Our Gosnell Gulag
Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 20 April 2013
The Gosnell moment, for that is what it is, presents a clear
opportunity for a real change of cultural heart. There are moments when
some suppressed or ignored horror comes sharply into focus, and after
that, it is not really possible to go back to the way it was before.
This is what happened when Solzhenitsyn published his Gulag,
for example. Something that had been successfully accommodated became
impossible to accommodate any further. It was a conscience moment,
which, given the nature of the case, most often come to us unsought. But
they do come.
This is that kind of moment for us. This is an atrocity that has
rocked even many "choice" advocates, and the media has been suppressing
it for clear and obvious reasons.
Who can bear to look straight at our
idea of what ghoulish privileges our mendacious constitutional manglers
can grant to a woman and her doctor? The Twitter barrage that forced the
mainstream media into covering this story was another sign of a
cultural conscience showing some signs of coming off life support. This
is as improbable as hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen protesting
homosexual marriage -- to speak of another great media coverup.
And the mainstream media are as blood-soaked in this as anybody. One
of the reasons we can be grateful that the Boston bombers were caught,
and that they turned out to be radical Muslims (what a shock), is that
if the perpetrators had been white guys with a cousin who had gone to a
Tea Party rally once a couple years ago, they would have ensured that
the bombing story would just blow the Gosnell story out of the headlines
for good. But now . . . back to Gosnell, and the absurdities of our
high shifts and low evasions.
The standards and workarounds that we have devised for ourselves are
arbitrary and demented. But they are also fragile, and one blast of
reality can collapse the entire thing. The value of the Gosnell house of
horrors is that it is just such a blast of reality. It reveals just how
arbitrary and just how demented our entire national policy on this
subject has been. Think about it.
First, let us talk about the arbitary nature of what we allow and
what we don't. Partial birth abortions (which Obama does not want
restricted) do exactly what Gosnell was doing, only with the baby half
in and half out. This makes a major ethical difference, apparently.
Regular abortions do these things with the baby all the way in. Gosnell
does these things to the baby with the baby all the way out. And he's
the freak show? If he put the baby back inside the mother, in a reverse
Caesarian, and cut the spinal cord then, is he a responsible medical
professional again? If it happens here, in the middle of the room, it is
a protected constitutional right. If he carries the baby over to the
corner where the light is better, then he can be charged with murder.
And he's the freak show? What about the lawyers and lobbyists
that insist on this? What can be said on behalf of a nation that is even
a little bit okay with this?
It is like having laws that say you can shoot your mom in the
kitchen, but not in the living room -- and then demanding that everybody
continue to respect the majesty of the law. But demented is as demented
does. When the Court upheld Roe, their argument was that they did not
want to undermine respect for the judicial system by overturning a
terrible law. Right -- there is nothing like doubling down on lunacy to
help persuade everybody that everything is just fine.
It is as though some horrible event happened in Canada that caused a
stream of refugees to head for our border, and someone with very precise
legal reasoning skills developed the schizophrenic policy of shooting
the refugees on their side of the border, but demanding the
ultimate in medical care for them if they managed to make it across the
border alive. You can learn a lot of amazing things in a Harvard grad
class.
Gosnell's problem is not with what he was doing, which countless progressives have defended with their special kind of passionate malice, but with where he was doing it. You see, he was doing it where people could see.
So Gosnell or no Gosnell, Philadelphia or no Philadelphia, why don't
we know that it is always that bad for the baby? This is not a one off
situation. This very thing is happening in your city -- right this
minute. Maybe you drive right by it as part of your daily commute. But
now, thanks to Gosnell, we know what we know. This is what pro-lifers
have been saying for a generation. It was as true in the seventies as it
is now, but this appears to be a moment where the point can not only be
stated, but also heard. So learn the potency of the hash tag #Gosnell.
One of the reasons that public opinion has started to shift on
abortion has been because of the advancements of ultrasound technology.
We can see with our eyes now, and what we are starting to see is that
our learned lies have been lies for all that, and the corollary occurs
to us that they have all been tumbling from the mouths of damned liars.
And it turns out the mouths are our own.
And the earth and sky fled from their places, and America came
forward trembling to speak with the Ancient of Days. And America said,
"Lord, when did we ever see you struggling on a table, and go get
scissors to snip your spinal cord?" And the Lord will say . . . but
perhaps we don't want to hear what the Lord will say. But it has
something to do with why there is a Hell.
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