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June 20, 2013 (National Right to Life News) – The immediate legal situation of abortionist Kermit Gosnell is settled. Three consecutive life terms without chance of parole and another 2 ½ to 5 years for the involuntary manslaughter of Karnamaya Mongar. While the 72-year-old Gosnell may be gone for good, his legacy is only beginning to unfold.

I had not seen until Tuesday a dialogue that appeared May 1 between two columnists for Bloomberg News– Margaret Carlson and Ramesh Ponnuru (better known for his work for National Review).

Ponnuru is unabashedly pro-life and the author of The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life. Carlson is reliably pro-abortion.

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Her comments in this discussion, which was published the day the jury recessed to reach its verdict on Gosnell, are amazing. The entire back and forth can be read here, so I will highlight just a couple of her wholly unexpected observations.

To Ponnuru’s point that “a lot of pro-choicers are uncomfortable with this story because it raises the question of whether we’ve gone too far with abortion rights,” Carlson responds

Let me answer the question you raise: Yes, we have gone too far. Since we’re talking about what we wrote, during last year’s Democratic convention I wrote about how terrible it was that Democrats took out of their platform that abortion should be ‘safe, legal, and rare.’ As I read the Gosnell case coverage, I’ve learned that late-term abortions aren’t as rare as I thought. Gosnell is charged with repeatedly and openly killing babies born alive. That is something doctors who perform abortions sometimes have to contemplate. Just yesterday, a pro-life group released a video of a doctor in a Washington clinic explaining what would happen if the baby were accidentally born alive. He wasn’t much different from Gosnell.

Here’s one more. Ponnuru talked about how when President Obama was an Illinois state legislator he had “voted against legislation to clarify that infants who survive abortions should be protected, because he worried that it was inconsistent with abortion rights. It’s a vote his defenders have been trying to explain away ever since.” To which Carlson answered:

This is where a constitutional law professor can go wrong, way wrong, and it’s something Obama must regret. I hope he does. …The other huge problem is how wide the ‘health of mother’ exception is. It can be anything — age, emotional health, financial condition. The loopholes are so large a nine-month pregnant woman could go through them. And there’s almost no difference between killing a baby accidentally born alive in a late-term abortion, as Gosnell stands accused of, and killing the same baby in the womb, as more skilled doctors can do.

Carlson makes a common error. The babies Gosnell murdered were not “accidentally born alive”–that is what Gosnell deliberately chose to do before he killed them by severing their spinal cords. That mistake notwithstanding Carlson’s eyes had been opened.

We can hope that the impact of Gosnell–and all the other abortionists whose behavior was captured on video by Live Action or discovered by authorities—will open the eyes of a nation.

This article originally appeared on National Right to Life News and is reprinted with permission.