Just over two years ago, a doctor in Philadelphia was arrested on eight counts of murder: one for a woman who died under his care and seven for newborns whose spinal cords he allegedly severed with a pair of scissors.
Abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell’s trial for these murders started last month, and the details of the trial have been harrowing. Testimonies from former employees claim that over the thirty years Gosnell’s clinic was in operation, the scissor procedure had been used on more than 100 newborns.
Gosnell also specifically targeted poor and minority women for his abortions, and made millions of dollars doing it.
Health inspectors largely looked the other way when walking past the blood-stained walls and numerous dismembered fetal body parts preserved in jars.
There have already been countless stories and opinions written about the lack of outrage in the media about this story, and as appalling as that is, the more interesting aspect of this story is the justification and desensitization that the employees and nurses in the Gosnell clinic had to go through to rationalize the murders being committed.
Workers called the fetal corpses “specimens,” and described the neck snipping as necessary to ensure “fetal demise.” The aborted babies were dehumanized; one worker described the cries of one child as “alien.”
To try to paint the entire pro-abortion rights movement with the brush of one clearly sick and homicidal individual would be irresponsible, but the moral contortion necessary to justify Gosnell’s horrific acts is the same moral contortion necessary to justify the pro-abortion rights position generally. The penchant for Orwellian euphemisms to describe the often horrific process of abortion is a common thread throughout the movement.
Whether it’s “specimens” or “products of conception,” whether it’s “fetal demise” or “termination of the pregnancy,” the use of sunny language to cast shadows over the dark details of abortion is widespread.
I’ve touched before on the illiberal nature of the “pro-choice” position, how viewing the unborn as somehow not human or less than human is a necessary moral assumption to make in deciding that the mother has the right to terminate her child’s life under any kind of circumstance.
The idea that some humans are less deserving of basic human rights than others has lead to some of the largest atrocities in human history. The good news is that those ideas never win out in the long run; as societies becomes more enlightened they tend to realize the immoral nature of treating some as less than others.
Sooner or later people will wake up and realize that without a strong protection of the right to life, protections for all other rights are rendered meaningless. And once this becomes widely known, once people recognize how the central liberal tenet of “all men are created equal” doesn’t mesh well with the right to abortion, the tide will turn.
Keene is a junior majoring in political science, economics and public policy.
