Gosnell’s clinic existed to perform the perfectly lawful
service of killing human babies inside their mothers’ wombs. While that act will always be horrific in the
minds of some, to many others it is--though perhaps sad and unfortunate--a
necessary reality in a world of “reproductive rights.”
If we are honest about it, we must admit that the lawful acts
we knew Gosnell to be doing and passively accepted (the same acts that will end
the lives of over 3,000 babies in the U.S. today) are only marginally distinct
from the unlawful acts that have forever branded Gosnell so deviant as to be
practically sub-human.
How arbitrary we are, as a society, in our moral
judgments! One physician performs an
intentional act that ends the life of a tiny human being, and an army of elite,
educated, activists will dedicate their lives to applauding and defending his
ability to legally do so. Another
physician performs the same act on a tiny human being who has emerged from the
woman’s womb, and he is roundly deplored as the brutal criminal of the
year.
How is it that a matter of spatial inches or relative
anatomical positioning could ever be the dividing line between an act that is celebrated
as the facilitation of civil rights--the empowerment of women--and an act that
is condemned as heinous murder? How is
it that if an angry boyfriend kills an unborn child he can be prosecuted for
homicide, but if the mother kills the same child, it is a private, protected “choice”?
This is the absurdity of legalized abortion. Where do we go from here?
As a modest starting point, we might seek means of
investigating claims that Gosnell’s practices were an aberration from the
allegedly clean, safe, and dignified business of abortion. Under present circumstances, it is difficult
to do so systematically.
In a recent article that appeared in the Washington Post, reporters cited
statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to
demonstrate the alleged safety of abortion.
According to CDC numbers, 10 women died from abortions in 2010, compared
with 793 deaths from bicycle accidents.
The comparison is misleading and irresponsible because, in
the case of CDC abortion statistics, the numbers that tell the real story are
the numbers that aren’t there. Even
states that require abortion reporting do not require reporting to the
CDC. The Alan Guttmacher Institute has
estimated that the voluntarily reported information excludes data on as many as
45-50% of annual abortions.
Awareness of this “missing data” problem seems to be
growing. For instance, a 2011 Chicago Tribune story by Megan Twohey
flagged the disparity between the number of Illinois abortion providers that
reported required data to state officials (26) and the number of providers
actually in business (37). The article also suggested that the state’s data
failed to account for as many as 17,000 abortions annually.
Rather than burying deadly realities in spurious statistics,
let’s have the intellectual honesty to admit that abortion politics have paved
the way for a new kind of “back alley.”
Let’s take what we have learned from the Gosnell tragedy and insist, at
the very least, upon meaningful oversight of businesses built upon human
demolition.
But let’s not stop there.
Let’s be “enlightened” enough to admit that we are hypocrites when we
accept legalized abortion as a paragon of civil rights but we cringe in horror
at the mention of snipped baby spinal cords.
We have strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel.
Yes, our judiciary has hijacked our ability to maintain
morally consistent, life-honoring laws.
But we, the people, must never rest in our efforts to reassert our
authority and restore our collective integrity.
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