Murder. That was the charge against the Philadelphia doctor who resolved those inconvenient late term pregnancies by inducing labor, forcing the premature live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh and eighth months of pregnancy and then snipping their spinal column to bring a premature end to their lives.
“Under Pennsylvania law, abortions are illegal after 24 weeks of pregnancy or just under six months, and most doctors won’t perform them after 20 weeks because of the risks, prosecutors said,” according to a report on the Associated Press.
Dr. Kermit Gosnell ignored the law, ignored his fellow doctors’ cautions and has ended late term pregnancies for numerous women since he opened his abortion clinic in 1979. His blatant disregard for life resulted last week in his arrest and the headline that went round the world “Abortion doctor accused of killing babies . . . .”
This is news?
Isn’t that what the pro-life movement has been saying since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973?
For 38 years, the headline has not been a popular sentence with pro-choice followers who prefer the more obtuse “terminating an unwanted pregnancy,” and referred to the pregnancy as a ball of cells, tissue, embryo or fetus.
It is rich irony that as the nation approaches the anniversary of Roe v. Wade which legalized abortions, that the headlines for Right to Life rallies will stand side-by-side with news of the arrest of Gosnell, an abortionist so well known that he never advertised his clinic. Prosecutors said Gosnell made millions of dollars over three decades performing thousands of dangerous abortions, many of them illegal, late-term procedures.
In the same story, the Associated Press details what is essentially the same action: One unseen, the other seen.
“In a typical late-term abortion, the fetus is dismembered in the uterus,” the AP story says to describe the widely, acceptable procedure done on an unborn child which is at no risk of taking a breath.
Two paragraphs later in the report, Gosnell is accused of inducing labor and delivery and “then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing the spinal cord.”
Whether we change the wording or change the location – the child of each late term pregnancy – unborn or prematurely born – experiences the same physical feeling of a deep, deathly cut into their body.
Using oblique wording skims over the exact same brutality of an action taken inside the warmth of a woman’s womb that Gosnell performed on infants forced to be born prematurely.
Gosnell is described as calloused, joking about the size of the babies, saving body parts and his utter disregard for the “safety of women undergoing abortion.”
He operated a clinic in a manner unbecoming to the name of medicine. He hired and used unlicensed, unschooled individuals to administer anesthesia, perform some of the abortions as well as the expectant women’s preparation and after care. In the days since his arrest, a silent sisterhood of women have emerged with horror stories of the infections, their forced abortions when they changed their minds and the complications some experienced from the service Gosnell and his staff provided.
The bad doctor is accused of damaging and repairing women’s wombs without telling them and leaving at least one dead from an overdose of painkiller given by the staff as they waited for Gosnell to arrive and perform the abortion.
Four clinic employees were also charged with murder, and five more, including Gosnell’s wife, Pearl, are charged with conspiracy, drug charges and other crimes.
Gosnell’s clinic reflects every description that the pro-abortion movement used to rally support for their quest to legalize abortion to keep women from having one in some unsanitary back alley clinic.
However, until he was arrested, Gosnell operated such a clinic; one sanctioned by the state of Pennsylvania even though no state regulator had stopped by to inspect it since 1993. “The state’s reluctance to investigate under several administrations may stem partly from the sensitivity of the abortion debate,” said District Attorney Seth Williams.
Abortion clinics are the hot potato no legislator or state official wants to hold very long. And yet, the reality is that when we begin to degrade the life of any human, we degrade all humans.
Last week, the headlines screamed “Abortion doctor accused of killing babies.” But, the truth is, that has been the reality in every abortion clinic across the country since Roe v. Wade in 1973 made it an acceptable way to deny the reality of each unseen child’s life.
It will continue to be the truth long after Gosnell’s story has faded from our memories. But may we never forget the truth of last week’s headlines. We can’t afford to do so – the smallest of children growing within depend on our remembering and continuing our quest to insure that all abortion clinics, as well as the one in Philadelphia, are closed.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)