One of the best responses to the Gosnell trial and its verdict of guilty today was penned by the Editors of the National Review.
Gosnell is Not an Aberration
Gosnell’s human abattoir is the logical endpoint of our morally fraudulent national approach to abortion, the proponents of which maintain that they wish the procedure to remain “safe, legal, and rare,” in Bill Clinton’s cynically triangulating formulation, while at the same time resisting any and all restrictions upon the procedure. Gosnell’s murders are not an aberrant abuse of the abortion license but an inevitable result of it.
Gosnell’s crimes produced stunning imagery: the severed spines, the severed limbs, a floundering baby struggling for life in a toilet. But Gosnell’s brutality was in fact not much different from what happens on any abortionist’s table.
That we recoil in horror from the images of Gosnell’s crimes is evidence that the casual practice of abortion, and all of the political rhetoric deployed on its behalf, have not yet entirely extinguished the moral sense of those who are confronted with these bloody scenes.
