Late Term Abortion and Infanticide

 

Gosnell, infanticide, and places even anti-life forces fear to tread

By Dave Andrusko

Steve Masoff

No sooner had I written “Why the Gosnell murder trial is not on every news show and front page” than I stumbled across “Abortion after Tiller,” a reference to the late Kansas abortionist George Tiller. This fine essay appeared in The Public Discourse.

The author is Prof. Justin Dyer, whose name NRL News Today readers may remember. I cited his keen analysis of the less-known history of the Roe v. Wade decision in “The multiple lies and distortions of the ‘New Abortion History’” (http://nrlc.cc/XFHOOf).
He uses as the backbone of his piece a highly sympathetic documentary that profiled “the nation’s four remaining late-term abortion providers (three of whom were trained by Tiller).” In fact, there are probably more, but that’s a minor point.
If you read, as I have, some of the background interviews filmmakers Martha Shane and Lana Wilson gave about “After Tiller,” you knew (as Dyer learned when he saw the film) that it would provide a “soft and humanizing portrait.”

I found Dyer’s essay helpful for several reasons. If (as at least one of these “late-term” abortionists concedes) “I think of them as babies,” it raises questions far beyond aborting babies diagnosed as having extreme abnormalities. Here’s how Dyer frames the question:

“By accepting the humanity of the unborn, ‘After Tiller’ broaches the question of whether, and in what circumstances, it is morally permissible to end the life of human beings at any age, since the reasons and justifications for ending the life of a child are not dependent, in principle, on its being an unborn child. Pro-choice philosophers and academics have acknowledged this at least since the 1970s, but it has taken several decades for the logic to manifest itself in our culture.”

Which opens the door—the trap door, if you will—that leads from abortion to infanticide.
The wider public would have no reason to know that there has been a kind of academic arms race as proponents of infanticide have become bolder and bolder and more and more forthcoming. Dyer reminds that at the same time the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments in Roe, lo and behold the first academic defense of infanticide appeared.

Michael Tooley wrote in the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs,

“One reason the question of the morality of infanticide is worth examining is that it seems very difficult to formulate a completely satisfactory liberal position on abortion without coming to grips with infanticide.”

In other words, in certain circles of academia the anti-life locomotive barreled through the is-abortion-acceptable? station on its way to its true destination: making it acceptable to kill human beings not just before birth but after.
It’s more than a slippery slope argument but for now let’s stay with the key question. If you can say (as Tooley persuaded himself you could) that there was no reason in principle to allow abortion but disallow infanticide– at least “during a time interval shortly after birth”–then the outcome was inevitable.
The principle sacrificed was that you don’t kill any innocent human life.
Once that was lost, inevitably the next step was, “Why stop at birth?” Why stop at infants? Why stop at whatever arbitrary quality of life criterion you’ve established? Once the principle is tossed overboard, it’s only about how quickly we snare additional categories of powerless people.
Why did this remind me of the Gosnell trial? Why is what he is charged with so abhorrent? The same media outlets that avert their gaze probably have little, if any, problem with Gosnell flouting the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania.

They probably are squeamish about the details of how Gosnell allegedly killed viable babies after they were born alive. Here’s how the Grand Jury described what is euphemistically described as “snipping.”

“The clinic’s employees used the term ‘snip’ to describe the severing of the spinal cord, but this is misleading.  Our neonatal expert testified that, because of the bony vertebrae surrounding the spinal cord, it would actually take a bit of pressure to cut all the way through the spinal cord and the bone – even at 23 or 24 weeks gestation.  At 29 weeks, on babies such as Baby Boy A, the expert said, ‘it would be really hard.’ The baby, we were told, would feel ‘tremendous pain.’”

Gosnell’s right hand man, Steve Massof, was more succinct in his testimony: it resembled “a beheading.”

But if you are not an academician explicitly defending infanticide, what is your recourse? Fortunately, these weren’t really babies because…well, babies are supposed to be delivered alive. These were preemies (albeit viable) who are alive only momentarily.
(Why? According to Gosnell’s staff he was so incompetent at injecting digoxin into the unborn baby’s heart to cause “fetal demise” in utero that “Gosnell stopped trying and reverted to his old system of killing babies after they were born.”)
Come to think of it, imagine the table like an extended birth canal. Indeed, if you close your eyes,  it was almost like the baby was still in the womb and abracadabra, a curettage becomes surgical scissors.

Source NRLC News

Gosnell is taking us places no one with a heart wants to go and to places those without a heart fear to tread.