by Casey Mattox

Like many, I’m both unsurprised and disgusted by the fact that the bulk of the media continues to ignore the multiple murder trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist accused of killing a Nepalese immigrant and at least seven infants, born alive and grotesquely murdered with scissors. Gosnell’s employees have testified that the babies screamed and flinched when Gosnell and his team snipped their spines to brutally and painfully end their minutes-old lives. Yet, the media deems this not newsworthy. While the first and perhaps more likely rationale is that this is exhibit 108 in the ongoing public trial of the media’s integrity on the abortion issue, perhaps there’s another answer. Dog bites man.

Perhaps the media realizes that Gosnell’s house of horrors is much closer to the reality of abortion than Planned Parenthood’s pink, proud, empowerment façade. A young woman named Tonya Reaves died from a hemorrhage last year in a Chicago Planned Parenthood. Jennifer Morbelli became the second (known) adult victim of perhaps the most well known abortionist in America, Leroy Carhart, when she died in Germantown, Maryland in February. I could go on.

But aside from the women who die in abortion facilities, investigations of Virginia clinics by government inspectors on announced visits have also demonstrated unsafe and unsanitary conditions that most of us would not tolerate in our dentist’s office. Dried blood on tables and instruments, pieces of aborted babies dried to the bottom of freezers, staff that failed to wash their hands. And this week, Wilmington, Delaware Planned Parenthood nurses left their jobs and exposed dangerous conditions at their facility, describing a “meat market style of assembly-line abortions” [that] left bloody drainage on the operating tables as patients were rushed in and out of the room.

The media may not talk much about these stories, but they know about them. Perhaps the reason why they aren’t covering Gosnell is that, unlike the bulk of the country that would still be shocked by Gosnell’s crimes, maybe the media that covers abortion knows enough about the abortion industry to know that Gosnell isn’t that much of an outlier. And the common isn’t news. Dog bites man. Abortionist is unethical, disgusting, and dangerous. Nothing to see here.

Or maybe it’s just the bias.

Casey Mattox is senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom.