Meanwhile, the attempts to make Gosnell representative of all abortion practictioners is also a failed enterprise - namely because there’s no there there - and that’s according to the pro-lifers themselves who have tried to gin up a controversy.

Live Action thinks there are lots of born-alive killings. To prove it, in the last six months, the organization has sent actresses into clinics with hidden cameras. The actresses, posing as patients, have asked clinic workers about born-alive scenarios, hoping to expose a pattern of infanticide. Instead, they’ve found nothing. “We never had that, for ages of being in this practice,” one clinic employee says in a video secretly recorded by Live Action. “We never had a situation like that,” says another. “That’s never happened,” says a third. A fourth assures the actress, “These kinds of issues that you’re talking about, they don’t happen.”
Unable to find an epidemic of born-alive murders, Live Action says the videos underscore the general ugliness of late-term abortions. That’s true. But late-term abortions are rare and getting rarer. According to the latest CDC data, only 8 percent of abortions are performed after 13 weeks gestation (the end of the first trimester), and only one percent are performed at 21 weeks or later. That’s a decline, in both total and percentage terms, over the last decade.
Pro-lifers say the Gosnell case shows that “abusive, contemptuous doctors are more the norm in freestanding abortion clinics than the public is willing to admit.” But the Live Action videos—the raw footage, not the edited versions the organization promotes—show the opposite. Most of the doctors and counselors seem more attentive and compassionate than the average nurse or physician. They help patients talk through their decisions. They offer financial help. They assuage anxieties. They answer endless questions.

Then, there’s an issue with a claim that the number of babies born alive after failed abortions in this country exceeds 1,000 per year. It’s based on a mangled statistic that lumps together all kinds of mortality data under a single heading.

Pro-lifers took the total number, but when digging into the figures, one finds that the number of babies born alive after failed abortions was 30 for 2010 (termination of pregnancy, newborn). Far from being a common occurrence, it’s exceedingly rare - and getting more so.