regulating and monitoring abortion clinics?

Virginia has decided to regulate abortion providers like hospitals (hat tip: Christianity Today). Especially for fans of business regulation, this would seem to be an appropriate move.

And you'd hope for more from the medical profession in self-policing. But here's the story (from the AP's Kathy Matheson) of Dr. Kermit Gosnell who performed abortions and endangered the lives of many women in a "squalid" Pennsylvania clinic. Bad enough, but worse still: he was not reported by most of the doctors who cared for the patients whose procedures he had botched.

Women went to Dr. Kermit Gosnell to end their pregnancies. Many came away with life-threatening infections and punctured organs; some still had fetal parts inside them when they arrived at nearby hospitals in dire need of emergency care.

Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which operates two hospitals within a mile of Gosnell's squalid abortion clinic in West Philadelphia, saw at least six of these patients- two of whom died. But they largely failed in their legal and ethical duties to report their peer's incompetence, according to a grand jury report...

Prosecutors described Gosnell's clinic as "a house of horrors," where viable babies were killed with scissors, fetal remains were kept in jars and freezers, and dirty medical equipment was operated by unlicensed, often untrained and unsupervised employees. Gosnell himself was never certified in obstetrics and gynecology, only family practice.

Gosnell, 70, is jailed without bail and charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of one patient and seven viable babies. Authorities say he also routinely maimed his clients, sometimes leaving them sterile and near death...