This is anmportant piece which differentiates between the much sensationalised illegal late abortion service provided by the recently incarcerated Dr Godnell’s and the harrowing reality of women’s experiences who, for whatever reason, have to abort late in their pregnancies. The discussion is around how the former has been used in the media to demonise the latter.

Dr Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia carried out very late abortions – badly and unlawfully. This is how Katha Pollitt described it in the Nation: ‘Blood-spattered floors. Cat faeces. Broken equipment. A 15-year-old giving anaesthesia. Two women dead and countless more maimed and injured. Third-trimester fetuses delivered alive whose spines were then severed by the doctor… This is what illegal abortion looks like.’

Illegal abortion is a key phrase here, and Pollitt rightly protests that it has not been pointed out often enough that what Gosnell was doing was illegal. In Pennsylvania it is not legal to perform abortions after 24 weeks, although in some other American states it is. But nowhere is it legal to slit the throats of born-alive fetuses. And nowhere is it legal for untrained, unlicensed employees to carry out medical procedures. Gosnell’s treatment of women was indefensible – both clinically and legally.

Pollitt, who has written a lot about abortion, suggests that this awful clinic could only exist for two reasons. Firstly, because Gosnell’s business was fuelled by desperate, poor women, who accepted such dangerous and degrading treatment because they felt they had no better alternative. Secondly, because legislators in Pennsylvania had been so focused on eliminating abortion that they had failed to regulate it properly as healthcare.

William Saletan, who has also written a lot about abortion, mostly for Slate magazine, sees the episode differently. For him, it is not about a rogue doctor providing illegal, dangerous and degrading care, but rather is an ‘occasion for pro-choice advocates to reflect on the limits of reproductive freedom’. Like Pollitt, Saletan identifies two problems – but they are not the same ones that Pollitt sees. ‘Throwing Gosnell in jail won’t solve the problem’, says Saletan, because ‘the women who came to him at 26, 28 or 30 weeks will show up somewhere else. And if you won’t say no to them, you will have to say yes.’