Matthew Franck, writing at The Public Discourse:
Gosnell, whose clinic was shut down by the Philadelphia authorities who charged him with murder, is the ne plus ultra of the abortion trade. Not because of the filth, the squalor, the jars of amputated keepsake baby feet, the employment of unlicensed incompetents, the promiscuous use of narcotics on unwitting patients, or the poisonous racism of a physician who preyed upon women and babies of his own race—although all of these are no surprise at all in America’s most unregulated branch of medicine.
No, Gosnell is the “slave-dealer” par excellence because, even if he had run the cleanest, brightest, most professional clinic in the country, he was simply following out the remorseless logic of the abortion regime installed forty years ago by the Supreme Court.
Women came to him for the very latest of late-term abortions, and he made sure their children were dead. Whether he accomplished their deaths in utero or ex utero—before or after their births—didn’t really matter to Gosnell. And, as we have heard from Planned Parenthood officials, from then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama, and from “pro-choice” politicians like Senator Barbara Boxer, it doesn’t matter to them, either.
Their insouciance about infanticide, moreover, is given intellectual respectability when a leading academic publication like the Journal of Medical Ethics publishes a symposium on infanticide in which the majority of the contributing scholars cannot bring themselves to condemn it.
