Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

It was 15 years ago that authorities raided a West Philadelphia abortion clinic owned and operated by Dr. Kermit Gossnell.

What they found led the investigators to dub the facility a, and I quote here,

House of Horrors. In addition to bloodstained furniture, urine-soaked walls, and cat feces everywhere,

investigators discovered the remains of 47 children, both born and unborn, in containers, boxes, and jars.

Gosnell's clinic targeted primarily poor minority women. Staff there testified that hundreds of infants had been born alive and were then killed, often through a method that Gosnell called sniffing.

Now described by Wikipedia as a serial killer, Gosnell was convicted of first-degree murder,

involuntary manslaughter, 21 felonies, and 200 other legal violations. The grand jury report

blamed a complete regulatory collapse, adding that at the time of Gosnell's arrest, nail salons in

Philadelphia faced more regulation and oversight than abortion clinics did. Well, in a recent essay in

first things, Erica Anderson documented a different list of ethical

horse, but one's also birth from under-regulation and lack of oversight. Now, to be clear, the stories of

the Wild West of Big Fertility are far more sanitized than Gosnell, nor are they as shocking as what was

found in Gosnell's home and in his clinic. But that's only because nothing's that

shocking. For example, a 51-year-old California man who lives with his elderly parents hired a

surrogate to carry embryos that he, quote-unquote, adopted. You could also say bought. He now has

custody, with no background check, no home study required, of three babies with whom he has no biological

relationship. During the pregnancy, he asked the surrogate to abort one of the babies, but she refused

and offered to raise the third child herself. He refused that and took all three children with him,

and the woman who carried them never saw them again. Bloomberg recently reported on a

dramatic case of businessman Gary Lindberg, whose ex-wife got custody of their three children.

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