This seems like a good way to ease back into blogging after a long absence. Planned Parenthood of Delaware faces “allegations of unsafe and unsanitary conditions” as witnesses report a failure to wear gloves, use of unsterilized instruments, and unclean surfaces. This April 9 story ran on ABC’s local Action News program in Philadelphia. What you probably haven’t seen on your local news stations, however, are the stories of “Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure.” In her USA Today piece today entitled “We’ve forgotten what belongs on Page One,” Kirsten Powers explains that “Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page.”
If ungloved hands and unsterilized instruments count as news, then certainly so should these macabre accounts:
NBC-10 Philadelphia reported that, Stephen Massof, a former Gosnell worker, "described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body." One former worker, Adrienne Moton, testified that Gosnell taught her his "snipping" technique to use on infants born alive.
Massof, who, like other witnesses, has himself pleaded guilty to serious crimes, testified "It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place." Here is the headline the Associated Press put on a story about his testimony that he saw 100 babies born and then snipped: "Staffer describes chaos at PA abortion clinic."
"Chaos" isn’t really the story here. Butchering babies that were already born and were older than the state’s 24-week limit for abortions is the story. There is a reason the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called this procedure infanticide.
Planned Parenthood recently claimed that the possibility of infants surviving late-term abortions was "highly unusual." The Gosnell case suggests otherwise.
There’s much worse compiled at HotAir. And yet, Powers reports, “none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months.” Even during the original trial, The Washington Post did not publish original reporting, and The New York Times ran only one original story on the trial’s first day, says Powers. That story appeared on page A-17.
The reason for the silence seems obvious: it renders indefensible an issue that, for ideologues, must be defended. I ask only this: It is indefensible, isn’t it? “On this,” Charles Krauthammer said today,
“I would think there would be unanimity in the country, and the reason that there is resistance, against either outlawing or heavily regulating it is because the pro-choice people imagine that any regulation, at any level, at any kind, is the beginning of the end of abortion rights. I think there is room for a national consensus on this.”
Right?