Posted on 04/13/2013 9:59:40 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In Philadelphia, at a human abattoir on Lancaster Avenue, is where it ends, not where it starts. It starts with the perversion of language. It starts when the icons of a dissipated culture reduce a baby to a fetus. From there, Yeatss blood-dimmed tide rolls rapidly in. Before long, a baby is not a person but a punishment, as President Barack Obama framed the matter in his familiar off-the-cuff iciness.
Of course, to describe newborn children in their boundless possibilities and wonder would be to acknowledge, foremost, their humanity. That is why, instead, abortion enthusiasts must grope for words when circumstances force them to speak publicly about their gruesome business.
That fetus, or child however way you want to describe it, Mr. Obama once stammered. This was back when, as a state senator, he was unnerved by the natural resistance of babies to the unnatural insistence of their mothers of the culture that they just disappear. If youve ever watched a hit man testify, youve heard the same stammer: the faint glimmer of a long-forgotten but stubbornly indelible line between right and wrong.
It is the line that makes killing much easier to do than to talk about. It is the line that now impels a self-imposed media embargo against news about the shocking trial of Kermit Gosnell.
Gosnell is a 72-year-old abortionist. The formal charges against him the murders of a woman and seven babies are but drops in a sea of carnage. Mounting evidence reveals him to be a mass murderer of epic scale and Mengele methods. It also spotlights the evil the apparently unspeakable evil of legalized abortion in all its coarsening gore. Plainly, the vaunted journalists of our debased mainstream have determined that there must be no meaningful coverage. No time in the 24/7 cycle to notice the inexorable path from dehumanizing the vulnerable through word games to mass-murdering them with casual sadism.
Better to shove the evidence into a dark closet. Thats what they did in Chicago. There, despite the best efforts of physicians (they of the do no harm oath), many however way you want to describe its were not just coming out limp and dead, as Obama haltingly put it. The abortionists answer was to stick the helpless survivors in a utility closet where they could die, out of sight and out of mind. Obama, in the pitiless logic of legalized abortion, labored to preserve this oft-practiced but never discussed form of infanticide against the Illinois legislatures proposed Born Alive ban. (See senate transcript, April 4, 2002, beginning at page 29.)
A decade later in Philadelphia, it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place. So said Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnells fellow butchers, as he described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the Womens Medical Society on Lancaster Avenue. There, scores of babies perhaps hundreds of them were willfully mutilated after being born alive.
Standard fare was the snip.
Snip is a terse, antiseptic word. Like choice, it is tailored to those rare, discomfiting occasions when the intentional killing of a however way you want to describe it must be spoken of rather than silently done. It is an effort, as much mentally as verbally, to evade the monstrousness we abide in the United States, where nearly 60 million children a population roughly equal to that of France or the United Kingdom have been aborted since the Supreme Courts 1973 fatwa in Roe v. Wade.
In a snip, the abortionist, sharp scissors in hand, grasps the squirming and sometimes squealing baby he has just delivered. He stabs the child in the back and then, snapping the blades, severs the spinal cord from the brain. Massof described the snip as literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.
He was testifying in exchange for a plea bargain that discounts his participation in numerous such procedures to a mere two instances of third-degree murder. After all, most of what he did at the Womens Medical Society was perfectly legal.
The euphemistic snip calls to mind the Supreme Courts opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, another case about choice. Like Gosnell, LeRoy Carhart was an abortion physician. In the high court, he joined his progressive friends at Planned Parenthood and the City of San Francisco to defend the choice known as partial birth abortion a name soothingly rebranded to late term abortion once it became clear that partial birth conveyed too much information.
In an uncharacteristically de trop outburst, the five justices in the narrow Carhart majority described varying abortion procedures with startling clinical precision. Most common is the first-trimester suction curettage, in which the physician vacuums the unwanted embryonic tissue from the womb. By the time the second trimester is reached, this tissue has matured into the unmistakable shape of a child. Thus the dilation and evacuation procedure is often called for.
Employed millions of times in this most civilized country over the last half century, D&E, the court explained, involves the physicians use of forceps to tear apart the fetus by ripping it from the cervix and then evacuating the fetus piece by piece . . . until it has been completely removed from the mother. Often, the justices observed, the D&E physician finds it more congenial to kill the fetus a day or two before performing the surgical evacuation, since medical experience has shown that, once dead . . . the fetus body will soften, becoming easier to dice and remove. Oh, another helpful tip: Rotating the fetus as it is being pulled decreases the odds of dismemberment.
By the time Carhart was decided, Roe v. Wade had been on the books for over a generation the generation, to be more specific, that is now ruling the roost. It goes without saying for we wouldnt want to say it that, in a nation that has absorbed this generations preening values, D&E already enjoyed the stamp of judicial approval. The only question before the Carhart Court was whether partial birth abortion intact D&E was beyond the pale.
This medical procedure is triggered by an advanced stage of maturation, in which the childs well-developed head tends to lodge in the cervix. Relying on the instruction of Martin Haskell, another experienced abortionist, the justices related:
The right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left [hand] along the back of the fetus and hooks the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down). While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.
The surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull. . . . He spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening. . . . The surgeon [then] removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.
Evacuates the skull contents may be more bracing than snip, but it doesnt quite do justice to the process and the frightful insouciance behind it. That was left to a nurse who had watched Haskell perform the procedure on a six-month-old however way you want to describe it. She recalled that, once all but the head had been delivered,
the babys little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the babys arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.
The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the babys brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. . . . He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.
Four justices of the United States Supreme Court would have upheld this barbarism. They would not have described it. It is not to be spoken of, only done. After all, to speak of it would infringe upon choice.
Speaking of choice, if President Obama has the opportunity to choose one more Supreme Court justice over the next four years, the Carhart dissenters will be the majority. Welcome to Philadelphia.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.
Impossible to read the entire thing. I mean, it needs to be said, but impossible to comprehend.
...step by step....one compromise at a time.
Barrack Obama who never fails to opine on every other thing going on seems to have turned into a cricket on this one.
I’ve been pondering when our nation became Orwellian. I think the ball got rolling with Roe/Wade, defining the unborn baby as just tissue.
That’s because he voted against BAIPA several times while in the Illinois House. Boy, do I wish THAT would be front and center in this story!
Obama is just the beginning. It will get much worse. Civil war? Nuclear war? Economic collapse? Concentration camps on American soil for those who refuse to embrace the New Order? It's coming.
The price of Roe v. Wade will be a high one. It will "terminate" freedom in America, and probably terminate American nationhood.
Such a terrible thing routinely happens in this country yet we have the gall to go around the world lecturing to others about human rights. A country that permits such a thing is with a moral compass and will allow anything.
I know what you mean.
I can only get through about a third of any Gosnell article. The horror and revulsion is too great.
Jesus Christ. Divine Mercy, save us from the fire of hell.
I managed to get through it, but not without weeping aloud. Forgive us, Lord, for standing by while this was going on.
It has definitely been down hill from there.
Makes my physically ill to even think about. Sad, depressed, and ill...and the only glimmer is that perhaps this will finally wake some folks up.
Slippery Slope. You “kill God” as Nietzsche stated. and there is no “Good and Evil”-—everything becomes ‘relative” and arbitrary. “Might makes Right”. There is no possibility of “Rule of Law” (higher law than man-made-up laws).
Dostoevsky stated that “without God, everything is permissible”. And that is true-—if there is no God-—we are nothing but animals and we will be treated as such and act like animals.
God gives human beings “hope” and “dignity and worth” because of being made in his “image” (who is Truth, Justice, Love, etc) and without God-—we are nothing and meaningless “useless idiots”.
I could explain exactly “how America got this way”, but I don’t think there are many who will receive it.
Our country has an original sin. All that’s happening today was bound to happen because we never renounced that sin. Rev. Wright is a nasty messenger, but it wouldn’t be the first time the Lord used one such to chastise a sinful people. I fear God really will damn America, because America has freely chosen damnation.
As my 29 year old daughter says - “we need to be smited”.
Powerful article.
If you're referring to slavery, it was renounced 150 years ago.
Slavery was only a little piece of it.
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