Slave Traders' Lobby

Gosnell, Abortion, and Slave Trading

One of the finest pieces yet to emerge about convicted murderer, Dr Gosnell's House of Abortion Horrors has been published by The Witherspoon Institute.  It has been written by Matthew J. Franck who is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute. 

The thing about the Gosnell case is this: you can get outraged over the death of innocent women who died at the hands of Gosnell's ministrations due to the squalor, filth, and brutality of his surgical interventions.  Plenty of people have.  Or, you could get angry over the purposive and deliberate actions of Gosnell and his staff to murder babies who had emerged from wombs alive (Gosnell "specialised" in late-term abortions).  People have.  But if you then go on to assert--as millions do--there are no problems whatsoever provided those same babies died whilst still in the womb due to Gosnell's actions, then your conscience has become as dead as one of Gosnell's victims.
 

Franck, drawing on arguments from Lincoln against slavery, makes abortion politically and morally equivalent to nineteenth century slavery, and abortionists equivalent to slave traders. Firstly, Lincoln's position on slave trading:

Abraham Lincoln addressed part of his argument to his southern fellow citizens. He was convinced that their own social customs gave evidence of a moral principle against slavery half asleep in their souls:

[Y]ou have amongst you, a sneaking individual, of the class of native tyrants, known as the “slave-dealer.” He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave, at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony—instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now why is this? You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.

Of course, if the right to own and traffic in slaves was protected by the Constitution—as the Supreme Court was to assert in 1857—then the slave-dealer was doing absolutely necessary work. But Lincoln was right: Decent people instinctively recoiled from contact with someone whose business was the despoliation of others’ human dignity.

Those in the business of despoiling other human beings are contemptible indeed. 

Franck concludes by addressing our own modern "slave-dealers' lobby".

In statements issued immediately after the Gosnell verdict, the slave-dealers’ lobby—Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America—reacted as though the real problem with Gosnell is that he preyed on women and endangered their health. To be sure, he did just that. But Gosnell victimized these women as the logical extension of these groups’ moral reasoning and public policy goals, which they have advocated for decades. They have devoted themselves to teaching American women that their unborn children simply don’t count in any moral calculus, and horrors like Gosnell’s clinic are the fruit of their diligent work.

There is no alchemy, no magic spell that can tell us how to distinguish, in terms of their moral claim on us, between the children aborted in Gosnell’s Philadelphia abattoir and the ones who were delivered and then killed. In certain respects, Kermit Gosnell has a right to be the most surprised man in America right now. We, on the other hand, who have not wanted to notice the slave-dealers in our midst, have no such excuse.