"But, why wasn’t more written sooner?"

Asks Melinda Henneberger at The Washington Post.

One colleague viewed Gosnell’s alleged atrocities as a local crime story, though I can’t think of another mass murder, with hundreds of victims, that we ever saw that way. Another said it was just too lurid, though that didn’t keep us from covering Jeffrey Dahmer, or that aspiring cannibal at the NYPD.

Yet another said it’s because the rest of the country doesn’t care about Philadelphia — that one was especially creative, I thought....

That would explain covering the cannibal cop. It happened in New York. As they say: Only in New York! But who cared about Milwaukee?

I say we didn’t write more because the only abortion story most outlets ever cover in the news pages is every single threat or perceived threat to abortion rights. 

Come on. Add the obvious: The media perceive the Gosnell story as a threat to abortion rights.

By the way, why are we calling what he did "abortion"? Just as a matter of clarity in the language. The grand jury report says that his method of ridding women of their unwanted late-term pregnancies was to induce labor and deliver the child. That's not abortion. That's childbirth. We're not even in the gray area where a strange term like "partial-birth abortion" could be used. It was complete birth, followed by murder. Why don't abortion rights proponents come down hard on that distinction? He wasn't an abortionist (in most of these instances), but an obstetrician-murderer. If abortion rights proponents don't want to talk about that, I'd like to hear exactly why they have a problem.