Fox's Bret Baier Attempts To Link Convicted Murderer Kermit Gosnell To Legal Abortion Clinics

Fox host Bret Baier smeared legal abortion clinics by claiming a Texas bill that would heavily restrict those clinics was  a direct response to the crimes of convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell.

On the June 26 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier, host Bret Baier engaged a panel discussion on proposed Texas legislation known as Senate Bill 5 (SB 5). During the segment, Baier claimed provisions of the bill that would impose new, restrictive mandates on legal abortion clinics was “a direct result of the Gosnell situation in Philadelphia.”

Baier's report failed to note that the standards SB5 would have imposed on abortion clinics would close more than 90% of the current facilites. 

As Demos senior fellow Bob Herbert and BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith explained during an April edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, Gosnell's business model was to prey on women who did not have access to legal abortion services:

HERBERT: What you want to do, though, is, if a woman is going to have an abortion, because abortion is legal in this country, then you want it to be accessible and safe. You want it to be done under sanitary conditions with qualified practitioners and that sort of thing.

One of the problems is that in so many parts of the country, it's just not available, and then women go to the terrible alternatives. 

SMITH: There has certainly been a campaign on the right to make it, in lieu of being able to actually ban abortion, just to make it incredibly difficult to get. And this is obviously the downside of that, right, that people wind up going outside the law.

Reproductive health professor at the University of California, Tracy Weitz, has explained that Gosnell's actions have “nothing to do with the way in which the standard of care and later abortion procedures are performed in the United States,” and that his practices are “nowhere in the medical literature.”

Baier's comment is the latest example of the right wing media attempting to make Kermit Gosnell the face of legal abortion in America.