The movie ‘Gosnell’ has a double truth: We ignore poor women and abortion

A new film out this past weekend highlights the horrifying 2009 death of Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old refugee from Nepal who died shortly after leaving a Philadelphia abortion clinic called the Women’s Medical Society.

A grand jury report showed Mongar’s death was only deeply looked into months after, when it was uncovered during an unrelated drug raid at Kermit Gosnell’s clinic. This fact points to a key takeaway from the film, regardless of one’s views on abortion: The Women’s Medical Society was overlooked because it served poor and disenfranchised women and because Gosnell was an abortion provider.

“Gosnell” centers on the investigation and trial of clinic owner Kermit Gosnell, now convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the case of Mongar — and of murdering three infants who were born alive and killed by what some experts call “after birth abortions.” (The trial suggested that it was likely Gosnell had done this to hundreds of infants although there was not enough evidence to bring more than three convictions.) Despite years of botched procedures, hospital doctors who treated the women injured — sometimes fatally — by Gosnell appear to have failed to comply with professional ethics and to have not reported the doctor’s incompetence. Because abortion in America is more about politics than policy, politics trumped truth and justice.

The movie, therefore, brings to the big screen a miniature drama of the abortion debate writ large, with both sides advancing their narratives at the expense of the potential for common ground around good policy: access to health care for poor pregnant women, abortion clinic regulations and the question of when a nascent child is entitled to legal protections.

Here's more of the article from behind the paywall:

"It’s an honest film in two senses. First, it follows the documented facts of the case fairly faithfully (if inartistically). Second, the screenplay was written by two painstaking foreign journalists, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, who covered the trial when few other American media outlets bothered to do so.
"In the book upon which the film is based, Ann McElhinney writes that before covering this case, she had always dismissed the images and characterizations of abortion given by antiabortion advocates as mere propaganda. She doesn’t believe that anymore. “Abortion arguments from pro-abortion advocates tend to avoid any actual talk of how an abortion is done and what it actually is that is being aborted.”

So the review does "go there." The author of the book-then-movie, Ann McIlhinney, actually converted to pro-life as a result.

It goes on:

"Yet, as horrific as Gosnell’s malpractice was, it rivals the systemic regulatory and community failures and incompetence that enabled him to continue unchecked for so many years.
Based on the evidence brought forth in the trial, the film portrays this reluctance to investigate Gosnell as rooted in the sense that it would be political suicide for any official to be seen as “attacking abortion.” If this is indeed the current political reality, then assurances made by abortion advocates that Gosnell was a “rogue” provider carry little promise."

One more thing: look at the reviewer's creds:

Karen Swallow Prior is an English professor at Liberty University and the author of “On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Literature.” She is a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, a senior fellow with Liberty University’s Center for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement,and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States.

Yes, I AM astounded it got into the Washington Post.

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