I’m going to quote Matthew Clark of Bearing Drift here, because he set up the situation pretty straightforwardly:

Virginia, with the support of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, has enacted some of the most stringent health requirements for abortion clinics in the country. The law allows the Virginia Board of Health to regulate abortion clinics much like hospitals, to ensure that they provide the same operation, staffing, equipping, staff qualifications and training, and conditions as hospitals in Virginia. These regulations would ensure that no “House of Horrors” operates in Virginia.

Yet, late last week, McAuliffe sent a fundraising email asking supporters to fund his campaign because his opponent, GOP gubernatorial all-but nominee Cuccinelli, “pushed through medically unnecessary regulations on women’s health centers with the aim of his number one goal: ending safe and legal abortion in Virginia.”

Why were these regulations proposed? Precisely to prevent the horrors of Gosnell’s clinic. The Washington Post reported at the time this bill was passed, “In recent weeks, abortion foes have cited the case of a Philadelphia area clinic [Gosnell’s] recently shut down after authorities discovered a series of botched and illegal abortions; inspectors discovered containers of fetal parts.”

Couple of things to note about this. First off, this should be your rebuttal of choice to anybody still trying to peddle the pro-abortion (more on that later) wheeze We cared about this at the time. Where were you? The answer, of course, is We were working to make sure that people like Kermit Gosnell weren’t going to be able to set up any more abattoirs for black and Hispanic babies. Where were you? Watching their response to that at least should provide some brief moments in amusement in what has been otherwise an unremittingly horrific policy discussion.

More importantly: let’s all be honest. I don’t care how pro-life you are (or how pro-choice you are, for that matter): you almost certainly know and like somebody who is on the other side of the abortion issue. It’s a policy dispute that has polarized the country; which means that everybody’s got an opinion, and most people have figured out how to compartmentalize it so that they can function and not get into pointless, joy-killing arguments with their Aunt Agnes or whoever. Have we established that, then? That there are in fact millions of personal truces in place between people who want abortion to be legal, and people who want abortion to be illegal? At least for the purposes of this discussion? Good.

There can be no truce with Kermit Gosnell. Kermit Gosnell is intolerable, and the conditions of institutional neglect and hyper-ideological blinkers that allowed him to murder babies and collect their hands and feet as trophies is likewise intolerable. Pro-lifers were told that imposing abortion via judicial fiat would not lead to The House of Horrors; we are fully cognizant of the fact that we were lied to, and we do not trust pro-abortion advocates to not lie to us again. We have every right to distrust pro-abortion advocates, too. And note the difference there between “pro-choice” and “pro-abortion:” it is clear that there is a contingent out there desperate to keep abortions operating at their current levels, and you can usually tell who they are by the fact that they’re trying to stop pro-lifers from demanding the imposition of basic sanitary conditions at abortion clinics.

Or, in Terry McAuliffe’s case, trying to fundraise on the ever-so-noble cause of making it easier for a poor minority woman bleed out her life in a slipshod, ill-designed medical ‘facility’ somewhere. Because I don’t really think that McAuliffe cares that much about the issue; the burning question in his mind is more likely about the percentages of checks that will clear on the first try.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Via @rbpundit.

PS: All of this can be safely assumed to be an indication that, yes, pro-lifers are going to keep publicly disinfecting the current system of systematic abuse of procedures and regulations by pro-abortion activists. Just one example: Planned Parenthood’s various shenanigans in Colorado. And no, there will be no trust. Trust has been forfeited. That is the entire point.