Linking Wolf, Gosnell ranks with 'guru ad'

Those polls showing Gov. Corbett badly trailing Tom Wolf must be correct. How else to explain Corbett's desperate attempt to link Wolf to abortionist Kermit Gosnell in a recent direct-mail piece paid for by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania?

The four-page glossy brochure is one of the more incendiary campaign ads I've seen in three decades of paying close attention to Pennsylvania politics. (How clever that Wolf and Gosnell are depicted in black and white, while Corbett is in color. Was that to make the governor look good, or to make Wolf and Gosnell racially indistinguishable?) It ranks up there with the 1986 television commercial run by the "real" Bob Casey against Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. William Scranton. That TV ad featured 15-year-old photographs of the young, long-haired Scranton and his beloved yogi, Maharishi Mahesh, with sitar music in the background.

Quickly dubbed the "guru ad," it created a statewide stir in a close gubernatorial race, despite having only been aired in central Pennsylvania. Out of 3.3 million votes cast, Casey defeated Scranton by a margin of 79,216, a win of just 2 percent. At least in that case, Scranton really had practiced Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi. There is zero connection between Wolf and Gosnell, and any assertion to the contrary is totally false.

The headline ("Will Proabortion Tom Wolf take us back?") running over a photograph of Gosnell's clinic, complete with the refrigerator in which he stored aborted fetuses, implies that Wolf's dangerous proabortion agenda will enable the Kermit Gosnells of the commonwealth, when the opposite is true.

Gosnell ran the Women's Medical Society in West Philadelphia for decades until February 2010, when an FBI raid looking for evidence of illegal prescription-drug dealing instead found a "house of horrors." A 280-page grand jury report released in 2011 described the clinic as reeking of urine, with blood on the floors, cats freely roaming, and fetal remains stacked in freezers.

Gosnell was convicted of murdering three newborn babies during late-term abortion procedures; he was said to have severed their spinal cords with scissors. He was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 overdose death of patient Karnamaya Mongar, 41, a refugee from Bhutan, and for more than 200 abortion-law violations. Investigators described Gosnell as running "a drug mill by day and an abortion mill by night."

The trouble with Gosnell wasn't that abortion was legal, but that he disregarded the laws on the books and that the state failed to enforce its regulations. The Corbett pitch turns this on its head, arguing: "They want to turn back the clock to the days when abortionists like Gosnell were able to commit atrocities without oversight." Medical data belie this assertion. When abortion was outlawed, more casualties resulted from abortions. Gosnell is what you get when abortion is pushed into the back alley. Several studies confirm this fact.

The Guttmacher Institute has noted that, in 1965, 17 percent of all deaths due to pregnancy and childbirth were the result of illegal abortion. After the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, there was a marked decline in deaths from abortion services as a result of the shift from illegal to legal abortion, according to a 1992 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Legalization gave women better access to the procedure, and they could seek it at earlier gestational ages.

The result is that today, abortion is a much safer procedure. A 2011 report by the World Health Organization found that in the United States, where abortion is legal, it results in only 0.6 deaths per 100,000 procedures. However, in areas where abortion is illegal, there is a much higher death rate associated with abortions. Worldwide, unsafe abortion accounts for a death rate nearly 350 times higher than that of the United States, and in sub-Saharan Africa, where abortion is illegal, the death rate is 800 times higher.

Too often, efforts to "regulate" abortion are actually thinly veiled moves to shut down clinics. Post-Gosnell, following the passage of a Pennsylvania law that held abortion clinics to the same safety regulations as ambulatory surgical centers, five abortion clinics closed in Pennsylvania. Nationwide, there were a record number of closings of abortion clinics in 2013, according to a survey by the antiabortion organization Operation Rescue, with Pennsylvania near the top of the list. The survey found that 87 clinics closed in 2013, reducing the remaining number of abortion clinics to 582 in the United States, a 73 percent drop from a high of 2,176 clinics in 1991.

No wonder abortion-rights activists fear that further regulation of abortion clinics will marginalize the procedure, close clinics, hike up prices, and force poor and disadvantaged women to seek back-alley providers like Gosnell and become vulnerable to online scams.

"All women deserve access to safe and comprehensive medically responsible care," said Marie Savard, a Philadelphia physician, author, and advocate for women's health. "It is outrageous to link the right for women to access care that women and their physicians deem medically necessary to illegal and dangerous clinical practices."

The best way to stop future Gosnells is to ensure that the practice stays in plain sight. Stopping women from getting a legal abortion will only prevent them from having a safe abortion. And arguing otherwise for political gain is beneath the dignity of a governor seeking reelection.