More on Gosnell

 

Part Four: The Gosnell Murder Convictions, the Day After–”Three Takeaways” from TIME magazine

 

By Dave Andrusko

Jack McMahon, Kermit Gosnell’s defense attorney

Regular readers of NRL News Today will instantly recognize the name Kate Pickert. Back in January we wrote about a piece she’d written–a woe-be-gotten, the pro-abortion world is about to end for TIME magazine. The piece generated a lot of heat from pro-abortion feminists, but while overwrought, Pickert understood perfectly well how aggressive pro-lifers were in state legislatures and how successful. (See http://nrlc.cc/103dU5A and http://nrlc.cc/129qGxk.)
So I was keen to see what Pickert and co-author Adam Sorensen would conclude in TIME magazine in a piece that ran yesterday—“ Three Takeaways from the Kermit Gosnell Trial.”  By and large, while lacking, the piece was better than I anticipated.
#1. “This was not a case about the morality of legal, late-term abortion,” they write. “Gosnell’s trial was about illegal abortion and homicide.”

Yes and no. Of course the legal charges were about aborting babies past the 24 week limit in Pennsylvania (which the Grand Jury found Gosnell did with impunity for decades) and murdering children he had aborted alive and then severed their spinal cords. No, in the sense that discussion in the court room in Philadelphia will bring a reality crashing home on most abortions. Yes, you CAN have an abortion up to 24 weeks in Pennsylvania and much further along in other states. The jury (as was the case with the Grand Jury) was not empanelled to talk about “the morality of legal, late-term abortion,” but it will come up again and again and again. How can it not when (a) most people don’t know it takes place and (b) that it’s legal to rip heads off of torsos in the womb but not “behead” them (the term used by a Gosnell employee who himself performed many of these abortions) outside the womb.

They also have a number of misstatements in the piece. Pro-abortionists and their media supporters are bound and determined to create out of whole cloth a narrative of pro-abortionists having “long ago called for Gosnell to be convicted of murder.”
#2. “State regulation is where the action is on abortion.” With a pro-abortion President and a United States Senate lead by and peopled by a pro-abortion majority, of course most action—but not all—will be in the states. As NRLC explains on our webpage under the headline, “Urge Congress to end abortion-to-birth in the nation’s capital!”

“Pro-life members of Congress, led by Congressman Trent Franks (R-Az.) and Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), with strong backing from the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), have re-introduced legislation to curb an ongoing scandal in our nation’s capital: The entire abortion law was repealed, and abortion has been made legal — for any reason whatever — right up until the moment of birth. This appalling situation would be addressed by the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R. 1797, S. 886).”


Pickert’s and Sorensen’s point is to concede that clinic regulation bills have been making progress in the state legislatures but then contend that “many of the new modern state regulations for abortion clinics do not objectively improve safety.” Sure they do, as the circumstances surrounding the death of the woman at Gosnell’s clinic demonstrated (see “Kermit Gosnell has been a wake-up call for Pennsylvania” ).
#3. Finally, “While it wasn’t completely ignored, the Gosnell trial revealed the mainstream media’s hesitancy to swarm a story about a horrifying abortion-related crime.” (No kidding.) They do an outstanding job laying out how the major media fell down on the job only to offer a bevy of lame excuses at the end.
Tomorrow we will pick up with further coverage of Gosnell case and what it portends for the future.

Source: NRLC News