Nicholas G. Hahn III

The Detroit News

The abortion industry can’t catch a break these days.

When investigators raided Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors in 2010, some pro-choicers denounced the numerous counts of infanticide, but most did their best to deflect. Yet Gosnell’s conviction in May 2013 didn’t mean the end of bad headlines for abortion supporters.

Last summer, the Center for Medical Progress released surreptitiously recorded videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the illegal practice of harvesting body parts from aborted babies for profit.

Now comes news that more doctors seem to be encouraging abortion for vulnerable women in precarious pregnancies.

Consider one woman from a southwest suburb of Chicago, who recently told CBS News that doctors pressured her to abort her child after discovering a cancerous tumor in her colon. “You’re gonna have to terminate your child,” doctors told Michelle Jahnke.

But Jahnke refused, found a doctor who prescribed specialized chemotherapy treatment, and gave birth to a healthy daughter, Elana. “Not one side effect from the chemotherapy,” said Jahnke.

Next, meet Courtney Baker. This Florida mom recently wrote an open letter to her prenatal specialist who “repeatedly suggested” she abort her child with Down syndrome.

“I told you her name,” Baker wrote to her doctor, “and you asked us again if we understood how low our quality of life would be with a child with Down syndrome.” Instead, Baker wrote that her daughter Emersyn has “given us a purpose and a joy that is impossible to express.”

Hillary Clinton is apparently unmoved. The presumptive Democratic nominee has come a long way from the old Clinton mantra that abortion be “safe, legal, and rare.”

In 2012, Democrats cut out the caveat that abortion be “rare,” and now Clinton has her sights set on reversing a 40-year-old Washington compromise that bars federal funding of abortion. “Let’s repeal laws like the Hyde Amendment,” Clinton told a Planned Parenthood gathering last week to raucous applause.

But if recent polls are any indication, an extreme proposal like that might not fare too well at the ballot box.

nhahn@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @NGHahn3