Opinion

PHILADELPHIA, March 22, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The pro-choice movement is having a terrible week. Kermit Gosnell’s trial began on Monday, and ever since there has been a non-stop litany of horrors pouring out of the Pennsylvania courtroom where the abortionist is facing the death penalty over his alleged role in the deaths of seven newborn infants and one of his former clients. 

According to former employees, Gosnell’s preferred method of committing “abortions” was to deliver living babies, and then snip their spinal cords. Meanwhile his staff had little or no medical training, Gosnell didn’t bother to clean his antiquated and rusting equipment between procedures, and the abortionist inexplicably stored jars containing dismembered feet of babies in his clinic.

But while reports about the nauseating conditions inside Gosnell’s abortion clinic aren’t doing much to inspire consumer confidence in the abortion industry, by far the worst thing for abortion supporters is the way the trial is laying bare for all to see the grotesque subversion of logic that lies at the heart of legalized abortion.

Gosnell, after all, faces the death penalty for allegedly killing newborn babies that, in many states, it would have been perfectly legal for him to kill a few minutes earlier. In fact, if he had killed the babies a few minutes earlier, the law in many states would have defended Gosnell’s actions as constitutionally protected “healthcare.” 

The abortionist’s crime isn’t therefore the fact that he killed these babies, but that he was too unskilled to kill them in the “right” way. Kill the baby one instant, and it is “reproductive healthcare.” Kill the baby the next instant, and it is capital murder. This is the outrageous contradiction created by legalized abortion.

This was driven home in a brutal fashion this week when the prosecution projected a photo taken of one of Gosnell’s alleged victims – “Baby A” – on a screen in the courtroom. Baby A was about 30 weeks gestation at the time of his death. After he was born, Gosnell reportedly slit his spinal cord and then threw him in a box, where he writhed for several moments.

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Those present in the courtroom were horrified by the photo. But what, really, were they so horrified by? Was it simply the fact that Gosnell had killed the baby after birth, and thereby committed murder under the law? Or was it, as I rather suspect, the fact that the baby had been killed at all? 

Consider: would those in the courtroom have been any less horrified if the prosecution had displayed the dismembered limbs of the same baby if he had been aborted legally prior to birth? I doubt it. Before or after birth, the baby was the same baby. And its death would be equally tragic in either circumstance. It would take either a fool, or somebody blinded by pure evil not to acknowledge this truth. 

Of course, the always-dependably pro-abortion media is doing its absolute best to cover for the abortion industry, ensuring that the general public doesn’t have the opportunity to ask these uncomfortable questions. Mostly they are doing so by ignoring the trial altogether. But where they have been forced to report on it, they are resorting to linguistic gymnastics that, if anything, only serve to drive home the absurd cognitive dissonance at the heart of the case. 

The best example is found in an Associated Press report which coolly observes: “Abortions are typically performed in utero.”  And then there is the New York Times, which called the living babies that Gosnell killed “viable fetuses.”

Of course, under everyday parlance, abortion by definition is performed in utero, and a child that has emerged from his or her mother’s womb by definition is no longer a fetus, but a baby. But under the harsh light of Gosnell’s alleged crimes suddenly the lines between abortion and murder, and between fetuses without any rights and babies with rights are appearing a little blurry…perhaps even arbitrary. 

Indeed, what is emerging thanks to Gosnell’s crimes is the absurdity of drawing any distinct lines in law between these things. A baby inside and outside his mother’s womb is one and the same. All that has changed is the position of the baby. And an abortion and a murder are exactly the same act: killing the baby. All that is different is the placement of the baby.

In some ways I pity Gosnell. To him it must appear unfair in the extreme that while he languishes in a jail cell facing the death penalty, his fellow abortionists continue to make good money doing basically the same thing he did while enjoying the full protection of the law. In fact, the main difference between him and them, is that his unorthodox method of killing babies is arguably safer for women. Rather than inserting medical instruments into the woman's body, and thereby risking perforating her uterus or causing other damage, he simply waited a few minutes until the baby was born to do the deed, and thereby avoided that risk.  

Faced with this disturbing truth, society can choose one of two paths: to do the hard thing and acknowledge that we have been wrong for the past forty years, and that the unborn child is a part of the human family and possesses the right to life; or we can, as has happened in the Netherlands with legalized infant euthanasia, throw it all to the devil and protect our beloved “right” to abortion by extending it even beyond birth.

The former way leads to health and sanity. The latter leads to Auschwitz. Choose wisely. 

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