Abortion is not to be spoken of, only done.
By
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, Yeats’s
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 you’ve ever watched a hit man testify, you’ve
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. That’s 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 legislature’s 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 Gosnell’s fellow
butchers, as he described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the
“Women’s 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 Court’s
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 “Women’s Medical Society” was perfectly
legal.
The
euphemistic “snip” calls to mind the Supreme Court’s 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 “physician’s” 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 wouldn’t want to say it — that, in a
nation that has absorbed this generation’s 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 child’s 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 doesn’t 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 baby’s 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 baby’s 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 baby’s 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.
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