Kermit Gosnell Killed Legislator’s Cousin in an Abortion, Now Planned Parenthood is Trying to Defeat Her

State   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Mar 21, 2014   |   10:52AM   |   Washington, DC

Last year, State Rep. Margo L. Davidson, an African-American first term Democratic legislator from Upper Darby supported a bill in the Pennsylvania legislature that would hold abortion facilities accountable for following basic health and safety standards.

Davidson explained why she strongly supported the legislation to better monitor abortion centers like the one Kermit Gosnell ran in Philadelphia, even though some Democrats and pro-abortion groups opposed it. She said her 22-year-old cousin was one of the women Gosnell killed in a failed abortion.”

margodavidsonSemika Shaw was “just coming into her own as a young woman,” Davidson said, when she died in 2002 from an infection caused by a botched abortion in Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic.

“I honor her memory by voting for this bill,” Davidson told her colleagues at the time, “so women will no longer walk into a licensed health-care facility and be butchered as she was.”

Shaw’s death, which led to a $900,000 insurance settlement, was central to the grand jury’s conclusion that state officials had failed to inspect the clinic for two decades and repeatedly ignored complaints of possible criminal activity there.

Davidson, 49, who grew up in same Mantua neighborhood where Shaw lived and the Gosnell clinic was located, said her young cousin probably sought an abortion because she had two young children and realized that as a single woman, she could not support a third. The grand jury report said Shaw had four previous abortions.

Little wonder the clinic wasn’t inspected in those days, Davidson reasoned. “The regulations regarding inspection were only policy,” the legislator said. “It was not mandated by the law.”

Now, the Planned Parenthood abortion business is trying to defeat her. As the Federalist reports, Davidson once had Planned Parenthood’s endorsement. Now that she has supported a pro-life bill, she’s on their hit list:

Planned Parenthood announced it is actively working to remove Margo Davidson from office. They have endorsed one of her primary opponents—opponents who have emerged because Rep. Davidson’s witness to the suffering of her family has unsettled certain factions in the Democratic Party.

It is hard to imagine a political maneuver that more clearly lays bare the chilling motivations at the heart of America’s abortion industry.

Planned Parenthood’s tendentious tagline is: “Care. No Matter What.” But we know, of course, that Planned Parenthood doesn’t care about the nascent lives its employees destroy by the hundreds of thousands. What has become clear as the Gosnell tragedy continues to unfold, though, is just how little Planned Parenthood cares about women.

Planned Parenthood doesn’t care about women like Semika Shaw. They are political inconveniences whose memory must be blotted out. And public figures who speak out for those victims—even their own family—are enemies who must be suppressed. Make no mistake about it: The campaign against Margo Davidson is a campaign to erase the memory of Kermit Gosnell from Pennsylvania politics.

If Planned Parenthood cared about women like Semika Shaw, then it wouldn’t oppose laws like the one Rep. Davidson supported. The clinic regulation bills that have swept the country in the wake of Gosnell’s atrocities merely ask that abortion clinics are run like what they claim to be: legitimate medical facilities. If Planned Parenthood were running itself like a legitimate medical provider, then there would be nothing to which to object. The fact that it is often ruinously expensive for Planned Parenthood to conform its surgical abortion facilities to the standards of other ambulatory surgical facilities shows just how shoddy they were to begin with.

“In opposing the woman who sought to defend women, Planned Parenthood is taking the most anti-woman posture they could possibly take,” said Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “America’s top abortion business has heaped pain upon grief for Rep. Davidson, who courageously sought to defend the health, safety, and dignity of women after learning that her own cousin was a victim of Kermit Gosnell’s brutality. Rep. Davidson was right when she said that for the ‘pro-choice’ community, ‘the institution [of abortion is] more important than the individual lives.’

“Despite evidence of abuse and neglect inside their own clinics, Planned Parenthood once again makes it crystal clear they care more about abortion than the lives of the women they claim to serve,” continued Dannenfelser. “This is another reminder of their ‘clear out the human weeds’ heritage of eugenicist Margaret Sanger.”

“It is disappointing, but not surprising, that Planned Parenthood is seeking to silence a powerful voice for Kermit Gosnell’s victims,” said Michael Geer, president of the Pennsylvania Family Institute. The decision to attack Rep. Davidson shows where Planned Parenthood’s interests truly lie: power and profits, not women’s health.”