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Operating on Babies In
Utero and Abortionist Kermit Gosnell
Part Four of Four By Dave Andrusko You know a column is really good when at virtually the same minute you are distributing it far and wide, people are sending an electronic copy of it to you! Such was the case last night (and extending over today) with George Will's latest Newsweek column, "Tale of Two Bad Laws." It's not without flaw; it spend most of the time giving way, way more than the benefit of the doubt to a politician who was and is determined to squelch free speech. But in the beginning Will excels at aggregating two developments together so as to teach us a lesson larger than the sum of the individual stories, powerful as they are on their own. There are the hideous trail of dead bodies--one woman, seven babies born alive and then allegedly murdered--that follows in the wake of abortionist Kermit Gosnell; and what we talked about Friday--the huge improvement in the lives of children with spina bifida if corrective surgery is done in utero rather than after the baby is born (www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/Feb11/nv021111part5.html). Even people who are well beyond being just casually interested in the Grand Jury report on Gosnell can be forgiven if they have missed the scope of the crimes the Grand Jury elaborated in its 261-page report. As you known Gosnell and four of his underpaid, undereducated staff are charged with the murders of one woman (Karnamaya Mongar) and seven babies born alive. How did Gosnell "ensuring fetal demise," as he put it? "[B]y sticking scissors into the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord," the Grand Jury reported. "He called that snipping." The Grand Jury is convinced there were hundreds of these "snippings," but "Most of these acts cannot be prosecuted, because Gosnell destroyed the files." Store that on your brain's hard drive. But the Grand Jury also discovered that long before police raided Gosnell's Women's Medical Society in West Philadelphia, another woman had died. That woman died of sepsis after Gosnell reportedly perforated her uterus. "The woman was 22 years old," wrote Melinda Henneberger, editor in chief of Politics Daily. "A civil suit against Gosnell was settled for almost a million dollars, and the insurance company forwarded the information to the Department of State. That report should have been all the confirmation needed for the complaint from the former employee that was already in the department's possession. Instead, the department attorneys dismissed this complaint, too. They concluded that death was just an 'inherent' risk, not something that should jeopardize a doctor's medical license." Will precedes his indignant comments about Gosnell ("the routine butchery of babies at a Philadelphia abortion mill") by noting that "Last week's interest in abortion [in Washington, DC] could have been, but was not, because of the simultaneously heartening and (one hopes) unsettling report about stunning success in treating severe forms of spina bifida in utero. If babies can be surgery patients 19 weeks after conception, are they not babies rather than mere 'fetal material' whose 'termination' is a matter of moral indifference?" If you look at over at National Right to Life News Today (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org), you will find a particularly horrific excerpt from the Grand Jury's report. Gosnell was reported to be aborting--and then severing the spinal cords –of babies up to and including 32.5 weeks. When does the unborn move from "fetal material" to bona fide human being about whose fate we cannot be morally indifferent? We can hope and pray that out of the Dante's Inferno-like Women's Medical Society, a real discussion about the preeminent moral issue of our day can begin. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha. |