The American left’s formulation not two decades ago was that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” As our culture has “progressed,” they first dropped the “rare.” The end of that public posturing was made apparent when the liberal clergy like Katherine Hancock Ragsdale preached from the pulpit that “abortion is a blessing.”

It's 2013 and  they’ve decided that the whole “safe” formulation is probably something we need to progress past as well. Which explains how a series of regulations in Virginia aimed at making abortion clinics adhere to rules similar to those of other outpatient medical facilities evoke cries of “attacking women’s health” or trying to shut the abortion providers down.

It was exactly this sort of attitude that any regulation is an infringement on the “right” to abortion that allowed Dr. Kermit Gosnell to operate his house of horrors in Philadelphia for 17 years without an inspection from the Pennsylvania government. Former GOP Gov. Tom Ridge, who is pro-abortion, is particularly responsible for Gosnell being able to perpetrate his crimes for so long.

What are we left with? Legal. That’s the only thing the pro-abortion left is really concerned with. Keep abortion legal because it saves women’s lives. It prevents back-alley abortions that killed so many women.

It's not really about saving lives or women's health for the Planned Parenthood and their allies. They're not angels in white doing the Lord's work. They're a profit-hungry company in a multimillion-dollar-a-year business. If it was anything but abortion, the left—and the media—would cast a skeptical eye at claims of purity and benevolence in such a money-making endeavor.

This is where the media should come in.

But it doesn’t.

You see, until Friday, the mainstream media had been curiously uninterested in the Gosnell case where harrowing testimony included phrases such as “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place,” and “it sounded like a little alien. It really freaked me out.”

Sure, this story was covered respectably in the Philadelphia-area media, but before Friday CNN had mentioned the trial once, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC had uttered nary a peep.

Why?

Well, a certain amount of the blame can be placed on the New York-D.C. bubble. While Gosnell and his horrors have received quite a bit of ink/pixels in the conservative and pro-life online media outlets, the people that make up the beltway media elite never read these sources.

A case in point was this ludicrous article by Salon’s Alex Seitz-Ward chastising the conservative media for not covering Gosnell, including the the line that “a search of the National Review’s website shows it’s written little on Gosnell.” Actually, National Review has written quite a lot on Gosnell. Unfortunately, the search function on the site has been broken for quite awhile. If you use Google to search for Gosnell and limit it to “site:nationalreview.com” you get a ton of hits. Now, I give Seitz-Ward a little bit of an excuse because National Review’s search function is broken. He did exactly what I do when I want to see if The Nation or Mother Jones has covered an issue. I’ve got to count on the search functionality because I don’t read that source regularly. If there was a conservative over at Salon, Seitz-Ward could’ve asked him if he’d seen anything about Gosnell on the web sites he frequents and he would’ve gotten a resounding “yes.”

But there aren’t any conservatives at Salon and Seitz-Ward doesn’t have any conservative friends he can ask about things like this, so he ends up looking like a fool.

If it  isn’t the bubble it’s the bias. A case in point is The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff who is the paper’s “Health Policy reporter.” Over the past year, Kliff’s health policy coverage has included a lot about Sandra “Georgetown University should pay for my $8/mo. Birth Control” Fluke, Todd Akin and the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s brief refusal to fund Planned Parenthood. Getreligion.org’s Mollie Hemingway asked her about her failure to cover the health policy implications of Gosnell’s house of horrors and got this response:

@mzhemingway Hi Molly - I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime, hence why I wrote about all the policy issues you mention.

— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) April 11, 2013

The Post and other media outlets nationwide managed to find policy issues in local crimes like the massacres in Newtown, Conn. and Aurora, Colo., but not in an abortion abattoir that made a men’s college dorm bathroom look like a class 100 clean room.

Taking on the role of editor, which I do so well, I offered Ms. Kliff some help.

@mzhemingway @sarahkliff Policy implications: Licensing of abortion facilities, requirements for training of employees... the list goes on.

— Matthew Hoy (@hoystory) April 11, 2013

@mzhemingway @sarahkliff Policy implications cont'd: Periodic inspection of abortion facilities for cleanliness...

— Matthew Hoy (@hoystory) April 11, 2013

@mzhemingway @sarahkliff Policy implications: providing info on # of 'emergency' responses to abortion facilities ...

— Matthew Hoy (@hoystory) April 11, 2013

On top of that, last week an abortion clinic in Delaware was revealed to have similar "sanitary" issues. It's not just so-called "rogue" operations like Gosnell; the clinic in Delaware is run by Planned Parenthood.

One is a tragedy. Two is a trend. And maybe there’s a policy story somewhere in there.

The sad fact is that the mainstream media and the abortion-on-demand lobby (but I repeat myself) aren’t interested in keeping women safe. They’re not interested in making abortion rare.

They’re really on interested in it being a legal method of “emergency” birth control for middle- and upper-class suburban white women. One of the interesting facets of the Gosnell trial testimony was that Gosnell would see white women in his relatively clean office, administer the drugs to them himself and offer them better treatment. Minority women weren’t treated with similar concern. (For those of you in the MSM—aka low-information journalists—Gosnell is black. There’s another policy issue for you to investigate.)

The Gosnell trial puts late-term abortions into the public dialogue in a level of detail like never before. When the subject was before the Supreme Court in the form of Congress’ partial-birth abortion ban (often appearing in the mainstream media as “so-called partial-birth abortion”) the media did its best to downplay the frequency and brutality of the procedure.

With the trial testimony, this sort of clinical analysis of what goes on in late term abortions can’t be papered over by even the most ardent pro-choice journalist. So, they ignored it.

If Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., are supposed to spur a national conversation on gun control, then Gosnell should spur a national conversation on late-term abortion.

Even if the Big 3 networks and cable news start covering the trial in coming days, don’t expect the kind of wall-to-wall coverage and zealous crusading that you’ve seen regarding gun control. It won’t happen. They’re not interested. They’re not unbiased. They’re not seeking truth, wherever it may be.

They’re the mainstream media.