One colleague viewed Gosnell’s alleged atrocities as a local crime story, though I can’t think of another mass murder, with hundreds of victims, that we ever saw that way. Another said it was just too lurid, though that didn’t keep us from covering Jeffrey Dahmer, or that aspiring cannibal at the NYPD.That would explain covering the cannibal cop. It happened in New York. As they say: Only in New York! But who cared about Milwaukee?
Yet another said it’s because the rest of the country doesn’t care about Philadelphia — that one was especially creative, I thought....
I say we didn’t write more because the only abortion story most outlets ever cover in the news pages is every single threat or perceived threat to abortion rights.Come on. Add the obvious: The media perceive the Gosnell story as a threat to abortion rights.
By the way, why are we calling what he did "abortion"? Just as a matter of clarity in the language. The grand jury report says that his method of ridding women of their unwanted late-term pregnancies was to induce labor and deliver the child. That's not abortion. That's childbirth. We're not even in the gray area where a strange term like "partial-birth abortion" could be used. It was complete birth, followed by murder. Why don't abortion rights proponents come down hard on that distinction? He wasn't an abortionist (in most of these instances), but an obstetrician-murderer. If abortion rights proponents don't want to talk about that, I'd like to hear exactly why they have a problem.
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«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 223 of 223rhhardin said...
'Personhood is determined by birth.
Everybody wants to pretend that there's some obscure line, viability, heartbeat, conception, or whatever, as if it's internal to the fetus."
Haha, truly stupid. So one second before birth, the not yet born baby is not human, not a person? One second later (after birth is completed) the baby is magically turned into a human? That is some ridiculous stuff (Althouse level, imo). You are saying that a baby one second before birth is not human and has no human rights?
Using your socially constructed personhood (wtf, personhood?!) logic, what limits the dividing line to birth? Why not make it within a day (or a week or whatever) of birth? Why not kill people who are no longer productive? Why not kill people whose politics are disagreeable to you?
@JL
The thing about that clump of cells is that it is going to eventually develop brain activity if left alone.
Just be clear where I stand: I don't think abortion is murder or homicide when the fetus is still just a clump of cells. (I fully respect the opinion of those that disagree, BTW.) I agree with St. Croix and others that brain activity should be used to define life. Aborting a fetus that has a nervous system, by suction or cutting or any method, is murder to me, even when it takes place in a nice sterile environment.
The problem with this is that, by the time the woman knows she's pregnant, the cells have all differentiated into the organs. The heart starts beating at about 15 days gestation, and they've measured brain waves at 39 days gestation.
This is what Tom Coburn said at the Sonia Sotomayer confirmation hearing. Bear in mind that Coburn is a medical doctor in addition to being a Senator.
"We now record fetal heartbeats at 14 days post-conception. We record fetal brainwaves at 39 days post-conception. And I don’t expect you to answer this, but I do expect you to pay attention to it as you contemplate these big issues. We have this schizophrenic rule of the law where we have defined death as the absence of those, but we refuse to define life as the presence of those."
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/2009/07/16/quotes-of-the-day/
And to be clear, white women who are repeat aborters are also STUPID, but they got preferential treatment upstairs.
Isn't that exactly what the founder of Planned Parenthood would've wanted?
On early measurable brain waves, see these two links, one contrary, and the other open-ended:
http://tigtogblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/fetal-brain-development-myths-and.html
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=76;t=000206;p=0
Limiting abortions to 8 weeks (or to those babies who do not yet have a heart beat or brain waves) would be a huge step forward from the current status.
I'm prolife from conception but could compromise on legality only in very early stages in order to save as many as possible....but I really don't believe there is any potentially enforceable way to create gestational term limits.
"Why don't abortion rights proponents come down hard on that distinction?"
I would think it's because that puts the focus on the baby, and abortion rights proponents get all their rhetorical mileage out of ignoring the baby/fetus/clump of cells and focusing entirely on the pregnant woman. (To be fair, the woman often disappears in pro-life rhetoric as well in favor of the unborn child.) Rhetorically speaking, this is giving pro-life proponents home field advantage, and I've rarely seen pro-choice people who ever argue without having home field advantage themselves.
Plus, it gets into slippery slope issues: if severing the spinal cord to kill is murder at time t, then why is it permissible at time t - 1 when the baby has moved about two feet in location? Is it murder if you slice the neck after you slice the umbilical cord but permissible if you do it before? Once you get people thinking about these questions, you can keep going backwards from there, so the strategy is to make sure people never think about these questions. Kind of despicable, really, but it's been fairly effective for the last forty years.
Just call it post-partum abortion and make it OK.
It is pretty clear why the pro-abortion movement within and without the press wants to avoid this case like the plague.
The only difference between a late term abortion (or arguably any abortion) and Gosnell's murders is the location of the victim before the abortionist kills her.
If abortion rights proponents don't want to talk about that, I'd like to hear exactly why they have a problem.
Because the clinic-bombers and doctor-killers cried "wolf" so much that when the real wolf came - with documentation and evidence - no one would believe it.
When people encounter evidence that contradicts their belief-system, they discount the evidence. This evidence is so wildly different from what the pro-choice community is used to seeing that it becomes invisible. That this evidence is so similar to what the protesters outside clinics wave, this evidence becomes doubly damned as agitprop.
As a country, we've become so insulated in our own little tribal communities that we don't talk with each other. We just bark past each other.
By the way, why are we calling what he did "abortion"?
For the same reason, I suppose, we talk about "reproductive health" and "contraception" when we mean "abortion."
What Gosnell should say is, "I'm an abortionist. I kill babies. It's my job!!! At least then he'd be an honest murderer.
"If abortion rights proponents don't want to talk about [Gosnell being an obstetrician-murderer], I'd like to hear exactly why they have a problem."
Because they suspect or know about 20 more abortionists as bad or worse than Gosnell, just from personal aquaintance.
Because in the secular arena, particularly on the left, ideology trumps everything, people, life, death, morality, ethics, everything. It's not far from feminists defending Bill Clinton the abuser and rapist, to pro-abortion "activists" pretending the obstetrican-murderer doesn't exist.
Jim, thanks for those links. That first link is kinda ridiculous.
Now, having done a fair amount of university biology, I knew that this fetal-brain claim was entirely bogus
Ah! She took a biology class in college. Awesome. I guess she knows more than the doctors who are publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine. For fuck's sake.
Dr. Goldenring's article is, IIRC, the one that convinced me.
Anyway, the argument has never relied on brain waves in the cerebral cortex. It's actually an argument that is based on law as much as medicine. Specifically, it's based on the laws that govern the practice of medicine in regard to the life-death question.
Our law defines when people die, and does so with crystal clarity. If you have any activity in the cerebral cortex or brain stem, you are alive.
The cerebral cortex is where we have thoughts, ideas, dreams, etc.
The brain stem is very, very basic, controlling body functions. Activity starts in the brain stem quite early, 6 weeks after conception, 8 weeks after LMP.
Under our law, if you have activity in your brain stem, you are alive, and it's a homicide to kill you. Thus activity in the brain stem is (under current definition of life/death in all 50 states) the relevant criteria.
States are free to change their rules, of course. But these doctors are completely right about the status of our laws now.
The doctors who say that brain activity starts at 6 weeks after conception (or 8 weeks after LMP) are not making this up. It's a well known biological fact. You can find it on any pregnancy website.
What makes Casey such a spectacularly stupid case is (among other things) this argument:
"No evolution of legal principle has left Roe’s doctrinal footings weaker than they were in 1973. No development of constitutional law since the case was decided has implicitly or explicitly left Roe behind as a mere survivor of obsolete constitutional thinking.”
And yet our law had undergone a radical change exactly during this time period. We have re-defined when human beings die!
Note too that this radical evolution in legal thinking was not done in regard to the abortion debate. It was done in regard to organ transplants. Are doctors killing their patients when they remove the heart out of a brain-dead patient? No, they are not.
So this change in our death statutes was not a political maneuver to overturn Roe v. Wade, designed by people who are hostile to abortion. No, our brain death rules were an organic change in the law, widely accepted by all our states, conservative or liberal. (See also what Pope John Paul II has to say on the subject).
The Supreme Court in Casey is apparently oblivious to all of this. They are unaware that there has been a fundamental change in our laws in regard to when people die. And the baby’s life or death is a critical issue in our abortion controversy, yes?
But the Supreme Court missed this important change in our law because the Court continues to define the baby as property, a partisan political position that has outraged millions of Americans, and more and more every day.
I have never tried it but I believe it: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. By the same token you can’t shame the MSM into giving Kermit Gosnell the same treatment as they gave, for example the Duke Lacrosse players. It’s simply not natural. Let’s face it; the MSM is philosophically and politically on the side of abortion and abortion doctors, just as they are philosophically and politically opposed to rich white kids and white males in general.
There’s no need to remind me that the kids of media heavyweights are mostly white and very rich, but we’re speaking of people they don’t know and who the MSM heavies consider the enemy.
So now we have a couple of MSM talking heads mentioning the Gosnell horror and pro-life advocats think they have won a victory. They haven’t. The essence of the treatment they gave the Treyvon Martin case, for example, was the 24/7 saturation coverage, the editorials it spawned, the Sunday news shows it dominated, the marches it fathered, the continuation of the blame game, even if they had to invent a new term – “white Hispanic” – to fit their paradigm. Gosnell, if the case gets anything at all, will get the one-time mention and then the MSM eyes will be averted once again. And if the pro-life side complains, they're going to be told that we covered it and now shut up about it.
They are not going to create a national story that examines the dark underbelly of the abortion industry because the people who determine what gets on the air and in print really don’t believe that what Gosnell did was mass murder, just sloppy medicine. They realize that it may reflect badly on abortion and as supporters they are not going to go to highlight its seamy side. Keep in mind that the NY Times still rules the MSM roost and it simply does not think that Gosnell and his charnel house is nearly as important as the sex of the membership of the Augusta Golf Club.
So what should people who are opposed to abortion do? They are already using the Internet to make themselves heard but it's far from enough. What’s the objective? To demonstrate to elected officials that they don’t have to be afraid of the pro-abortion groups? To have abortion clinics held to the same standards as other medical facilities? To reduce the number of abortions by having women think about what they're doing when they consider abortion? The Internet isn’t going to do that, and the MSM isn’t going to do it for them.
This is the perfect time for citizen action. Think in terms of street protests. Tea Party type rallies were hugely effective at getting attention of a reluctant and even antagonistic media. Gosnell has all of the elements that, once uncovered, can’t be waved away: butchering women, killing babies after birth, and the bête noir of all media evil: racism. Gosnell preyed mostly on poor black and immigrant women; he even has a segregated reception area for white women.
It’s rarely talked about but it’s a fact that most aborted babies are black. There is a silent holocaust going on that the mostly white upper class MSM masters don’t want to admit. Some may even consider it a "good thing."
The next meeting of any pro-life group should be in the street, right in front of the newspaper and TV offices with “No More Gosnell” as the battle cry. And if they accuse you of using dead babies as props, you just cry “Sandy Hook.”
Ann:
Cheers for breaking the silence on abortion. But let's not stop there. Let's talk about the tens of millions of poor dark women around the world who have been sterilized without their knowledge or consent--many with U.S. tax dollars and as a matter of deliberate policy.
Here are some useful quotes from standard embryology textbooks:
http://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/embryoquotes2.html
Of course it wasn't covered. Only a fool (or a good party Democrat)would deny that major Journalism's Paradigm is: "Abortion Today, Abortion Tomorrow, Abortion Forever. Second Amendment? Policy, subject to review by your betters."
Don't worry, Ann. This procedure is already blessed (oops, sorry, that implies some religious undertones) -- 'approved' by professional academic drones who are experts in ethics, so you don't have to.
It's called 'post-birth abortion', which sounds so much better than 'infanticide' (probably a term invented by some dead white guy).
http://plbirnamwood.blogspot.com/2012/03/oxford-ethicists-infanticide-is-only.html
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