Several years ago, Jennifer Senior wrote a fascinating, agonized essay for New York Magazine on abortion and the challenges facing the pro-choice cause. Of the piece’s many memorable passages, this stretch in particular stood out:

… if you want to hear honest talk about the realities of abortion, go speak with those abortion counselors and providers. Even the most radically pro-choice will tell you that the political discourse they hear about the subject, with its easy dichotomies and bumper-sticker boilerplate, has little correspondence to the messy, intricate stories of her patients. They hear about peace and guilt, relief and sin. And it is they who will acknowledge, whether we like it or not, that the rhetoric and imagery of the pro-life movement can touch on some basic emotional truths. Peg Johnston, who manages Access for Women in upstate New York, remembers the first time her patients unconsciously began to co-opt the language of the protesters outside. “And it wasn’t that these protesters were brainwashing them,” she says. “It’s that they were tapping into things we all have some discomfort about.”

This is quite a brave confession for Johnston—or any pro-choice person—to make. It means making oneself vulnerable to opportunist pro-life activists, who’ll happily take those words about uncertainty or moral qualms and repurpose them for their own ends. Back in the late eighties, Charlotte Taft, who first pioneered the practice of writing notes on hearts in her Dallas clinic, mentioned to a journalist that women knew “abortion is a kind of killing,” and poor Kate Michelman, at NARAL, was forced to go on the defensive for days. Last year, Lisa Harris, a Michigan doctor, wrote an incredibly powerful essay for Reproductive Health Matters, trying to come to terms with the goriness of second-trimester abortions while simultaneously recognizing their validity: “What do we do when caught between pro-choice discourse that, while it reflects our values, does not accurately reflect the full extent of our experience of abortion and in fact contradicts an enormous part of it, and the anti-abortion discourse and imagery that may actually be more closely aligned to our experience but is based in values we do not share?”

… [her essay described] performing an abortion on a woman who was 23 weeks along and then immediately running to deliver a premature baby … of 23 to 24 weeks. “I thought to myself how bizarre it was that I could have legally dismembered this fetus-now-newborn if it were inside its mother’s uterus,” she writes, “but that the same kind of violence against it now would be illegal, and unspeakable.” Later she notes, “Currently, the violence and, frankly, the gruesomeness of abortion is owned only by those who would like to see abortion (at any time in pregnancy) disappear.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this passage, and the tensions it illuminates, while following the debate over whether the national media has adequately covered the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia M.D. charged with murdering both the women who went to him for late-term abortions and the post-birth infants whose spines he allegedly severed with scissors after they were delivered. Since the story was finally forced into prominence late last week, it has inspired a number of eloquent critiques of how the press covers abortion (I recommend reading Carl Cannon and Melinda Henneberger, in particular) as well as various pieces defending the media from charges of bias and pinning the lack of coverage on other factors.

But the most interesting response by far has come from voices on the uncompromisingly pro-choice left. These writers have basically made two interlocking arguments: First, that there was no “liberal media” blackout, because feminist bloggers wrote about the story from the beginning, and second, that if there was a breakdown in mainstream coverage, it was the failure to recognize the ways in which the Gosnell story is actually about inequities in access to medical care and the perverse consequences of abortion restrictions, rather than (as the pro-life side would have it) the inherent horror of the procedure itself.

These arguments have showed up in a lot of places, but they’ve been developed most extensively by Irin Carmon at Salon. From her initial piece on the case:

If you’ve never heard of the Gosnell story, it’s … probably because you failed to pay attention to the copious coverage among pro-choice and feminist journalists, as well as the big news organizations, when the news first broke in 2011. There would be something rich, if it weren’t so infuriating, about these (almost uniformly male, as it happens) reporters and commentators scrambling to break open this shocking untold story. You know, the one that was written about here, here and here, to name some disparate sources.

I can’t speak for big news organizations like CNN and the networks, but let’s think about this question another way: How often do such places devote their energies to covering the massive health disparities and poor outcomes that are wrought by our current system? How often are the travails of the women whose vulnerabilities Gosnell exploited — the poor, immigrants and otherwise marginalized people — given wall-to-wall, trial-level coverage? If you’re surprised that in the face of politicized stigma, lack of public funding or good information, and a morass of restrictive laws allegedly meant to protect women, the vacuum was filled by a monster — well, the most generous thing I can say is that you haven’t been paying attention.

And then, in a follow-up piece:

By all means, let’s talk about Kermit Gosnell — who is accused of acts that are already illegal — but in a fact-based fashion. As Philadelphia Weekly reporter Tara Murtha put it, this was about a “multi-level, panoramic, institutional negligence, a culture of passing the buck and flagrant disregard for patient’s welfare, [which] prevented any meaningful investigation.” This is not about how Gosnell performed “late term abortions” (a highly imprecise term) as much as it is about the fact that the women who went to him felt they had nowhere else to go, an issue I have yet to see all the right-wing grandstanders fully address. As Erin Grant of the Philadelphia Women’s Center wrote, ”Now, instead of people who morally oppose what I do just being outside my door on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, they are emboldened on the state Senate floor to ‘save women’s lives.’ Yet, nothing has been done to provide low-income women with dignified health care, including safe abortion care.”

Some of Carmon’s commentary on the press coverage feels like obfuscation: The voices complaining about the media blackout obviously weren’t talking about a lack of coverage in The Nation, and the claim that the people taking an interest in the story are “uniformly male” is just nonsense. (As I noted in my Sunday column, the two writers who put the most energy into pushing this story into the mainstream were Kirsten Powers in U.S.A. Today and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway of GetReligion; it’s one recent appearance on a Sunday roundtable was courtesy of Peggy Noonan; one of the best pieces on the lack of media coverage was the Melinda Henneberger column I noted above … you get the idea.)

But her obfuscation is woven together with a legitimate point. The most rigorously pro-choice writers really did cover the Gosnell case more assiduously than the mainstream media, because they really do see it, not as an embarrassment to the cause of abortion rights, but a vindication of their worldview.

And not without reason. In a society more comprehensively pro-abortion than our own, there would presumably be more doctors willing to perform late-term abortions and certainly more government funding for abortion generally, both of which would reduce the “market share,” if you will, available for a monster like Gosnell to exploit. His practice allegedly operated in a gray area created by the combination of 1) Pennsylvania’s restrictions on post-viability abortions and 2) pro-choice Pennsylvania administrations that didn’t want to enforce those restrictions. But obviously if the state had no restrictions whatsoever and spent public money subsidizing abortion, his abattoir would have had more clean, well-lit, sanitary competitors. Thus Matt Yglesias’s conclusion that from a rigorously pro-choice, pro-Roe v. Wade perspective the lesson of the Gosnell horror show is not that the regulations he flouted should have been better enforced; rather, it’s that Pennsylvania needed an ”above-board competitive marketplace with multiple legal providers of late-term abortion facilities,” and the restrictions on late-term abortion unfortunately prevented that marketplace from emerging.

The only things missing from this clean, airtight, entirely consistent argument are, well, all the dead babies in the Gosnell clinic — or the dead “precipitated fetuses,” to employ the language Gosnell and his associates used to euphemize their practice of delivering and then “snipping” rather than aborting in utero. Their absence is not necessarily a problem if you’re willing to argue that those babies were non-persons before delivery and became persons immediately after (in which case Gosnell is guilty of infanticide but a more competent late-term abortion facility wouldn’t be), or if you’re willing to argue, with Peter Singer and some others, that personhood is something that emerges gradually at some indeterminate time after birth (in which case Gosnell’s “snipping” wasn’t murder at all). The former, I think, is the more common form of pro-choice absolutism, and the latter belongs to the more philosophically-inclined fringe (although the debate over “born-alive” bills has moved the official consensus fringeward). But if you’re already committed to absolute support for abortion rights, either argument will suffice to justify treating Gosnell’s conduct as irrelevant to the broader abortion controversy.

What neither argument seems likely to do, however, is do much to persuade the many, many “pro-choice but …” people who aren’t already so committed, and whose support for abortion rights tends to waver most when they’re confronted with the reality of what abortion actually does to fetal life — in clean, well-funded facilities as well as filthy ones, and in the womb as much as on Gosnell’s operating tables. This is, of course, the central reason why the pro-life side assumes that mainstream reporters didn’t particularly want to cover the trial: Because the mainstream press leans pro-choice, because mainstream journalism is pitched to readers in the mushy middle on abortion, and because the practice of “after-birth abortion” makes fetal humanity manifest in ways that almost inevitably push that middle in a more pro-life direction.

And it’s this reality that the pro-choice commentary on the case, with its focus on making these procedures safer and more accessible (and keeping them in utero), has a very hard time addressing. If you’re one of the 28 percent of Americans who believe that abortion should be legal in all circumstances (or, to take a more specific Gallup question, one of the 14 percent who think that “all circumstances” should include the third trimester), then Carmon’s points, or Yglesias’s, will tend to confirm you in that position. But if you’re a typically-conflicted American — the kind of person for whom stories about neonates gasping for breath before their spines get severed makes you question whether abortion isn’t murder after all — then the insistence that Gosnell case just reveals the advantages of an “above-board competitive marketplace” in late-term abortion isn’t really much of a response.

Which brings us back to that Senior essay, because I think what you’re seeing from the pro-choice side of the Gosnell debate is exactly the dilemma she describes. To respond effectively to the doubts about abortion that fetal snipping summons up, pro-choice advocates would need arguments that (to rephrase Senior’s language) acknowledge and come to terms with the goriness of third-trimester abortions while simultaneously persuading the conflicted and uncommitted of their validity, and that somehow take ownership of the “violence” and “gruesomeness” of abortion (to borrow Harris’s words) without giving aid and comfort to the pro-life cause. And in the absence of such arguments, the pro-choice response to Gosnell feels either evasive and euphemistic, or else logically consistent in ways that tend to horrify the unconvinced — and in either case, inadequate to the challenge his case presents to the cause of abortion rights.

But of course it’s possible that those arguments are absent because they simply don’t exist.