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?

Use this link to read more from Ms. Hamilton 

 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.