I tend to avoid the abortion issue, because it’s a no-win topic. But I’ve been following a murder trial recently that turns my stomach so severely that I can’t keep my mouth shut.
Mood music:
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The Catholic Church tends to label anyone who is against Roe v. Wade as being a baby killer. I don’t think the situation is that simple. I agree that abortion is wrong, tragic and evil. It disgusts me that some women choose to terminate a pregnancy because it’s inconvenient.
There are cases, however, when a pregnancy becomes a grave medical circumstance, such as when the mother’s life is in danger. This scenario is not abortion in my book; it’s a lost baby. And I’ve never met a person who was happy about losing a baby. They’re almost always devastated.
Yet the case of Kermit Gosnell is pretty straightforward. The Philadelphia abortion doctor is on trial for allegedly delivering live, screaming children and then snuffing them out. If the testimony of witnesses in this case are to be believed, and they seem pretty credible to me, this guy is a baby killer. He’s a monster who deserves a special place in Hell.
CNN paints the following picture:
A Pennsylvania doctor is accused of running a “house of horrors” in which he performed abortions past the 24-week limit allowed by law — even allegedly as late as eight months into pregnancy.
He used scissors, authorities say, to sever the spinal cords of newborns who emerged from their mothers still alive. …
Gosnell faces eight counts of murder: for the deaths of seven babies, and in the case of a 41-year-old woman who died of an anesthetic overdose during a second-trimester abortion.
The babies were born alive in the sixth, seventh and eighth months of pregnancy, but their spinal cords were severed with scissors.
This story has not made the front page much. Melinda Henneberger of The Washington Post offers a possible reason:
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. In fact, that is so fixed a view of what constitutes coverage of that issue that it’s genuinely hard, I think, for many journalists to see a story outside that paradigm as news. That’s not so much a conscious decision as a reflex, but the effect is one-sided coverage.
That’s why I choose to write about this case today. This is a case study that forces us to look long and hard at our own positions. As disgusting as the details are, I think we need that look in the mirror sometimes.
If the charges are true, this man is a monster.
