On Tuesday's edition of The Mark Steyn Show, we're all about the women. I start by considering the "march for women" in Washington and elsewhere - and end with some thoughts (speaking of women's rights) on the man who put the Saud in Saudi Arabia.
In between, we discuss some of the things women won't march for. My guests today are the indefatigable Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, authors of a brand new book published today called Gosnell. Kermit Gosnell is the biggest serial killer you've never heard of. He killed women, he killed children, he killed blacks, he killed immigrants, he killed refugees ...but because he did so as an "abortion provider" the American media declined to cover the case. As I wrote at the time:
This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale - and it barely makes the papers... Ever since Roe v Wade, proponents of a woman's "right to choose" have warned us against going back to the bad old days of rusty coat hangers and unsterilized instruments from money-grubbing butchers on the wrong side of town. Now, happily, the back alley is on the main drag, and with a state permit framed on the wall. In Philadelphia:
'Furniture and blankets were stained with blood. Instruments were not properly sterilized. Disposable medical supplies were not disposed of; they were reused, over and over again. Medical equipment – such as the defibrillator, the EKG, the pulse oximeter, the blood pressure cuff – was generally broken; even when it worked, it wasn't used. The emergency exit was padlocked shut. And scattered throughout, in cabinets, in the basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags and plastic jugs, were fetal remains. It was a baby charnel house...'
For years, the supposed regulators averted their gaze - as a matter of policy. For abortion's ideological enforcers, the official euphemisms trump reality. For those on the receiving end of infection, mutilation, sterilization and death, reality has a way of intruding... When the pro-choice rally ends and Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd and other celebrities d'un certain age return to Hollywood, and the upper-middle-class women with the one designer baby go back to their suburbs, a woman's "right to choose" means that, day in, day out, the blessings of this "right" fall disproportionately on all the identity groups the upscale liberals profess to care about - poor women, black women, Hispanic women, undocumented women, and other denizens of Big Government's back alley.
Gosnell is published today, and it's a terrific read - both a work of investigative rigor and vivid storytelling. Ann and Phelim's feature film on the subject will be released later this year.
Also on today's Mark Steyn Show, another round of "Know Your Ensigns" gets bogged down in a rather abstruse point: Speaking of women's rights, can you have red maple leaves and topless Irish colleens? For more details on the show, see here.
