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Part Three: The Gosnell Murder Convictions, the Day After

May 14, 2013

By Dave Andrusko

Kermit Gosnell gets escorted to a van leaving the Criminal Justice Center after being convicted.

Kermit Gosnell gets escorted to a van leaving the Criminal Justice Center after being convicted.

In Part Two, we talked about how the Gosnell murder convictions will be interpreted for the wider public which, unlike the readers of NRL News Today, will not have the wealth of background information to understand what really took place in Kermit Gosnell’s “House of Horrors.”

We largely talked about how pro-abortionists are historical revisionists and how they will always come to the same conclusion—absolutely no regulation of abortion clinics is needed–no matter WHAT has taken place in Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society or any place else. In Part Three we look at one pro-life response.

Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer who writes a column for the Philadelphia Daily News. Her mind is as keen as the words that flow from her word processor are sharp. The title of her piece is “Gosnell jury saw the truth.”

I could end right there. The long and the short of it is the jury (self-described as including nine “pro-choicers”) would not be derailed. They heard what they heard, from medical authorities, investigators, and former Gosnell employees, and came to the conclusion that Gosnell was guilty of three counts of first-degree murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter. All the blue smoke and mirror Jack McMahon (Gosnell’s attorney) stirred up could not change what had happened.

Flowers adds a number of terribly important considerations, starting with her first three sentences:

“AND SO, what Jack McMahon audaciously called a racist prosecution, wherein a black man was being called to account for ending the lives of countless nameless black babies, has ended in a righteous verdict: guilty, guilty, and again, guilty. Three lives vindicated with three words, uttered after months of testimony and evidence that makes you want to turn your face away. But we looked, and we understood that here was madness and evil, not racism.”

McMahon had only two cards to play, and he played them both from the bottom of the deck. First, try to turn the trial into a racist conspiracy. Never mind that the District Attorney is an African-American or that almost all the women Gosnell aborted were women of color. That the jury did not buy into this disgusting tactic is refreshing.

Second, insist that all the babies whose spinal cords Gosnell severed were already dead. We’ve talked about this on many occasions, but it was absurd on its face. (See, for example, http://nrlc.cc/10Fx3Y7 and http://nrlc.cc/10FxilT.)

Flowers eloquently reaffirms what the Abortion Establishment is desperate to deny.

“The moment we start talking about how abortion needs to remain safe and legal and that Gosnell is not the face of the movement, we allow ourselves to fall back into that comfort zone of denial. …

“Gosnell is just the natural evolution of what started in 1973.”

Which is, of course, why Gosnell is the Abortion Industry’s worst nightmare. He may be unique—is anyone else deliberating delivering aborted babies alive only to kill them by severing their spinal cord?—because “unique” means one of a kind. But as we and others have written about for decades, the kind of gross indifference to women and the grotesque violence inflicted on helpless unborn babies is not confined to West Philadelphia.

Flowers is more pessimistic than I am about might—not will, but might—happen in the aftermath. She writes.

“While I have no illusion that what this jury has done will stop the moral devolution, I am glad that at least we are taking a long look at where we are headed. If the message conveyed by this jury does anything, it holds a mirror up to a society that, for so long, has closed its eyes.”

What follows comes to you second hand, so I won’t say who this prominent commentator is. But her comment was that she was amazed how little her pro-choice friends knew about abortion.

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And this is so true, so painfully true. Overwhelmingly, Americans haven’t the first idea that tens of thousands of pain-capable unborn babies are aborted each and every year. To pro-abortionists, this is little more than a rounding error. Why get all in a huff over 15,000 or 20,000—or more—babies whose lives are taken when they have reached the point when they will experience pain no words could possibly describe?

And, of course, this is the primary reason the Gosnell murder trial received so little attention. The dominant media narrative is that most abortions are performed in the first trimester (true); that most abortion clinics are peopled by Marcus Welby, MD-types (most assuredly not true); and (implicitly) if a “tiny proportion” are killed who would experience pain imaginable only in Dante’s Inferno, it’s a small price to pay to ensure that “access” to abortion is absolutely unfettered.

Gosnell’s rat-trap of an abortion clinic, where (according to NBC 10) former Gosnell employee “Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.’ He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, ‘it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place’”—well, that just doesn’t promote the abortion brand, a task so many media representatives feel honor-bound (so to speak) to advance.

In Part Four, we will talk about what went on in the courtroom just prior to and just after the verdicts were delivered. It says a lot about Kermit Gosnell

Categories: Gosnell