Gosnell Guilty: A Triumph over Evil in the Year of Faith

More disturbing than the accounts of the house of the human carnage that was Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s “Women’s Clinic” in Philadelphia was the fact that Gosnell and his attorney seemed shocked that a jury viewing the evidence of abortion there, found him guilty on three counts of first degree murder and one of manslaughter. To reach those verdicts, the jury had to find “beyond a reasonable doubt,” that those little ones were still alive when the doctor and/or clinic workers used surgical scissors to sever each of their spines. A Philadelphia grand jury had handed down a 300 count indictment against the proprietor of this business involving such brazen butchery of the vulnerable. Oh the mental and verbal gymnastics to which one must go to defend the indefensible.

Pennsylvania’s “moderate” (which to progressives means favorable towards the option of abortion) Governor Tom Ridge refused to even order a safety examination of this house of horrors seventeen years ago. No one has followed up since. How could such disregard for the value of human beings be so cavalierly shunted aside. Ridge’s dereliction of duty provides us with a cautionary tale about the principle that a law means nothing if it is not enforced.

Years before this Dr. Kenneth Edelin (1976) was tried, in Massachusetts for manslaughter after he resorted to other means to abort a little one when he realized he had not succeeded using chemical means since the baby was still alive in utero. To finish the job, while the baby (fetus in the bio-legal terminology of Roe v. Wade ) was still inside the mother, he pinched the baby’s nose to shut off the air and clamped his hand over the mouth until the little one stopped kicking. Then he removed the lifeless baby and sniped the chord. This was the reality of legal abortion. President Obama while he was a state senator opposed the Illinois “Born Alive Infants” act which forbid doctors from “finishing the job” and leaving the little one a ward of the state. Edelin was acquitted because he had used “standard medical procedures” in performing a legal abortion. It should be no surprise that so few doctors in the US want to be involved in such grisly business these days.

How Orwellian we are to say that if the fetus is “wanted” it is a baby and every effort should be made to save it with advanced neo-natal care; but if it is “unwanted” it should be killed. In many hospitals across the nation this lunacy is being played out on different wings of the same hospital.

Thank God a jury had the courage to stand for reason, science and life. All of this abortion carnage brings to mind a poem by Alexander Pope on the Human response to evil.

Evil is a monster of such hideous mien

That to be hated needs but to be seen

     But seen too often

Familiar with her face

First we pity

Then endure

And finally embrace.

In our 21st century land of “Alice in Wonderland” morality, evil has become a “sacred” legal right. Everything is upside down. Even the science of fetology must be sacrificed at the altar of of personal self-fulfillment and freedom. No one dare tell the devotees of Planned Parenthood, including President Obama, that “the emperor has no clothes.”

My prayer is that this jury’s principled verdict is one of the many fruits of the Year of Faith and proof of the power of intercession to the Blessed Mother of the infant Jesus on behalf of the unborn and their mothers and fathers.