What’s So Bad About Gosnell?
By Rebecca Hamilton
It’s a
matter of timing, not killing.
No one
questioned that Dr Kermit Gosnell had killed a lot of babies. After all, that
was his business. He killed babies for a living. And he made a
killing at killing. According to some reports, Dr Gosnell made millions from
killing babies.
That was never the issue. Because killing babies is not a crime. The crime is where
and when you kill them. The issue, the fine point that both the
defense and the prosecution wrangled over day after day for weeks, was whether
or not Dr Gosnell killed the babies after they were outside their mother’s
bodies, or before.
Doctors
routinely chop babies up when they are inside their mother’s wombs. I
could put a YouTube video right here of a doctor dismembering a baby and
pulling its body parts out and tossing them in a tray. Happens all the time.
Happens every day.
Every. Single. Day.
The difference is when the mother delays killing her baby until the child is
big enough that it’s no longer possible to chop it up inside the womb and then
extract the dismembered body a piece at a time. There comes a point where it’s
difficult to get that big baby out without also delivering a living child.
Abortionists
go through all sorts of medical contortions to make sure that the baby is dead
when they get it out. One of their favs is to jab a needle
through the mother’s abdomen and shoot poison into the little one’s beating
heart. If the dosage is adequate and their aim is good, the baby dies. They can
then put the mother through labor and delivery of a dead child. Ta da. Dead
baby and no courtroom drama to follow.
Another practice is to induce labor with such violent contractions that the
contractions kill the child as it’s being born. Not so neat. And certainly a big
ouch for the mother. But another ta da. Dead baby and no need to hire a defense
attorney.
There are other ways, of course. One is to shoot saline solution into the
mother’s womb (again, that nasty needle through the abdomen) and scald the baby
to death. Then, of course, induce labor and deliver a dead child. Ta. Da. Dead
baby and no visits from the police.
Of course,
things get dicey when one of these tragic potions fails and a live child comes
out of the abortion process. That’s when the question of timing becomes
pertinent.
As Gosnell’s defense demonstrated, it doesn’t matter that Dr Gosnell killed children.
All that matters is when he did it. Their whole defense rested
on the contention that the good doctor had managed to kill each of these babies
while it was still inside mama’s womb. His grisly practice of using scissors to
sever their spinal cords afterwards was just a bit of — excuse the word —
overkill.
They were successful enough with this defense to get several charges
dismissed and to have the jury find the doc not guilty on another charge. In
other words, it worked. Fortunately for justice lovers the world over, it
didn’t work completely. The jury evidently decided that Dr Gosnell had not killed all the babies before getting
them out. Three of them managed to survive the abortion. Killing them then made
it murder.
Five
minutes before, it would have been good medicine.
Dr Gosnell is not the first abortionist to get hung up on this quibbling
technicality of when they kill the baby. Dr
Kenneth Edelin and his colleague tried to abort a baby that was around
20-24 weeks back in 1973. First, his colleague used the
then-standard process of injecting saline into the mother’s womb. When the baby
survived that, Dr Edelin tried what is called a hysterotomy, which involves
cutting the mother open and then running his finger between the baby and the
placenta, severing its lifeline. In theory, the baby smothers and dies and we have
another ta da. Dead baby and no legal troubles for doctor.
In this instance, prosecutors maintained that Dr Edelin failed to kill the
child again. He ended up smothering it after it was born.
Instead of a ta da, Dr Edelin had to go to court, where he was convicted. His conviction was
subsequently overturned, based largely on claims that the baby was “not viable”
anyway.
That overturned conviction, based as it was on the question of viability,
set the stage for 40 years of slaughter of late-term babies.
The
prosecution achieved a first in the Gosnell case. They got a jury to
acknowledge that what Dr Gosnell had been killing were human beings.
A first degree murder conviction is only possible if people are killed. You can
not be charged, much less convicted, of first degree murder for killing
chickens or pigs or goats. First degree murder requires that a human being
deliberately and with premeditation kills another human being.
That’s what Dr Gosnell was charged with and it’s what the jury convicted him
of doing.
That’s a big win.
But it still begs the question: If these babies were human beings when
Gosnell killed them, why were the other babies for whom charges were dismissed,
not human beings?
Let’s examine this contention. The babies who were
“already dead when they were born” had been killed by Dr Gosnell. Not one
person disputes this. But because they were killed a few minutes earlier in
their lives than the other babies, their deaths don’t matter. They are
non-human thingies that anyone can kill for any reason or no reason at any time.
But, 15 minutes later, they are full-fledged human
beings and killing them is premeditated, first-degree murder that is liable to
earn their murderer the death penalty.
In both the case of Dr Edelin in 1973 and Dr Gosnell
in 2013, the legality of using timing to determine humanity is insane. There is
no logic or explanation that can make it seem sane to any thinking person.
Yet that is the law we live by. It is the law these
babies died by.
We have made murder a “right,” and we are, every
single day, reaping the whirlwind that comes from that.
So, the question arises. If it’s only a matter of
timing, what’s so bad about Gosnell?
During her tenure in the Oklahoma Legislature, Rep. Hamilton has been an
advocate for human rights, believing that government must support and
defend the sanctity of all human lives, from conception to natural
death.
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