Megan McArdle Astonished to Find that Legalized Abortion Leads to Murdering Babies

from Stand Firm by Greg Griffith

It’s like there’s some sort of connection or something.

Ruminating on the right’s criticisms that leftists and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) have studiously refused to cover the Gosnell trial, McArdle writes:

I understand why pro-lifers have their suspicions.
I could also offer Kliff’s defense, that this is a local crime.  But George Tiller’s murder was also a local crime. There was no “national policy issue” involved: murder is a matter for state law. And there was no real question that if Tiller’s murderer was caught, he was going to be tried and convicted for the killing. Nonetheless, lots of national journalists—including Sarah Kliff, for Newsweek—covered the killing and discussed what it meant for abortion provision nationwide.
If I think about it for a moment, there are obviously lots of policy implications of Gosnell’s baby charnel house.  How the hell did this clinic operate for seventeen years without health inspectors discovering his brutal crimes?  Are there major holes in our medical regulatory system?  More to the point, are those holes created, in part, by the pressure to go easy on abortion clinics, or more charitably, the fear of getting tangled in a hot-button political issue?  These have clear implications for abortion access, and abortion politics.
After all, when ostensibly neutral local regulations threaten to restrict abortion access—as with Virginia’s recent moves to require stricter regulatory standards for abortion clinics, and ultrasounds for women seeking abortions—the national media thinks that this is worthy of remark.  If local governments are being too lax on abortion clinics, surely that is also worthy of note.