The Gosnell trial provides us an opportunity to press abortion-defenders to explain what's so magical about birth

Kermit Gosnell: Epiphany for Birthers?

by John B. Londregan

It is neither the impossibility of writing clear laws nor our inability to witness abortion that stops us from making it illegal. Instead it is the will to kill for convenience that drives some people to sustain the fiction that human life begins at birth.

The conviction of murderer Kermit Gosnell reminds us of the horror of cruelly mauling helpless young people to death, as Matt Franck argued here at Public Discourse last week. Yet the coverage of the event uncovered a revealing confusion on the part of the press--many accounts referred to the infants murdered by Gosnell as "fetuses," unconsciously recognizing the continuity of life from one minute to the next, from the beginning to the end of the miracle of life.

Of course, in this second decade of the twenty-first century it is perfectly legal, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to kill a 168-day-old fetus, provided she has not yet emerged from her mother, but a moment after she does the legal panorama is transformed and snipping her neck to make her stop crying is defined as murder.

But how different is the child? What transformation has come over her in the half dozen or so sweeps of the second hand around the clock on the wall of the abortionist's abattoir that take her from unwanted appendage to little girl? While the legal code of Pennsylvania notes a cosmic difference, the ability of the small vulnerable child to feel pain, fear, or joy is the same--ten minutes before she is born the fetus is just as human as she will be ten minutes afterwards, yet the law is blind to this.

Why need the law be incapable of recognizing the humanity of all of us? Each of us passed through gestation and birth, each of us was human from the moment of conception. Each of us was already a person. Does the law's failure to recognize this simple reality stem from the impossibility of writing clear legislation to protect new life? No. That's easy enough. When I was born out of wedlock to a vulnerable young mother in Maryland, a jurisdiction not known at the time for producing particularly enlightened legislation, the laws were nevertheless sufficiently grounded in reality that atrocities such as killing helpless young people were illegal, ten minutes before birth as well as ten minutes after.

The problem is not linguistic. Nor does the lack of sensible legislation stem from uncertainty. Jurors and courtroom observers in the Gosnell case were driven to grief and tears at the heartrending evidence of his heinous crimes. Thanks to ultrasound technology, we can see fetuses kick, squirm, and react before they leave the womb with virtually the same clarity as witnesses observed and recounted the slaughter of the innocents in Gosnell's killing chamber.

It is neither the impossibility of writing clear laws, nor our inability to witness the nature of abortion that stops us from making it illegal. Instead it is the will to kill for convenience that drives some--let us refer to them as "birthers"--to sustain the fiction that human life begins at birth.

To be sure, the Supreme Court of the land, ruling in 1973, found that a parent's right to privacy allowed one to kill one's daughter right up to the moment of birth. But this was tantamount to judicial murder, and it remains so. If any were then uncertain about the grisly shredding of a helpless human being that takes place in an abortion, that tatter of ambiguity has long since been rent asunder by the increased viability of people at earlier and earlier stages of gestation, by the clarity of in vivo tomography and ultrasound images, and by simple common sense.

Would we tolerate a Supreme Court ruling that resulted in the killing of three quarters of a million people every year, including disproportionately many girls and minority children? Would we shrug our shoulders and declare the question to be "above our pay grade"? Apparently yes, as this is precisely what our society is doing as it permits abortion with a cynicism so transparent it would have made Pontius Pilate blush.

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