The Barbarism in Philadelphia

At Power Line, Scott Johnson writes:

I first became aware of the Gosnell case through Joseph Bottum’s February 2011 Weekly Standard article “To live and die in Philadelphia” and Clarke Forsythe’s January 2011 Weekly Standard online column “The Supreme Court’s back alley runs through Philadelphia.” Bottum’s and Forsythe’s pieces were based on the grand jury report in the case, which has now gone to trial.

The Standard takes another look at the Gosnell case today, not to elaborate on the evidence that has emerged at trial, but rather to place it in the context of the abortion culture growing out of the 1973 Supreme Court rulings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. In “The barbarism in Philadelphia” Claremont McKenna associate professor of government Jon Shields writes: “Dr. Gosnell…fits the profile of a sociopathic killer. But unlike most such deviants, Gosnell could argue that he acted within his constitutional rights.” Looking at applicable law, Shields adds: “Had Kermit Gosnell found a second physician to back him up and then killed the third-trimester fetuses before they passed through the birth canal, he would have committed no crime under Roe and Doe or the laws of Pennsylvania. The grand jury never wrapped its mind around this chilling fact.”

Meanwhile at Twitchy, “Philly-area columnist asks a key, yet horrifying, Gosnell question:”

Wondering: Did Dr. Kermit Gosnell ever deliver a baby and let it live? #Gosnell

— jdmullane (@jdmullane) April 18, 2013

As the Twitchy writer adds, “Devastating. That key question should put things in perspective for those in the media who are refusing to cover the trial of Kermit Gosnell and his house of horrors.”

And finally, the password is: utilitarianism, Ed Morrissey writes:

The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Sherman Frederick hits the nail on the head. In the end, the question is not so much about the few inches between life and disinterest in the law, but in the difference between life and utilitarianism:

If people focused on Dr. Gosnell, they would see the crazy horror of American abortion policy as codified by the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling. That ruling figuratively and literally splits babies in a vain attempt to avoid the obvious — abortion kills, whether it is in the last week or the first week of pregnancy. You can call it a fetus or, as the court said, “potential life.” But no matter what euphemisms we might use to soothe our conscience, simple science and staggering medical advances over the past 40 years render it all vanity. …

The grand jury report also notes that Dr. Gosnell kept in his office 20 to 30 jars filled with the feet of the aborted. That Mengele-esque detail aside, Dr. Gosnell’s story should spark questions about the difference between a 25-week-old “baby” and a 24-week-old “fetus.”

Medically, the answer is nothing, and the intellectually honest know it.

The argument for abortion in the new millennium has become the argument for politically correct infanticide. Not the “bad” kind of infanticide that selects for gender or against ethnicity, but the “good” kind of American infanticide that selects against the young for the sole convenience of the old.

That’s the inconvenient truth. Pay no attention to those jars filled with baby feet.

McMahon will spend the next several weeks trying to sell utilitarianism to the jury. Let’s see if the media spends the next several weeks trying to sell utilitarianism to the nation.