites as exhibit A of her indictment the Texas state senator, Wendy Davis, who fought to prevent the Texas legislature from effectively banning Kermit Gosnell-type abortion clinics from operating in Texas:
The Democratic star du jour [Davis] was asked this week to explain the difference between the late-term abortions she fought to keep legal in Texas and the illegal killings by Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. “I don’t know what happened in the Gosnell case,” she told the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, who cornered her after her National Press Club speech on Monday.As Powers explains, Gosnell's crimes were conducted in a clinic that Pennsylvania's Department of Health failed to hold to the standards of an ambulatory surgical facility. Since then, the state has passed a law, over the objections of Democrats and Planned Parenthood, that would require that any facility performing abortions be held to the same standards of hygiene as are these facilities.
This is incredible. After all, Davis is the state senator who held an 11-hour filibuster to fight legislation drafted in response to the abuses at Gosnell’s clinic. A passing knowledge of the case seems like basic due diligence.
She went on: “But I do know that [Gosnell] happened in an ambulatory surgical center. And in Texas changing our clinics to that standard obviously isn’t going to make a difference.” It takes real skill to pack so many falsehoods into so few words.
At one point in his interview, McCormack asked Davis what she made of the fact a majority of women support late-term abortion bans. Davis told him, “I…think that a lot of people don’t really understand the landscape of what’s happening in that arena today and what an incredibly small percentage of procedures take place there.”The small percentage, Powers notes dryly, translates to 18,000 late term abortions a year.
Perhaps the most remarkable example of ignorance and sheer stupidity in Powers' article came, unsurprisingly, from the lips of Nancy Pelosi:
In June, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi convened a press conference to condemn a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks. McCormack asked her essentially the same question he asked Davis: “What is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth? Pelosi answered, “You’re probably enjoying that question a lot, I can see you savoring it.” This insulting nonsense inexplicably elicited laughter from some of the assembled reporters.And, Powers might have added, achieved escape velocity from the inconvenient constraints of logic. Only someone with an IQ low enough to freeze nitrogen would utter such an embarrassing non sequitur. Ms Pelosi's reply is a tacit acknowledgement that she had no rational response to give.
Pelosi then told an outright lie: “[The 20-week ban] would make it a federal law that there would be no abortion in our country.” No reporter questioned this absurdity, even though they’ve heard pro-abortion rights leaders assert a thousand times that “only” 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks. (For those who care, that’s “only” 18,000 late-term abortions each year.)
Pelosi then expressed outrage at the line of questioning, raised the fact she had five children in six years, and snapped, “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this.” When you are pulling the Catholic card to defend your support of unrestricted late-term abortion, you’ve officially gone off the rails.
For those who might be wondering why people get upset over late-term abortion I recommend Powers' (who, by the way, is a liberal Democrat) last paragraph:
In May this year, former abortion doctor Dr. Anthony Levantino described late-term abortion in congressional testimony before a House subcommittee debating the 20-week abortion ban Pelosi and most Democrats opposed. It is similar to the one Davis opposed in Texas. Levantino told the committee: “The toughest part...is extracting the baby’s head. [Y]ou will know you have it right when you crush down on the clamp and see white gelatinous material coming through the cervix. That was the baby’s brains. You can then extract the skull pieces. Many times a little face will come out and stare back at you.”A culture, a political party, and politicians who defend such a practice are either ignorant of the facts and/or morally destitute. Either way we have proceeded very far along the road to total cultural degeneration if we allow the thinking of such people as Ms Davis and Ms Pelosi to determine our posture on abortion.
