Does the president really care about women’s health?
Published 11:00 pm Friday, April 26, 2013
Something just seems out of whack.
On Friday, President Obama became the first sitting president to address Planned Parenthood. In his remarks, he vowed to join the organization in fighting against efforts to “turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st Century.”
Of course, he was talking about growing efforts nationwide to limit or ban access to abortions or to restrict access to birth control or other services supported by Planned Parenthood and other women’s rights organizations. The president, who made a woman’s right to seek an abortion a pivotal issue in the 2012 campaign, lambasted what he called “an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women’s health.”
Yet, it seems our president is overlooking one of the most horrific offenses to women’s health that’s taken place in recent years – and one that has come at the hands of a Planned Parenthood-endorsed women’s health clinic.
We’re talking, of course, about the clinic operated by Kermit Gosnell, a Pennsylvania abortion provider who is standing trial on charges of killing babies after they were born alive at his West Philadelphia clinic.
Gosnell’s alleged crimes are not just an affront to those who oppose abortion. He is also charged in the 2009 overdose death of a 41-year-old woman who came to his clinic for an abortion. And, for anyone who invests the time and reads the grand jury report detailing the horrific findings from his clinic, the every day activities that took place at his medical center sound like a series of women’s health atrocities – from forcing women to deliver unwanted babies while sitting over toilets to performing medical procedures with unsterilized and infected instruments – that reek of the 19th century, or worse.
The fault starts at the hands of Gosnell, but carries over to the multiple government agencies that failed for years to provide oversight or to stop the horrors that occurred in that clinic.
While the president’s polarizing speech at Planned Parenthood makes for good soundbites on the news and fodder for liberal supporters, his continued lack of willingness to address the horrors of the Gosnell clinic make us question if he truly understands the scope and complexity of the issue he purports to care so much about. If President Obama truly cared about protecting women’s health, he would “vow to fight” the atrocities that took place at the Gosnell clinic.