Political Blasphemy

One of the most horrifying revelations of recent years came under the heading of legalized abortion. Today, the perpetrator of that series of atrocities stands trial for his deeds:

Today is the second day in the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the infamous Philadelphia abortionist charged with murdering seven newborn babies and one young woman in a botched abortion due to overdose of anesthesia. Gosnell killed the babies with scissors after they had been born – and he wasn’t the only one.

Infanticide remains murder and punishable as such. This chagrins the Left, which has made abortion -- on demand and at any stage of gestation -- its most hallowed of rituals, and the Democrat Party, which must have the votes of the pro-abortion crowd for any degree of electoral success. Still, the law is the law. But don't imagine for an instant that the defenders of "a woman's right to choose" will allow one of its folk heroes to be prosecuted strictly on the basis of the law:

Kermit Gosnell’s “house of horrors,” otherwise known as the Philadelphia Women's Medical Society, has been well documented, but Gosnell’s defense attorney, Jack McMahon, says that the prosecution is racially motivated.

"This is a targeted, elitist and racist prosecution of a doctor who's done nothing but give (back) to the poor and the people of West Philadelphia…It's a prosecutorial lynching of Dr. Kermit Gosnell."

That's right, sports fans: To defend this monster in human guise, the Left has played the race card yet again. In effect, the defense has claimed that all abortion clinics practice infanticide, and that Pennsylvania has chosen to prosecute Gosnell solely because of the color of his skin. Clearly, it would prefer not to defend the specifics of his "medical practice." How it would defend a white practitioner of infanticide must be left to our imaginations.

The Sixties' debates over whether to legalize abortion were uncommonly fierce. The Left's position was that the laws were unenforceable, and an abridgement of women's rights besides. The Right's position was that abortion is pre-natal murder, and that its legalization would lead to the murder of babies already born alive. Decide for yourself which side had the better stance.

Ironically, Associate Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade argued that legal restrictions on abortion were wrong and should be struck because they impeded the work of doctors. He barely touched on the right-to-life and right-to-bodily-autonomy arguments that had roiled the floor of Congress. He plainly wasn't as interested in them as their proponents.

Blackmun, appointed to the Court by President Richard Nixon under the misconception that he was a strict-constructionist conservative, remained forever uninterested in the carnage that flowed from his opinion. He died in 1999, staunch to the last in defense of his work. We can only wonder whether he's enjoying the afterlife.