The trial of Dr Kermit Gosnell is now making headlines around the world. Consider, for example, the article below, which today appeared in the NZ Herald in New Zealand. The piece makes for difficult reading. The first response is to extend compassion towards the medical assistants who are now facing up to what they did. They know they have murdered children. For at least some of them their grief will be inconsolable and their guilt will be unable to be expiated. May God have mercy upon them and draw them to the Lord Jesus Christ.
But this trial and all its horrors is important for other reasons. There are plenty of effete liberals who propound all kinds of abstract ratiocinations to justify the evil of abortion (the child is not a human being until it has been born; the child has no legal rights; the pregnant female's rights to control their own body trump any other human rights, and so forth.) To them we would simply ask them once again to get on their soap boxes and justify why they believe what was taking place in the Philadelphia's House of Horrors was perfectly acceptable, moral, and right. For in principle they all do. Most, however, are afraid to face up to the position they hold. That is why we call them effete liberals.
The fact that the law was being broken in this case is irrelevant, for these effete liberals ought to go on to argue that the law in this case is an ass. When a tumour is growing in the body, society does not codify rules which declare that once the tumour has passed a certain age or size it is illegal to operate upon the tumour and kill its cells off. That would be absurd. If the unborn child is nothing more than a tumour growing in the body (which, since it is declared by our liberal protagonists to be non-human, there are no other categories or options) Gosnell and his assistants have done nothing morally wrong. It is the law, therefore, which is immoral.
We are aware that there is a certain class of libertarians who propound a dichotomy between potentiality and actuality. The unborn child is potentially a human being, but not actually. Therefore, until its potential becomes actual, the unborn thing is not a human being and has no rights as such. This precious piece of Aristotelian rationalising, of course, proves too much, lumping the argument with far too much weight to bear. Since all human beings consist of a mixture of actuality and potentiality at what point does the actual trump the potential, so that human rights and protections--in particular, the right to life--apply? Does a two day old baby after birth have more actuality than potentiality? Does a three month old baby? How about a 75 year old? How about a child born with Downs Syndrome? However these libertarians answer that question the answer will always be with prejudice and answer will be nothing more than a artificial, arid ratiocination.
The Gosnell trial is important. We are glad it is getting headlines and exposure. For far too long we have tolerated the most cowardly form of murder imaginable. We have industrialised it. We have created national killing floors. And it is acceptable in polite circles. We have even had the audacity and the chutzpah to declare this industrialised slaughter a fundamental human right.
But come, one and all, you who would defend this horror. We challenge you to stand in solidarity with Dr Gosnell. Don't be cowardly in his hour of need. Get out on the streets, get on the net, get into the media and defend the man and his clinic. No doubt you view him as one of the great heroes of our generation. Let's hear from you. Let's hear why snipping baby's spines and cutting their necks is a great, moral, ethical, and righteous deed. Let's hear about the implicit racism in his prosecution. Let's hear about solidarity with the poor. Let's hear the calls for Gosnell to be given a medal--maybe the Medal of Freedom. That would be apt.
Worker admits cutting 10 babies at abortion clinic
7:17 AM Wednesday Mar 20, 2013
Dr. Kermit Gosnell
A medical assistant told a jury Tuesday that she snipped the spines of at least 10 babies during unorthodox abortions at a West Philadelphia clinic. And she said Dr. Kermit Gosnell and another employee did the same to terminate pregnancies.
Adrienne Moton's testimony came in the capital murder trial of Gosnell, the clinic owner, who is on trial in the deaths of a patient and seven babies. Prosecutors accuse him of killing late-term, viable babies after they were delivered alive, in violation of state abortion laws.
Gosnell's lawyer denies the murder charge and disputes that any babies were born alive. He also challenges the gestational age of the aborted fetuses, calling them inexact estimates.
Moton, the first employee to testify, sobbed as she recalled taking a cellphone photograph of one baby left in her work area. She thought he could have survived, given his size and pinkish color. She had measured him at nearly 30 weeks. "The aunt felt it was just best for her (the mother's) future," Moton testified.
Jurors saw Moton's photograph on a large screen in the courtroom, which took on a bizarre look Tuesday as she testified near a hospital bed with stirrups and other aging obstetric equipment. Denied the chance to bring jurors to the shuttered inner-city clinic, prosecutors are instead recreating a patient room in court.
Moton, 35, sobbed as she described her work at the clinic. Because of problems at home, she had moved in with Gosnell and his third wife during high school, and she went to work for him from 2005 to 2008. She earned about $10 an hour, off the books, to administer drugs, perform sonograms, help with abortions and dispose of fetal remains. Workers got $20 bonuses for second-term abortions on Saturdays, when a half-dozen were sometimes performed.
She once had to kill a baby delivered in a toilet, cutting its neck with scissors, she said. Asked if she knew that was wrong, she said, "At first I didn't."
Abortions are typically performed in utero. In Pennsylvania, abortions cannot legally be performed after the 24th week of pregnancy. Moton has pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, which carries a 20- to 40-year term, as well as conspiracy and other charges. She has been in prison since early 2011, when Philadelphia prosecutors released the harrowing grand jury report on Gosnell's Women's Medical Center and arrested the doctor, wife Pearl and eight current or former employees. Most of them are expected to testify.
Women and teens came from across the mid-Atlantic, often seeking late-term abortions, Moton said. She recalled one young woman from Puerto Rico who did not speak English and appeared to be 27 weeks pregnant.
One patient, a 41-year-old refugee, died after an overdose of drugs allegedly given to her during a 2009 abortion.
Defense lawyer Jack McMahon told jurors in opening statements Monday that Gosnell, now 72, returned to the impoverished neighborhood after medical school when he could have struck it rich in the suburbs. He called the prosecution of his client, who is black, "a lynching."
But prosecutors believe Gosnell made plenty of money over a 30-year career using cheap, untrained staff, outdated medicines and barbaric techniques to perform abortions on desperate, low-income women. And they say he made even more on the side running a "pill mill," where addicts and drug dealers could get prescriptions for potent painkillers. Authorities found $250,000 in cash at his home when they searched it in 2010.
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