Arthur L. Caplan, PhD
June 05, 2013
Hi. I’m Art Caplan at the NYU Langone Medical Center. I want to talk today about a pretty awful case. It involves a doctor named Kermit Gosnell, who ran an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. As many of you viewers will know, he was arrested after it was found that he had killed 4 babies after they were born alive. One of his patients died in his clinic, and he was certainly running an operation that, to put it mildly, did not live up to minimal standards of cleanliness, hygiene, personnel staffing, and so on.
One thing that is beyond dispute is that he was performing these abortions late. The law in Pennsylvania did not allow abortions after viability at 24 weeks of fetal development. So, here we see this physician running a type of butcher shop. What are we to make of all this? What does it mean? The fact that Gosnell is going to jail, the fact that just about everybody from all sides of the abortion issue has excoriated him for what he was doing, doesn’t leave us with a conclusion about how we are going to avoid future Gosnells.
I think technology is going to give us an answer. Kermit Gosnell was doing what he was doing because women came to him late in their pregnancies, desperate to not have a child that they didn’t want. Legitimate doctors certainly find it difficult to do abortions for nonmedical reasons very late in pregnancy. Many states won’t allow this type of abortion to be done at all. Past the stage of viability, they would say that you just can’t end that fetal life. So, the answer isn’t to try to get rid of Kermit Gosnell; it’s to try to get rid of the unwanted pregnancies.
There are 2 things happening that I think are going to contribute to that very desirable goal. First, we are getting emergency contraception that works. We know about Plan B. It is becoming more and more easily available. I happen to think that it is so safe and so innocuous that it ought to be available to any woman, even someone as young as 13 or 14, who wants to get it at a pharmacy. We can certainly argue about whether it should be sold in front of the counter or behind the counter, but I think we should be able to get it and use it. It’s just oral contraception in a bigger dose. It works very well if you are not pregnant, so we’re not talking about an abortion agent here. I think that it is a useful thing to have in order to prevent people from winding up in the hands of a Gosnell.
The other is the abortion pill, RU486. More and more women are choosing to end pregnancies early with that pill. If we could make it available, then it certainly would lessen the moral burden of trying to end a pregnancy at 24, 25, or 26 weeks. I understand that there will still be objections because it is an abortion pill, but nonetheless it is safer than surgical abortion. You don’t have to go to a butcher like Gosnell to try to do something so late in pregnancy. It has moral advantages even if you are not comfortable with it based on your personal views on abortion.
I think this is a place where technology is going to solve a problem. We have too many women winding up trying to do something too late in pregnancy because they didn’t get contraception. They didn’t get the day-after pill. They didn’t even know about RU486. If we can get that knowledge out there to them, we won’t have the need to put the likes of Kermit Gosnell on trial. I’m Art Caplan from the NYU Langone Medical Center. Thanks for watching.