NRL News
202.626.8824
dadandrusk@aol.com

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, Kermit Gosnell, and the day of reckoning

May 18, 2015

 

Editor’s note. This story appears on page two of the May online edition of National Right to Life News. This story, and all the stories in the 39-page edition, can be found at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsMay2015.pdf. Please be sure to forward stories from this excellent issue of the “pro-life newspaper of record.” H.R. 36, referenced in the first paragraph, subsequently passed the House on a vote of 242-184.

Editpage2There are multiple reasons the story about H.R. 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, is on page one. Here are just a few of the most important.

When later this week the House of Representatives takes up the bill, not only will the fundamental difference in values and worldviews between pro-life and pro-abortionists be thrown into stark relief, the public will also be reminded that the anti-life forces have never encountered an abortion they find unacceptable. It is not in them.

Every “concession” is (to them) not merely a tiny step down a slippery slope which eventually ends in ruin. It’s more like a game of Jenga. Only in this case if any block is moved, the entire tower collapses.

You can understand their nervousness. The case for death is so inherently repulsive–and therefore fragile– they know they must be constantly on the alert to keep the slaughter “private.”

All this will take place while the specter of abortionist Kermit Gosnell hovers in the background. On May 13 it will be two years since he was convicted and sentenced to serve three life sentences at Huntingdon State Correctional Institution for atrocities that boggle the mind. More about the proprietor of the “House of Horrors” momentarily.

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act has already been passed in eleven states and introduced in two more. Why is this particular law so potentially historic and such a threat to the Abortion Establishment?

Consider: there is a considerable body of medical evidence and congressional findings that by 20 weeks fetal age (and even earlier) the unborn child has the capacity to experience great pain during an abortion. If this truth works into the public conversation, the damage of the abortion industry could be incalculable.

And not just because all that resonates with an intuition–of course by this state of development, the baby can feel pain–but also because it reminds people that abortion is essentially legal on demand throughout pregnancy. A large segment of the public is under the vague impression that abortion is legal only ‘early’ in pregnancy, perhaps through the first trimester. To be shown otherwise can change someone’s mind in a heartbeat.

While I won’t belabor a fact of life we have discussed countless times, it is crucial to remember that the public strongly supports a law like the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. In a nationwide poll of 1,623 registered voters in November 2014, The Quinnipiac University Poll found that 60% would support a law such as the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act prohibiting abortion after 20 weeks, while only 33% opposed such legislation.

Every demographic supported the law, including younger people. Even Democrats opposed it by only a single point: 47% against to 46% for.

Just a few words about Gosnell. This was a man prosecutors said he would make $10,000-$15,000 a night performing late, late abortions on (almost entirely) women of color.

Gosnell performed abortions so late in pregnancy– “the really big ones”– that “even he was afraid to perform in front of others. These abortions were scheduled for Sundays, a day when the clinic was closed and none of the regular employees were present,” the Philadelphia Grand Jury concluded.

No doubt he made even more money for performing those abortions. (And that doesn’t even address the gobs of money he made writing illegal drug prescriptions, a charge he pled guilty to after his first trial.)

The Grand Jury believed there were hundreds of late abortions in which the child was aborted/delivered alive and then murdered when he slit spinal cords. But the one thing Gosnell was fastidious about was making sure there were no records, or that they were destroyed.

Finally, there is symbolism a plenty in the case of man who to this day thinks of himself as “innocent.” What does it say that although he routinely earned between $1 million and $1.8 million a year and owned multiple properties, Gosnell chose to live in utter squalor, reminiscent of the disgusting pit known as his Women’s Medical Society?

The NARALs and the Planned Parenthoods adamantly insisted Gosnell was an “outlier,” a “renegade.” In truth, in many ways, Gosnell is the genuine face of an industry that traffics in the blood of unborn children and their misery of their mothers.

“There are Kermit Gosnells all over America, inflicting not only violence, cruelty and death on very young children, but excruciating pain as well,” Rep. Chris Smith said last Friday. “Some abortionists may have cleaner sheets than Gosnell did and better sterilized equipment and better trained accomplices, but what they do and what Gosnell did for four decades–kill babies and hurt women–is the same.”

Amen.

Categories: Abortion