Kermit Gosnell is to Abortion as Cecil B. Jacobson is to Fertility Treatments

Abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell - who is accused of truly horrific crimes allegedly committed at his abortion clinic - is on trial:

(CBS/AP) PHILADELPHIA - An unlicensed doctor fled out the back of an unorthodox medical clinic the night the FBI raided the facility in 2010, a witness testified Thursday at a murder trial centered on the location.

Abortion provider Kermit Gosnell, 72, is charged with killing a 41-year-old female patient and seven babies allegedly born alive, and with performing illegal, late-term abortions at his thriving inner-city clinic. Co-defendant Eileen O'Neill, 56, of Phoenixville, is charged with billing as a doctor and participating in a corrupt organization.

Eight former employees have pleaded guilty, some to third-degree murder, and have testified this month about bizarre, often-chaotic practices at the clinic.

The Kermit Gosnell story is almost too ugly for words, and it is, not surprisingly, being used by anti-abortion forces as an argument against abortion. But it is not about the rightness or wrongness of abortion - it is about Kermit Gosnell.

Just like Cecil B. Jacobson's story is not about the rightness or wrongess of fertility treatments - it is about  Cecil B. Jacobson:

A Federal jury today convicted an infertility specialist on 52 counts of fraud and perjury for artificially inseminating unwitting patients with his own sperm and for telling them they were pregnant when they were not.

The doctor, Cecil B. Jacobson, who could be sentenced to up to 280 years in prison and fined up to $500,000, sat impassively with his arms crossed when the jury foreman read the guilty verdicts. Sentencing was set for May 8.

After the trial, jurors said that DNA tests indicating that the doctor had fathered 15 children for his patients had convinced them that he lied about the source of the sperm. The prosecutors charged that Dr. Jacobson may have fathered as many as 75 children.

There are horrible people in the world, and some of them are doctors. It doesn't make what they practice wrong - it makes them wrong.

And as is pointed out at Salon - anti-abortion forces are trying to make access to medically safe abortions illegal. That is inarguably the core of their cause. So using Kermit Gosnell's story as an anti-abortion story is ironic in an unintentionally very ugly way.