The capricious and arbitrary abortion clinic regulations that went into effect in Kansas this week have closed two of the state’s three abortion providers. I suspect the law was written carefully to do just that; by leaving one clinic open, the criminalizers can argue the law wasn’t written just to close abortion clinics. A court may place a temporary injunction on the closures any time now, though.

Elsewhere — gender-selection abortion is a hot issue again. A few days ago Ross Douthat wrote a column in which he expressed deeply felt and tender concern for the number of girl babies aborted in India and China, and said western liberals ought to be very uncomfortable with this, because obviously if abortion weren’t available it wouldn’t be happening.

Let me make it clear that I find the practice of aborting babies for gender preference appalling, but it also comes under the heading of Stuff I Can’t Do Anything About Because It’s Happening In Someone Else’s Country. And I don’t think my wagging a finger at India and saying “hey, there, stop doing that!” will have any effect.

However, one could blame ultrasound as much as abortion, because if ultrasound weren’t available I suspect it wouldn’t be happening, either. And if places where this is happening keep ultrasound and outlaw abortion, I submit about the same number of sex-selection abortions would still be performed illegally. The fault is not with legal abortion, but with cultures that devalue girls. The solution is not to criminalize abortion — which just drives abortion underground while it further devalues women — but to raise the status of women in those cultures, which eliminates the demand for gender selection abortion.

Of course that’s much easier said that done, but it’s the only effective way to stop this tragic practice, since there is no evidence it is happening in developed democracies where girls are as valued as boys.

This reminded me of another rightie who once commented on the pregnancies terminated for gender selection in developing countries, saying,

In countries where a woman has a virtually unfettered right to choose abortion, the result is that women overwhelmingly choose to abort female fetuses.

When I pointed out to this genius that there are many parts of the world in which women have an unfettered right to choose abortion, but in which no gender imbalance is taking place, he came up with a spirited but utterly nonsensical argument that women still choose to abort female fetuses anyway, nyah nyah nyah. He admitted himself that the only sex selection that may be taking place in the U.S. appears to be happening in ethnic Asian populations, which rather proved my point that culture, not “unfettered choice,” is causing this phenomenon, but he was unable to grasp this distinction.

I take it that several years ago, strategists among pro-criminalizaton activists came up with Asia’s gender selection issue as a way to make western liberals uncomfortable with abortion, or to force us into a debate over whether the right to choose includes gender selection — since girls, presumably, will be the gender targeted for termination. And then, of course, if women don’t have a right to gender-select, then the right to abortion is not absolute and can be picked apart.

Now that rebuttals to Douthat have gone up around the web (see, for example, Matt Yglesias and Mara Hvistendahl), I’ve been thinking about this issue a bit more.

And I have a question — is gender selection abortion being performed in the U.S. at all? There is no authoritative agency that provides data on why abortions are performed, so we can only guess. I understand that by comparing gender ratios of newborns, statistics suggest that some gender selection may be taking place in ethnic Asian populations in the U.S., but the ratio of boy and girl babies nationwide doesn’t indicate that any girls are missing.

The authors of one one website have done an excellent job pulling together actual data pertaining to gender selection in the U.S. From this I learned —

Girl babies actually are highly prized in America. Studies from all over the place show that American couples seeking to adopt a baby prefer girls over boys.

Further, when couples attempt to manipulate conception to tilt the odds in favor of one gender over another, they are more likely to try for a girl rather than a boy.

So if Americans are using abortion to select gender, wouldn’t we be seeing a reduced number of boys, not girls? And, indeed, the gender selection website says that the ratio of girls to boys has gone up a tick in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade, although there may be reasons for that beside abortion. In some parts of the world, high levels of certain man-made chemicals in the environment are causing far more girls to be born than boys.

Nature herself seems to have worked out a 51 to 49 ratio of boy births to girl births, and this ratio has been pretty constant in the U.S. and most other industrialized democracies for a long time.

One other point that I think is significant — I understand that most pregnant American women these days learn the gender of their babies by ultrasound at about the 20th week of gestation, give or take, which is pretty far along. Only about 1 percent of all abortions in the U.S. take place after that point. A very small percentage of women learn the gender before that, by amniocentesis, but physicians generally won’t perform amnio unless they think something is wrong because of the slight chance of causing miscarriage.

So we’re talking about late second trimester abortions here, and while they may fall into the period of legal elective abortion, they are pushing the edge of it. And I’m saying not many women are going to voluntarily take a pregnancy that far and then terminate only because they preferred the other gender. It would be like climbing halfway up Mount Everest and then going back to the bottom to get your other camera.

And, yes, that this happens commonly in some places says something pretty horrendous about those places.

One other thing — I’m also seeing the “what if they find a gay gene and then people could abort gay babies” argument. Yeah, right. It may be that someday embryos routinely will get a complete genetic screening so that parents can see the odds that their child might someday develop Alzheimer’s or breast cancer or, yes, same-sex preference. But by the time such a practice becomes reality, if ever, maybe we’ll have cures for Alzheimer’s and breast cancer, and no one will care about sexual preference. Frankly, I doubt any child ever is conceived without some genes predictive of some eventual misfortune, so any couple dippy enough to aim for perfect is likely to not reproduce at all.

So this is a bridge that may never have to be crossed, and I don’t see us coming to it any time soon. Let’s keep our eyes on problems we actually have, shall we?

New laws in several states prohibit nearly all abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation. This flies in the face of Roe v. Wade, which permits states to prohibit elective abortion only after viability is possible, at roughly 24 weeks’ gestation.

The laws are being justified on the theory that a fetus at 20 weeks can perceive pain, in spite of the fact that its cerebral cortex has not yet developed. Most scientists insist that a functioning cerebral cortex is necessary to perceive pain, or anything else.

On a Web site summarizing their case, abortion opponents counter with recent studies by a handful of scientists claiming that a functioning cortex is not necessary for the experience of pain. They charge that the American and British obstetrical colleges are biased, dominated by abortion supporters.

Projection, much?

These laws allow for an exception only in the case of possible death or permanent bodily injury of the mother. The law focuses on a couple who were not allowed to terminate a 22 week pregnancy, even though the fetus had stopped developing and the pregnancy had caused a serious infection.

Even worse, states are beginning to prosecute women for stillbirths. Kansas is attempting to shut down its three remaining abortion clinics through onerous and arbitrary building regulations.

Several states have passed new laws that force women to overcome arbitrary and unnecessary hurdles to terminate pregnancies. These include coercive “counseling” and ultrasounds. And, of course, several states are moving toward defunding Planned Parenthood, or have already defunded it. Across the country there has been a huge spike in state anti-abortion legislation.

I am glad to hear that everything is so hunky-dory in so many states that legislators have nothing else to do but think up ways to ban abortions. I’d hate to think this obsession with womb regulation might be taking precedence over more pressing matters. (/snark)

But I say again, polls going back many years show that American public opinion on abortion is not nearly as extreme as what one sees in a lot of state legislatures. A Time poll conducted last week showed that 64 percent of adults nationwide think that women have a right to terminate a pregnancy in the first few weeks, as opposed to 35 percent who think they don’t. So, while many Americans lean more conservatively on such issues as parental notification and limits on later-term abortions, there has long been a broad consensus that abortions in the first trimester or so (which are 88 percent of abortions performed in the U.S.) are a woman’s business, not the government’s.

This leads to two question. One, it seems to me there long has been a pattern for state legislatures to be more right wing than the the people of a state on many issues. Over the years I’ve noticed this in regard to several issues, from flying Confederate flags over statehouses to allowing bar patrons to carry guns. This speaks to the power of right-wing organizations to elect candidates, but I really wish someone would do a comprehensive study of this someday.

Second, I do wonder what the people in many of these states think. I suspect many of them voted for the guys who promised to cut taxes and grow jobs. Once elected, however, they appear to spend the bulk of their time trying to shut down abortion clinics. Which doesn’t grow jobs. When are they going to realize that if they want sane, responsible government, they have to weed out politicians who are obsessed with abortion.

Gail Collins at the New York Times has written a couple of really good columns about the politics of abortion and family planning recently. Earlier this week, in “Behind the Abortion War,” she described the Right’s antipathy to contraception. Today, in “The New Anti-Abortion Math,” she writes about the Right’s refusal to face reality about their opposition to contraception.

Pointing to the government of the state of Texas, Collins writes,

Right now, the state is wrestling with a fiscal megacrisis that goes back to 2006, when the Legislature cut local property taxes and made up for the lost revenue with a new business tax. The new tax produced billions less than expected to the shock and horror of everyone except all the experts who had been predicting that all along.

Governor Perry blames the whole thing on President Obama.

Texas’ problems are of interest to us all because Texas is producing a huge chunk of the nation’s future work force with a system that goes like this:

• Terrible sex education programs and a lack of access to contraceptives leads to a huge number of births to poor women. (About 60 percent of the deliveries in Texas are financed by Medicaid.) Texas also leads the nation in the number of teenage mothers with two or more offspring.

• The Texas baby boom — an 800,000 increase in schoolchildren over the last decade — marches off to underfunded schools. Which are getting more underfunded by the minute, thanks to that little tax error.

And naturally, when times got tough at the State Capitol, one of the first things the cash-strapped Legislature tried to cut was family planning.

This is typical:

The state estimates the pregnancies averted would reduce its Medicaid bill by more than $36 million next year. But when a budget expert told the Texas House Committee on Human Services that the program saved money, he was laced into by Representative Jodie Laubenberg for using “government math.”

The Fetus People have persuaded themselves that there are “studies” that show widespread contraceptive use leads to more unwanted pregnancies. Actual studies show just the opposite, of course.

I also got a kick out of Gov. Perry’s claim that he knows abstinence education works “from personal experience.” I hadn’t heard that one before.

This goes back to my long-standing gripe that media continue to paint anti-abortion activists and pro-reproductive rights activists as equally radical and absolutist. But the major reproductive rights organizations like NARAL and Planned Parenthood just want to maintain the Roe v. Wade guidelines, whereas the anti-aborts don’t want to just overturn Roe v. Wade; they want to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut.

… is, apparently, restricting access to abortion. Maybe they think this will increase jobs in the daycare industry.

The anti-human rights organization Live Action has released more Lila Rose videos of their Planned Parenthood “sting” operation. Media Matters documents that the videos are doctored, and says the videos have ended Lisa Rose’s credibility.

If only that were so. If you were getting all of your information about the hoax from mainstream media, you’d probably have a strong impression that Planned Parenthood got caught doing something wrong.

I’ve been checking it out. This Christian Science Monitor story is pretty typical. The headline says “Planned Parenthood Under Fire,” and it’s followed by a blurb saying “Antiabortion activists have released videos showing Planned Parenthood workers allegedly colluding with a man posing as a pimp to exploit underage sex workers.”

How many people really pay attention to “allegedlys”?

The allegations are repeated and elaborated on in the first several paragraphs of the story. However, Christian Science Monitor readers are not told the videos were doctored or that Planned Parenthood notified authorities of a possible sex trafficking ring after the visit by the hoaxers.

In many other newspapers, Planned Parenthood’s side of the story is presented, but you have to read several paragraphs into the story to find it. If you read only the headline and the first paragraph or two, you only hear Live Action’s side. This is sloppy news writing, IMO, but it’s how most news stories are written.

Radio news is even worse; a lot of radio stations are just reporting verbatim what Live Action says.

But there’s something else about the videos that needs to be said. In one of the more recently released videos, the Planned Parenthood employee can be heard telling the “pimp” that what he’s doing is illegal and would have to be reported. Doesn’t that mean Live Action’s own video disproves that Planned Parenthood supports child prostitution? Apparently not; people are linking to the video as “proof” that Planned Parenthood is evil and must be vanquished.

The disconnect, I think, comes from the fact that the woman in the video is not expressing shock or screaming or rending her hair or otherwise reacting to the faux pimp with anything but matter-of-fact calm. She’s just rattling off information, in other words. And when he left, Planned Parenthood says, she reported the hoax visit to her supervisor, who called the police.

What else was she supposed to do? If I’m a woman in a room alone with a man who presents himself to be a dangerous criminal, I would do the same thing. I would stay very calm, tell the guy whatever I think he wants to hear, and then call the police after he has left. If he had been a real criminal, and the woman started screaming at him, he might have reacted violently.

As Gail Collins writes, “there is no way to look good while providing useful information to a self-proclaimed child molester, even if the cops get called. That, presumably, is why Live Action chose the scenario.”

Exactly. What else was she supposed to do? Under that circumstance, unless there happens to be a cop in the next room, when put in that position there is not much else one can do but humor the guy and hope he leaves without hurting anyone. But the people who believe the videos incriminate Planned Parenthood don’t consider that.

Gail Collins also reports on efforts in Congress to de-fund Planned Parenthood, and adds,

The people trying to put Planned Parenthood out of business do not seem concerned about what would happen to the 1.85 million low-income women who get family-planning help and medical care at the clinics each year. It just doesn’t come up. There’s not even a vague contingency plan.

There is no comparable organization to Planned Parenthood, providing the same kind of services on a national basis. If there were, most of the women eligible for Medicaid-financed family-planning assistance wouldn’t have to go without it. In Texas, which has one of the highest teenage birthrates in the country, only about 20 percent of low-income women get that kind of help. Yet Planned Parenthood is under attack, and the State Legislature has diverted some of its funding to crisis pregnancy centers, which provide no medical care and tend to be staffed by volunteers dedicated to dissuading women from having abortions.

It’s all about priorities.

In Washington, the new Republican majority that promised to do great things about jobs, jobs, jobs is preparing for hearings on a bill to make it economically impossible for insurance companies to offer policies that cover abortions. And in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry, faced with an epic budget crisis that’s left the state’s schools and health care services in crisis, has brought out emergency legislation — requiring mandatory sonograms for women considering abortion.

So in Wingnut World, puppy mills are good and women’s health services are bad. Unreal.

Update: I forgot to mention — this past week Media Matters had a telephone conference for progressive bloggers and media on the Planned Parenthood sting issue. This is a common thing; it’s like a press conference, only cheaper. Usually somebody makes a statement and then takes questions. I get lots of invitations to phone conferences, although I rarely listen in because they eat time and I’d just as soon get the same information in a press release. I suspect the Right does the same thing with its bloggers now and then.

But Breitbart Media is trying to blow up the phone conference into something sinister, implying that those who took part are somehow taking money to promote child prostitution. Weird.

Update: New GOP Bill Would Allow Hospitals To Let Women Die Instead Of Having An Abortion

The outrage du jour is that House Republicans are backing a bill that tightens already restricted federal funding for abortion by re-defining “rape.” The old restrictions were that federal funds could be used to pay for abortions in the case of rape, incest, or to save a woman’s life. But H.R.3 – No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act specifies that the rape exception is only for forcible rape.

This leaves out non-forcible rape, which would include underage, physically helpless, and mentally incompetent victims. I believe it would leave out a woman who was violated after being doped with roofies. From West’s Encyclopedia of American Law:

Most jurisdictions have special statutes for sex offenses committed with an underage victim, usually termed statutory rape laws. … The law also considers physically helpless and mentally disabled victims to be incapable of giving consent to sexual acts. Physically helpless individuals include those who are unconscious, paralyzed, restrained, or otherwise incapable of resisting the sexual acts. Mentally disabled victims may include those who are permanently mentally disabled or those who are drugged and in a temporary state of mental disability. Some state statutes even include involuntarily intoxicated individuals in the category of temporarily mentally disabled victims.

Further, under the proposed law, if the parents of a 12-year-old impregnated by a 34-year-old pay for an abortion themselves, they cannot use funds from a Health Savings Account or use the cost as a medical deduction for tax purposes.

So far reactions to this on the blogosphere are coming from the Left, with the exception of James Joyner, who writes that “the rape exception was never logical but rather a concession to an emotional issue.”

That is, if one believes a fetus at a given stage of development is a human life worthy of protection by law, the events leading to the pregnancy are irrelevant. We don’t, after all, countenance the murder of post-birth children conceived pursuant to rape. But the idea that a woman should be forced to bear the emotional trauma of carrying a constant reminder of a violent, awful crime for nine months — and then be forced to either look at the child every day or bear the alternative trauma of giving up the baby — is just so emotionally wrenching that we’ve carved out an exception.

So big of us. But Joyner keeps digging —

But does this really hold in the case of a statutory rape which, despite the name, frequently isn’t really a rape at all?

No? Who says?

Again, this is a queasy subject.

In other words, it’s “just emotional.”

We can all agree that a 9-year-old lacks the emotional maturity to give meaningful consent to sex with an adult and that an adult who violates a child is a rapist. But we’ve raised the bar on childhood in recent years, extending it well into puberty. Within living memory, it was common, at least in rural areas, for girls to marry and start having children in early puberty. Generally, with men significantly older than they were. Now, though, most states make it a crime for a 19-year-old to have consensual sex with their 16-year-old girlfriend.

Is a pregnancy arising from that circumstance really comparable to one arising from being jumped in a dark ally by a stranger and violated under threat of death? Really?

Well, Joyner, I’d say that until you’ve been through it yourself you have no way to know. But then, I’d argue that the people with “emotional” issues are the Republicans who would rather compel a 12-year-old, or someone too mentally or physically impaired to resist, to go through with a pregnancy than help her terminate it. And I think it’s a damn shame people let their emotions get in the way of judgment or even an average amount of human compassion. But that’s Republicans for you.

Joyner doesn’t agree with the law, mind you, but only because he thinks it’s bad politics.

Steve M. reminds us that many righties continue to cling to the fiction that rape doesn’t result in pregnancy, anyway, and he links to some “right to life” sites making that claim.

Dennis G. at Balloon Juice re-names the bill The Rapist Protection Act of 2011. Yeah, pretty much. See also Scott Lemieux.

Related: See Nicholas Kristof, “Tussling Over Jesus.”

William Saletan’s highly annoying article asks the question, “Is it OK to abort a viable fetus? An answer to pro-choicers on Kermit Gosnell.” Like “pro-choicers” were lining up to defend Kermit Gosnell? Not that I’ve seen.

Then he says,

Gosnell stands charged with abortions beyond the 24-week gestational limit prescribed by Pennsylvania law. I asked the feminist writers whether, in the name of women’s autonomy, those charges should be dropped.

Gosnell is charged with a lot of things, including infanticide, and among those charges is the accusation that he lied to patients about how far along they were and put their lives at risk through careless and unethical medical practices. I don’t see “women’s autonomy” there; I see exploitation. The Gosnell case is not relevant to the question of gestational limits, and it’s dishonest of Saletan to drag it in and use it for a “hook” for his challenge to reproductive rights.

However, as annoying and intellectually dishonest as Saletan’s abortion articles tend to be, he has a point that many abortions rights activists do seem loathe to answer the simple question — is it OK to abort a viable fetus?

I have believed, since Roe v. Wade was decided, that NARAL and other reproduction rights advocacy groups made a huge mistake by not advocating a clear gestational limit on elective abortions per the Roe guidelines — 24 weeks’ gestation, or the medically recognized threshold of viability. Doing that would have pre-emptively disarmed most of the anti-choice propaganda cranked out over the years. And, in fact, today post-viability elective abortions (with exceptions for life and health of the mother) are prohibited in nearly every state, but I don’t think most people realize that.

I’ve been digging through all kinds of data on abortion for years, and it’s my understanding that there is a gestational limit to elective abortion somewhere in the laws of even the most liberal nations, such as The Netherlands (24 weeks’ gestation, as I remember). In some European countries (Denmark, for example, unless it’s been changed recently), it’s as early as 12 weeks’ gestation. After that point, a woman who wants to terminate a pregnancy has to jump through a number of legal and medical hoops to do so. To my mind 12 weeks is a tad early; but my point is that among the industrialized democracies some kind of gestational limit is the norm, and women understand that if they’re going to abort, they need to get it done before that time. End of story.

I understand there are valid reasons why women postpone abortion. They may not have the money to pay for one; they may have to travel a long distance and arrange for an overnight stay somewhere because of some mandatory “waiting period” between the time an abortion is requested and the time it is performed. They may dread walking through a gauntlet of screeching anti-rights goons. They may be required to get permission from legal guardians or a spouse, and cannot.

It’s also the case that a great many women with no health insurance are effectively cut off from anything approximating pre-natal care, and when they do realize they are pregnant they have no idea how far along they are, and they have no way to find out. Another argument for health care reform.

It’s also the case that people may disagree about what’s “elective” and what isn’t. For example, I understand that rape victims and very young teens often are in denial about being pregnant until they are so far along they can’t hide it any more, and IMO allowances should be made for that. And it would be good to clarify that when a fetus is so physically compromised that it will not survive outside the womb even if born full-term, it’s merciful to allow the woman to abort.

But I am not satisfied with this response to Saletan from Pema Levy:

For me, the answer is yes, late-term abortions should be legal, even if medical complications are out of the picture. If a woman decides to have a late-term abortion, which often means traveling across state lines and spending a lot of money to have it done or submitting to a complicated procedure at a shady clinic like Dr. Gosnell’s patients did, then they are obviously making a very serious decision because they feel having an abortion is what they need. Maybe their decision is financial, maybe their marriage has become abusive, and maybe she’s a bad, fickle person. But being pro-choice means having the strong belief that women’s bodies should not be used in any way against their will.

Absolutely, women should exercise free will, but is there a non-medical reason for a third-trimester abortion that wasn’t also present during the first and second trimesters? If so, then we probably are talking about a short-term crisis, not a chronic living condition, and perhaps other kinds of assistance are warranted.

And if a woman is so ambivalent she can’t decide whether to go through with the pregnancy or not, then it has to be made clear that there comes a time that nature will make your decision for you. Frankly, by the time you get to 24 weeks’ gestation, it’s way too late to “get out of” the pregnancy. By then most of the hormonal and physical challenges of pregnancy have arrived.

It’s also the case that a later-term abortion is more dangerous than earlier ones for a woman. That’s another reason women should understand that abortions can’t be postponed until whenever.

We are, of course, talking about a very small percentage of the abortions in the U.S. According to Alan Guttmacher, only 1.5 percent of abortions are performed after 21 weeks, which do not all qualify as post-viability abortions, Saletan’s fudging of this issue to the contrary. And those are abortions performed for all reasons, including saving the mothers’ lives or removal of a fetus that has already died from natural causes.

Since they are illegal in nearly every state, I question whether any post-viability elective abortions are being performed in the U.S., except in an unlawful operation such as Kermit Gosnell’s. To my mind, those of us who support reproductive rights aren’t giving anything away by advocating a 24-week limit. This is merely clarifying reality.

For the record, according to the Journal of Perinatology,

The gestational age and birth weight below which infants are too immature to survive, and thus provision of intensive care is unreasonable, appears to be at <23 weeks and <500 g, respectively.

A handful, pretty much literally, of premature babies claimed to have been at less than 23 weeks gestation have survived, but there is skepticism in the medical community that the gestational age was accurate. So, at the moment, the viability “wall” remains after 23 weeks gestation as far as medical science is concerned.

People can quibble over where the gestational line should be drawn. If all of the barriers and roadblocks to getting early-term abortions disappeared tomorrow, and if all American women had access to medical care, and if it is understood that doctors will be allowed some discretion about what is considered “elective,” my preference would be to set the elective limit at some point between 15 and 20 weeks, frankly, although I won’t argue with 24 weeks.

But, to me, once the fetus can survive outside the womb, then the actual birth is something of a technicality, and the woman’s “free will” can no longer be absolute. And however onerous carrying the pregnancy to term might be, surely it was just as onerous before 24 weeks’ gestation.

So, to the simple question, “Is it OK to abort a viable fetus?” I do wish more reproduction rights advocates could learn to just say no, and be clear about it, and stop fudging. There may be conditions attached to that “no,” but it’s still no.

Related: Proof that Fetus People are lying when they claim they care about the well-being of women.

Not finding enough people to hate today, I suppose, flaming idiot Donald Douglas lies to his readers about what I wrote about the abortion doctor and clinic under indictment in Philadelphia.

Get a load of this headline:

Click for larger image

And then the miserable liar Douglas ends his post this way —

I’m saddened by the industrial-scale death that you promote with your radical pro-choice ideology. And I’ll pray for those babies — and for you as well.

Pray for yourself, Douglas. Maybe God will make you an honest man. Or, at least, bequeath unto you standard reading comprehension skills.

Of course I didn’t “cheer” the doctor under indictment. The point of the post was that what he did was illegal under current abortion law, and now he is being prosecuted, which is as it should be. Further criminalization of abortion will not stop more clinics like this, but rather make it likely there will be more of them. I’m not saying this is what I want; I’m saying this is a terrible thing that will happen if abortion is further criminalized in the U.S.

And of course, no reader of Douglas’s slanderous post will bother to actually read what I really wrote, because righties don’t read. They just hate.

A Philadelphia physician has been “charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive and then killed with scissors,” the Associated Press reports. It appears to me this is not a bogus charge concocted by “Right to Life” operatives.

The indictment says Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his mostly unlicensed staff on seven occasions performed “abortions” by inducing labor in women in late stages of pregnancy and killed viable, living babies by severing their spinal chords with scissors. One woman died after being given an overdose of painkiller by an unlicensed staffer.

Dr. Gosnell’s clinic was shut down last year because it was unhygienic and, well, weird. “There were jars, lining shelves, with severed feet that he kept for no medical purpose,” the prosecutor said. He also allowed his unlicensed staff to administer drugs with no supervision; without his even being in the clinic, apparently.

I knew when I saw this story that it would set up much howling and screeching from the Fetus People that abortions should be illegal. What they’re not noticing is that what Dr. Gosnell is accused of already is illegal. That’s, um, why he’s being prosecuted.

Further, if the charges turn out to be true, the argument could be made that women went to Dr. Gosnell for cheap abortions because, under Pennsylvania state law, public funds may not be used to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother.

Here’s why practices attributed to Dr. Gosnell are illegal already —

First, Pennsylvania law prohibits abortions performed so late in the pregnancy that the fetus might be viable (late second trimester, 23-24 weeks’ gestation), except when the life or health of the mother are seriously threatened by the pregnancy.

In that case, such abortions must be performed in a hospital, not a clinic; and by a physician, not a high-school graduate with some on-the-job training. In fact one of the staffers administering drugs was still in high school.

[Update: According to NARAL, post-viabiity abortions can’t be performed legally in Pennsylvania unless two physicians agree in writing that continuing the pregnancy could take the woman’s life or cause a “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” Under most circumstances the physician must use the procedure most likely to allow the newborn to survive. A second physician must attend the procedure. (18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 3211).]

FYI, Pennsylvania law also provides that women must receive “counseling” to discourage them from having abortions and then wait 24 hours before the procedure is performed. Minors must have parental consent.

(For data, see “State Facts About Abortion: Pennsylvania” and “State Policies in Brief” at Alan Guttmacher Institute.)

And killing or causing the death of a living newborn is homicide in all 50 states, the many apocryphal stories of newborn murder concocted by anti-abortion activists to the contrary. Most states have laws on the books that make causing the death of a viable fetus a criminal act, for that matter. Pennsylvania law makes killing an “unborn child” a criminal act, but I take it this law has been under constitutional challenge and I don’t know if the viability issue has been clarified.

More from the Associated Press report —

Gosnell didn’t advertise, but word got around. Women came from across the city, state and region for illegal late-term abortions, authorities said. They paid $325 for first-trimester abortions and $1,600 to $3,000 for abortions up to 30 weeks. The clinic took in $10,000 to $15,000 a day, authorities said.

“People knew near and far that if you needed a late-term abortion you could go see Dr. Gosnell,” Williams said.

White women from the suburbs were ushered into a separate, slightly cleaner area because Gosnell believed they were more likely to file complaints, Williams said.

Few if any of the unconscious patients knew their babies had been born alive and then killed, prosecutors said. Many were first-time mothers who were told they were 24 weeks pregnant, even if they were much further along, authorities said.

Prosecutors said Gosnell falsified the ultrasound examinations that determine how far along a pregnancy is, teaching his staff to hold the probe in such a way that the fetus would look smaller.

So what Dr. Gosnell is accused of doing already was illegal. He and some of his staff are under indictment and awaiting trial. This is the system working. If abortion is criminalized, thousands of clinics like this will spring up like mushrooms, operating underground, out of sight of the law.

Update: More details from the indictment from Jeralyn at TalkLeft.