Alan W. Dowd @ American Thinker:
The trial of Kermit Gosnell — the Philadelphia man accused of murdering a female patient and several babies who were “accidentally” born during abortion procedures — has struck a nerve in a numbed America.
Gosnell’s crimes were uncovered quite by accident during a 2010 FBI-DEA raid related to drug violations at Gosnell’s abortion clinic. What the federal agents found was shocking: a beautician assisting on late-term abortions, blood-covered floors, reused disposable medical supplies, body parts stuffed in plastic bags. Whatever you wish to call those to whom Gosnell’s macabre collection once belonged — unviable tissue masses, fetuses, babies — their remains weren’t even accorded the respect a highway-cleanup worker gives road-kill. A grand jury report aptly called Gosnell’s abortion mill a “house of horrors.”
As The Washington Post reported, albeit belatedly, state regulators had ignored complaints about Gosnell, including 46 lawsuits filed against him, and made just five inspections — which are supposed to be conducted annually — since the clinic opened in 1979. The woman whose murder he is being tried for succumbed to lethal doses of pain killers and sedatives. The babies Gosnell is accused of murdering — initial charges included seven newborns, but the judge threw out some of the cases — were not so fortunate as to be sedated to death. To its credit, once the Post got around to covering the case, its reporting included eyewitness testimony — too gruesome, too inhuman, too heartbreaking to include here — describing how horribly these and other newborns died.
That brings us to the raw nerve exposed by the Gosnell case.
For those without strong views on abortion and even for many abortion supporters — “reproductive-rights advocates,” in media parlance — the ghastly details of Gosnell’s multi-million-dollar abortion enterprise are forcing them to consider two truths:
First, the Gosnell case amplifies the mixed messages floating around a mixed-up country. The case provides an unsettling, discomforting reminder that partial-birth and post-birth abortions like those performed by Gosnell cause pain to the baby, put the mother at risk and end a life — just like the 1.2 million pre-birth abortions carried out in America each year. Indeed, if Gosnell’s infant victims had succumbed to Gosnell’s wares before they were born, the crimes Gosnell is being accused of would not be crimes in most cases or in some places. As Michael Geer of the Pennsylvania Family Institute observed, the difference is “a 15-minute or half-hour time frame and 10 inches of physical space.”
The article uses the ”slippery slope” of Roe and asks how we got from the original ruling to Gosnell.
We usually forget that, under the original supreme court ruling, women were ONLY to have complete control of their bodies (over their child’s rights) during the first trimester.
During the 2nd trimester doctors and the law could combine to either allow or disallow an individual’s abortion.
BUT during that 3rd trimester no abortions were allowed….originally.
Gosnell’s whole case is abounding in 3rd trimester abortions.
When did this slide down the slope happen?
It was incremental, or we definitely would have stopped it.
Better late than never.