"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
Otherwise, all this extremist talk about “choice” and “women’s rights” might lead to mass murder:
A massacre perpetrated by a deranged man is not about the deranged man; it’s about “rhetoric.” But a massacre perpetrated by an abortion provider whose violations against laws of the nation and of humanity were overlooked for years is “not about abortion.” It’s about criminal behavior, and that’s all.
More civility from Ace of Spades and Ed Driscoll.
Which is to say, its antithesis:
I think we’re all pretty well agreed that if the charges against Kermit Gosnell are true, then dude is a criminal and needs to go to jail. Killing a baby after it’s born and has taken breaths? Is not abortion. It should be, and is, a crime punishable by law. And Kermit Gosnell is being criminally prosecuted.
That’s Jill Filipovic at Feministing, whom last we encountered when she chose the occasion of Julian Assange’s arrest to lecture us about “no means no” and “stop means stop” but who, evidently, can’t get her mind around such a complex concept as “Thou shalt not kill.”
Fortunately, there is no need for me to refute Filipovic’s counterfactual insistence that the Gosnell case has nothing to do with the legality of abortion, because her late-term fisking has already been accomplished:
So, um… very glib, very semantic, but, even granting the Humpty Dumpty power to just say “these were not abortions” despite the fact that the women showed up for abortions at a place known for late-term illegal abortions and the doctor performed what he called an abortion, in fact 33 counts are about illegal abortions. The eight murder charges are just about the babies he decided it would be easier to deliver and kill. . . .
That’s Ace of Spades, Esq., and you should read the whole damned thing.
“I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies. You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.”
— Paul Z. Myers, University of Minnesota biology professor
UPDATE: Linked by Sister Toldjah — thanks! — and by Doug at Daley Gator, who sees “moral retardation” at work. Both relate this to the heinous case of Kermit Gosnell and, as further proof of his fanatical blindness, Professor Myers declared of the “house of horrors” in Philadelphia: “This is not about abortion.”
Ed Morrissey reports that Gosnell has been denied bail, and calls to our attention Michelle Malkin’s column explaining how the politics of “choice” made the Philadelphia horror possible:
[T]he grand jury itself pointed out that loosened oversight of abortion clinics enacted under pro-choice former GOP governor Tom Ridge enabled Gosnell’s criminal enterprise – and led to the heartless execution of hundreds of babies. Mass murder got a pass in the name of expanding “access” and appeasing abortion lobbyists. As the report made clear: “With the change of administration from [pro-life Democrat] Governor Casey to Governor Ridge,” government health officials “concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”
Read the rest of that. As for Professor Myers and other academic propagandists of the Culture of Death, I remind you of Abraham Lincoln’s remark that “the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” And godlessness has been the official philosophy of American schools for more than one generation.
UPDATE II: Vox Day:
This is the naked face of atheism, ladies and gentlemen. Look on it well and remember it, because it usually doesn’t dare to show its disgusting and anti-human nature so openly.
Maybe you want to read the extremely graphic Philadelphia grand jury report on Gosnell’s house of horrors. Or maybe it will suffice to see the jars of baby feet kept in the abortionist’s clinic.
Today is, after all, “Ask Them What They Mean by ‘Choice’ Day.” And there is a Memeorandum thread.
“Bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses were scattered throughout the building. . . . A row of jars containing severed feet lined a shelf. . . . Untrained, unsupervised workers injected dangerous drugs into women undergoing illegal late-term abortions.”
— Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams
Everybody blogged about this Wednesday, but I don’t think it should be a one-day story, a blip that pops up on the news and is then forgotten. However, some people evidently want us to forget it: Ken Shepherd notes that none of the three broadcast networks mentioned this atrocity on Thursday’s morning news programs.
“The left has made abortion the highest good that trumps every other concern, and the resulting real-world policies border on the surreal.”
— Shannon Love, Chicago Boyz
This morning I was checking the trackbacks and found Scared Monkeys saying, “Hair salons probably have greater oversight than abortion clinics. . . .Where is their outrage on this?” That post included this video with the district attorney’s press conference that you must watch:
Indeed: Where is the outrage? What Dr. Kermit Gosnell did in Philadelphia is, as the district attorney said, “barbaric.” However, it’s something that’s been happening every day in America — legally, protected by those “penumbras formed by emanations” discerned by the Supreme Court — for more than 30 years. It’s happening today, and will happen tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and it ought to make us sick with grief for the heartless cruelty it represents.
“As long as we’re discussing the conditions that lead to murderous behavior, let’s talk about million-dollar industries which profit from a process they won’t describe as death, with targets they refuse to identify as human beings. Freshly minted presidential candidate Herman Cain has been calling for the government to defund Planned Parenthood, which he regards as a holding a ‘racist agenda,’ since ‘75% of their clinics are located in black neighborhoods.’ Why should anyone be surprised that we get more of what we subsidize?”
— John Hayward, Human Events
Abortion is already subsidized with taxpayer dollars and we must prevent it from becoming even more subsidized under ObamaCare:
The No Tax-Payer Funding for Abortion Act, introduced Thursday as H.R. 3, aims to codify the Hyde Amendment, which has long barred federal funding for abortion and must currently be renewed every year. The legislation was introduced in tandem with the Protect Life Act, sponsored by Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee Chair Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.), that would specifically bar any federal funding for abortion under the health reform law.
“This common sense legislation reflects the will of the people and deserves the support of the House,” House Speaker John Boehner said at a Thursday morning press conference. “It’s one of highest legislative priorities and as such I’ve directed it receive the designation of H.R. 3.”
Pro-life leaders are urging citizens to contact Congress and make clear that that you support repeal of ObamaCare.
UPDATE: “Ask Them What They MEAN By ‘CHOICE‘ Blog Day.”
“The Leftist has no respect or concern with individual human life. It does not play a part in the sterile laboratories of their minds where they grow the fetid cultures that are their utopian ideas. . . . [I]deas are all that matter to the Enlightened Progressive. Every revolution has been based on this thinking and every revolution has brought about mass-murder at the hands of the revolution’s zealots in the name of the new ‘people’s’ state.”
— Bob Belevedere, “The Atrocity Exhibtion,” The Camp of the Saints
Even the Associated Press can’t ignore this story:
A doctor who provided abortions for minorities, immigrants and poor women in a “house of horrors” clinic has been charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive . . .
(Via Memeorandum.)
UPDATE: John Hayward at Human Events on Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s ghastly practice:
He’s been doing it for thirty years, and raked in millions of dollars. . . .
Since our media is obsessed with “climates” and “dangerous language” these days, maybe it’s time to review the antiseptic language that helped Gosnell carry on his grim trade for decades, while his heinous deeds were described as simple outpatient surgery to remove “unviable tissue masses.” . . .
UPDATE II: Lisa Graas reminds us that Dr. Gosnell is not a random point off on the edge of the scatter-chart. Planned Parenthood is also apparently willing to cross the line between “choice” and infanticide:
“The news coming out of Philadelphia is disgusting. Infanticide continues to happen in America and only certain cases are coming to light. SFLA has been on top of this since 2008 when we released an undercover video of a Planned Parenthood worker, at a federally funded Planned Parenthood facility, openly admitting to practicing infanticide as a form of an abortion procedure. These are newborn babies who are being left to die or are being killed because they are supposedly ‘unwanted.’ America needs to put a stop to this barbaric and inhumane practice and Congress must defund Planned Parenthood immediately.”
— Kristan Hawkins, Students for Life of America
UPDATE III: “How does a man murder an innocent child in cold blood and then go about his business?”
UPDATE IV: Guess who said this?
“People who know the history of Margaret Sanger, who started Planned Parenthood, they know that the intention was not to help young women who get pregnant to plan their parenthood. No — it was a sham to be able to kill black babies . . . 75 percent of all Planned Parenthood facilities are located in black neighborhoods. . . . I believe that life begins at conception, period.”
UPDATE V: Ed Morrissey:
My guess is that few people will rush to defend Gosnell’s alleged actions, apart from the fringe like Peter Singer who argue that parents should have the option of terminating an infant’s life past a live birth. But this revelation will certainly linger in the minds of everyone else, and have people asking how many more Gosnells may be making their own fortunes through similar means.
Ericka Andersen on Twitter: “Abortion is abortion is abortion. This guy just made it obvious. Wake up people. Early term, late term. Its all murder.”
UPDATE VII: News video via Anglican Samizdat:
“I find it far-fetched that women are having abortions because no one is willing to help them give the baby up for adoption — there are lots of people and agencies that will not only help them, but pay a substantial portion of their expenses until they deliver. They’re having abortions because pregnancy is physically uncomfortable, and there’s still a social stigma on women who carry a baby to term in order to give it away. . . .
“The means to (almost always when used correctly) prevent pregnancy is quite widely distributed through our nation’s drugstores, and adoptions are quite well facilitated through the current network of adoption agencies. Yet nonetheless, one in five pregnancies ends in an abortion.”
— Megan McArdle, “Abortion, Adoption, Supply and Demand,” The Atlantic Monthly
And 40% of babies carried to term are born to unmarried women. What does this reveal? I think it reveals less about women’s preferences than men’s. Aren’t the prevalence of abortion, the popularity of contraception and the pandemic of unwed motherhood all largely the result of men’s declining interest in fatherhood?
Men are nowadays increasingly eager to avoid commitment to wives and children, to keep their options open, to evade responsibility for the welfare of others, to live only for themselves, their own pleasure, their own advantage. The word “duty” no longer has any positive meaning in a culture of selfish entitlement, a society devoted to abject and unapologetic hedonism.
The guy who pays his own bills, raises his own children and sleeps with his own wife is scorned as a chump, presumably too stupid to figure out a way to escape such an unglamorous life. As a society, we have de-stigmatized bastardy and thereby let the “baby daddies” off the hook, shifting their obligations to taxpayers — except where we can create work for lawyers who’ll sue the unwilling dads into permanent poverty to subsidize the single motherhood of their ex-girlfriends.
Where no stigma is attached, nor any punishment due, to those who do the wrong thing (for that would be judgmental, after all) neither can anyone expect praise or reward for doing the right thing. We should not be surprised, then, that people act as if they are at best agnostic toward — if not contemptuous of — old-fashioned virtue.
If men can scarcely be compelled to support their own flesh and blood, why should we expect them to volunteer to support other people’s offspring through adoption? This is just another symptom of a widespread disease, the spiritual decay of a demoralized nation.
“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion— to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.”
—Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (1979)
As Ed Driscoll says, “Oswald Spengler, please call your office.”
Just pointing that out for the benefit of Andrew Sullivan who claims to be Catholic — e.g., his post about Epiphany — and seizes upon Ross Douthat’s pro-life column today to make a plea for “expanding adoption opportunities.”
Nudge. Nudge. While it’s tragic, I suppose, that Sully isn’t a zillionaire rock star who can afford a rent-a-womb boutique baby, is there any Catholic conservative pro-lifer who takes Sully seriously as either Catholic, or conservative, or pro-life?
Of course, I’m a Protestant and have no stake in defending Catholicism against Andrew Sullivan’s efforts to discredit that faith, but couldn’t some influential Catholic say a word to the Pope and get Sully officially ex-communicated?
Being pro-life is different than merely saying you’re pro-life. Pundette has an excellent post pointing out the Baby Boom generation’s failure to reproduce. The embrace of the Contraceptive Culture is more seriously implicated in that failure — a sinful disobedience to the commandment, “Be fruitful and multiply” — than such alternative lifestyles as practiced by Sully. Neverthless, pills and condoms sometimes fail to prevent conception, resulting in “happy accidents,” whereas no child has ever been conceived by sodomy.
Breeding: It’s a Beautiful Thing!
UPDATE: The Anchoress on the illogic that leads young women to prefer abortion over adoption:
The “I can’t carry to term then allow someone else to raise the baby” notion is a fundamentally flawed bit of moral reasoning–one that flourishes because, in this age of moral relativism we are discouraged from teaching sound moral reasoning. The dictatorship of relativism must be defeated.
It is not merely relativism, but also narcissism that’s involved: What young woman wants to get fat, sustain stretch-marks, possibly a C-section scar, etc., and then not have something to show for all that damage to her physique?
Possibly related: The Department of Health and Human Services has an online calculator to help single mothers determine whether they’ll lose welfare benefits by marrying their baby-daddy.
Because that’s what life is really all about: Maximizing your benefits.
UPDATE II: Maura Butler at Life News shares a reader’s e-mail:
I was 14 years old when I conceived my son. I was in a relationship with a 16 year old guy who had already had one son who he didn’t see much. I figured since he already had a child, he was mature.
(Hello? 16-year-old baby daddies are presumed “mature”?)
It turned out he was very controlling and abusive, so I decided to leave him. Two days after my 15th birthday, I found out I was pregnant. I was so scared and confused but he said he’d be there and take care of everything.
Just three weeks later, he told me he wanted nothing to do with me and I haven’t seen him since. . . .
(How do boys like this expect to get away with such behavior? Why isn’t this boy locked up in juvenile hall? Never mind: The girl’s sister drove her to the abortion clinic, but the girl decided against it.)
On November 3rd, I had my beautiful baby boy via c-section and am living with my dad with his support, and returning to school next year. I am so in love with my baby. I cry at the thought of ever even thinking about ending his life. I thank God everyday for helping me see the light through the darkness.
Well, OK. That’s good. But don’t we see in this story how disastrously far astray our culture has gone? Here’s a boy, 16 years old, having already fathered and abandoned one child, now getting a 14-year-old girl pregnant — and he’s not behind bars? He’s “abusive,” and yet seemingly has no fear that the girl’s male relatives will seek to avenge her?
Just as being pro-life is more than being anti-abortion, traditional values is more than being anti-fornication. Here is an excellent example of a traditional values response when somebody is “abusive” to your sister: