The case for regime change on abortion.
By
James Taranto
Here
is incontrovertible proof that Kirsten Powers and Conor Friedersdorf are correct in
arguing that the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell has
received insufficient media coverage: On Friday, Snopes.com
was compelled to publish a page confirming that the story is real, not
merely an urban legend.
Gosnell,
as we noted
in January 2011, is charged with eight counts of murder. One
of his alleged victims, Karnamaya Mongar, was a 41-year-old woman. The other
seven did not live long enough to acquire names. They were infants who were
born when Gosnell induced labor in their mothers. According to the Philadelphia grand jury report, he
or his employees then killed them by using scissors to sever the neck and spinal
cord:
He
called that "snipping."
Over
the years, there were hundreds of "snippings." Sometimes, if Gosnell
was unavailable, the "snipping" was done by one of his fake doctors,
or even by one of the administrative staff. But all the employees of the Women's
Medical Society knew. Everyone there acted as if it wasn't murder at all.
Most
of these acts cannot be prosecuted, because Gosnell destroyed the files.
The
trial opened March 18, as the New York Times reported on page A17
of the next day's paper--its last word to date on the topic.
What
accounts for the media's lack of interest in a trial that not only is
sensational but implicates the most divisive social and political issue in
America? PJMedia.com's Roger L. Simon has the answer:
"The trial of Dr. Gosnell is a potential time bomb exploding in the
conventional liberal narrative on abortion itself." He demonstrates via
self-reflection:
I can give you two guinea pigs to prove
this point--my wife Sheryl and me. We were in the kitchen last night, preparing
dinner, when we saw a short report of this story on the countertop TV.
Both lifelong "pro-choice"
people, after watching only seconds, we embarked in an immediate discussion of
whether it was time to reconsider that view. (Didn't human life really begin at
the moment of conception? What other time?) Neither of us was comfortable as a
"pro-choice" advocate in the face of these horrifying revelations.
How could we be?
Yes, Dr. Gosnell was exceptional (thank
God for that!), but a dead fetus was a dead fetus, even if incinerated in some
supposedly humane fashion rather than left crying out in blind agony on
the operating room floor, as was reportedly the case with one of Gosnell's
victims. I say blind because this second-trimester fetus did not yet have fully
formed eyes. (Think about that one.)
So I don't think I'm
"pro-choice" anymore, but I'm not really "pro-life" either.
I would feel like a hypocrite. I don't want to pretend to ideals I have serious
doubts I would be able to uphold in a real-world situation. If a woman in my
family, or a close friend, were (Heaven forbid) impregnated through rape, I
would undoubtedly support her right to abortion. I might even advocate it. I
also have no idea how I would react if confronted by having to make a choice
between the life of a fetus and his/her mother. Just the thought makes my head
spin.
Anyone who he thinks he knows how he
would respond in these situations--and hasn't--is doing nothing but posturing.
Welcome
to the mushy middle, Roger. This columnist has been here for quite some time,
as you can see from this
1999 piece. But we too, when we were very young, were a
"pro-choice" libertarian. We came to question, and ultimately
rejected, that position, although fully accepting the "pro-life" side
of the argument remains a bridge too far for us.
Our
path was more cerebral and less visceral. It started with our education in
constitutional law. Although we thought abortion on demand was a good policy,
we knew how to read, and the Constitution had nothing to say about the matter.
We came to view Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that
declared otherwise, as a gross abuse of power by the Supreme Court,
notwithstanding that it was in the service of a cause we agreed with.
A
funny thing happens when you dissent from Roe v. Wade: You come to see
that there's not much else by way of intellectual content to the case for
abortion on demand. Roe predates our own political consciousness, so we
have to assume there were once stronger arguments. But these days the appeal to
the authority of Roe is pretty much all there is apart from
sloganeering, name-calling, appeals to self-interest and an emphasis on
difficult and unusual cases such as pregnancy due to rape.
So
totemic is Roe that on one recent day two top New York Times
commentators, editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal and columnist Bill
Keller, cited it as if it were still the law and ignored the
1992 case that supplanted it, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The
latter was pretty much a complete do-over, although the "core
holding" was the same.
When
you dissent from Roe v. Wade, you notice that people committed to the
pro-abortion side almost never acknowledge that the question of abortion poses
a conflict of rights or of legitimate interests. Try to pin them down as to
where they'd draw the line--at what point in fetal development does abortion
become unacceptable? It's pretty much impossible. The court in Casey said
abortion could be restricted after 23 to 24 weeks, earlier than Roe's 28
weeks, but groups like Planned Parenthood oppose restrictions on late-term
abortion, too. All they care about is "a woman's right to choose."
The
line-drawing exercise is indeed a vexing one. We aren't "pro-life"--which
is to say that we do not favor the outlawing of all abortion--and not only
because of the difficult cases Simon notes. Our own moral intuition is that an
early-term abortion, or the use of an abortifacient to prevent implantation, is
different in kind from a late-term abortion or infanticide.
But
we concede that intuition is irreconcilable with the scientific fact that the
difference between a zygote and an infant--or, for that matter, an adult--is
one of degree: All are the same human being at different stages of development.
(To be sure, the natural occurrence of apogamy, or monozygotic twinning, makes
that last statement a bit of an oversimplification, as do recent and prospective
technologies like in vitro fertilization and cloning. That doesn't make the
puzzle any easier to solve.)
Any
line one could draw between acceptable abortion and homicide would be an
arbitrary one. Both extremes in the abortion debate are united in rejecting the
line-drawing exercise in principle for that reason. But either
"principled" position leads to monstrous results.
A
law protecting every human life from the moment of fertilization would be
draconian or unenforceable, and probably both. Would a free society really
tolerate its government's forcing a rape victim to carry her attacker's child
to term? Surely not--but an exception for rape would also create a loophole, an
incentive for women seeking abortions to claim rape falsely. Norma McCorvey, the
anonymous Roe v. Wade plaintiff, did just that, albeit unsuccessfully,
before filing her lawsuit.
The
reductio ad absurdum of the pro-abortion side is Kermit Gosnell. That is why
the Gosnell case has crystallized our view that the current regime of abortion
on demand in America is a grave evil that ought to be abolished. It is
murderous, if not categorically then at least in its extreme manifestations.
Maintaining it requires an assault on language and logic that has taken on a
totalitarian character. And it is politically poisonous.
Some
pro-abortion commentators have denied that the horrors of the Women's Medical
Society implicate their ideology. While they have little to say about the
babies Gosnell allegedly killed, they certainly don't approve of the way he
treated his pregnant patients, at least two of whom, according to the grand
jury, ended up dead, with untold others mutilated or infected. No, these
advocates assure us, they want abortion to be "safe and legal." (The
Clintonian "rare" is not heard anymore. In a Philadelphia Inquirer
op-ed last month, Kate Michelman of NARAL Pro-Choice
America came right out and said that she wants abortion to be
"common.")
But
the grand jury--which described its members as covering "a spectrum of
personal beliefs about the morality of abortion"--directly blamed
"pro-choice" politics for the regulatory failure that allowed the
clinic to remain open for decades. The Pennsylvania Department of Health had
conducted occasional inspections of the clinic starting in 1979, although it
failed to act on the violations it found:
After 1993, even that pro forma effort
came to an end. Not because of administrative ennui, although there had been
plenty. Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for
political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all. The politics in
question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of administration
from Governor [Bob] Casey to Governor [Tom] Ridge, officials concluded that
inspections would be "putting a barrier up to women" seeking
abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as
Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.
It's
worth noting that the governors in question were both outliers in their
parties: Casey (the respondent in the 1992 Supreme Court case) was an
antiabortion Democrat; Ridge, a pro-abortion Republican. But Ridge's
lassitudinous policy was bipartisan, continued by his successor, Democrat Ed
Rendell. Inspections of Pennsylvania abortion clinics resumed only after a 2010
raid at the Women's Medical Society--initiated by the FBI, which was following
up on a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation into suspected illegal
narcotics prescriptions.
The
grand jury also faulted the National Abortion Federation, "a professional
association of 400 abortion providers nationwide that offers referrals and
services to member providers." In 2009 Gosnell applied for membership in
the NAF, a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of abortion:
When asked if she had ever seen
anything like the conditions and practices she observed at Gosnell's clinic in
any of the roughly one hundred clinics she has visited in the United States,
Canada, and Mexico, the evaluator answered: "No."
Based on her observations, the
evaluator determined that there were far too many deficiencies at the clinic
and in how it operated to even consider admitting Gosnell to NAF membership.
The
NAF rejected the clinic, but that's all it did. As the grand jury observed:
"We have to question why an evaluator from NAF, whose stated mission is to
ensure safe, legal, and acceptable abortion care, and to promote health and
justice for women, did not report Gosnell to authorities."
Gosnell
worked one day a week at another clinic, Delaware's Atlantic Women's Medical
Services, which was NAF-certified. "At least six patients were referred
from Atlantic to Gosnell's clinic in Philadelphia for illegal late-term
abortions," the grand jury reported. The federation suspended the Delaware
clinic's membership only after the grand jury urged it to do so in its January
2011 report. (The clinic later closed.)
The
grand jury report does not name any other clinic that referred women to
Gosnell, but it implies that he had carved out a lucrative niche for himself in
the abortion industry. He had a bad reputation in Philadelphia:
As a result, Gosnell began to rely much
more on referrals from other areas where abortions as late as 24 weeks are
unavailable. More and more of his patients came from out of state and were late
second-trimester patients. Many of them were well beyond 24 weeks. Gosnell was
known as a doctor who would perform abortions at any stage, without regard for
legal limits. His patients came from several states, including Delaware,
Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, as well as from Pennsylvania cities
outside the Philadelphia area, such as Allentown. He also had many late-term
Philadelphia patients because most other local clinics would not perform
procedures past 20 weeks.
Karnamaya
Mongar, the woman Gosnell is accused of murdering by overdosing her with drugs,
was likewise referred by an out-of-state clinic because her pregnancy was so
far along. Again the report does not name the referring clinic, and it's
unclear if it was in Virginia, where she lived, or the District of Columbia.
The
abortion lobby opposes restrictions on late-term abortions. But surely at least
they agree that infanticide--the killing of a child after birth--is
murder. Or do they?
Two
weeks ago John McCormack of The Weekly
Standard reported on a shocking exchange between Alisa LaPolt Snow, a lobbyist
for the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, and members of the
Florida House who were holding a committee hearing:
"So, um, it is just really hard
for me to even ask you this question because I'm almost in disbelief,"
said Rep. Jim Boyd. "If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched
abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that
is struggling for life?"
"We believe that any decision
that's made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the
physician," said Planned Parenthood lobbyist Snow.
Rep. Daniel Davis then asked Snow,
"What happens in a situation where a baby is alive, breathing on a table,
moving. What do your physicians do at that point?"
"I do not have that information,"
Snow replied. "I am not a physician, I am not an abortion provider. So I
do not have that information."
Rep. Jose Oliva followed up, asking the
Planned Parenthood official, "You stated that a baby born alive on a table
as a result of a botched abortion that that decision should be left to the
doctor and the family. Is that what you're saying?"
Again, Snow replied, "That
decision should be between the patient and the health care provider."
One
full week later, ChristianPost.com reports, "Planned Parenthood
clarified . . . that it is not in favor of killing babies who survive
a botched abortion." Are you reassured?
YouTube
has an audio recording of a 2001
exchange in the Illinois Senate between a sponsor of a bill to protect infants
born alive in an "abortion" and a colleague who worries that such the
bill's requirement of a second physician would be too burdensome for the
abortionist. It's chilling to listen in light of the Gosnell allegations. The
second senator, who voted against the bill, is now president of the United
States. In 2008, according to FactCheck.org,
Barack Obama said he would have supported a similar federal law that was
enacted in 2002 and accused his critics of "lying." Are you
reassured?
Last
year the Journal of Medical Ethics published
a paper by two academics who argued that "what we call 'after-birth
abortion' (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where
abortion is [allowed], including cases where the newborn is not disabled."
There
is a brutal logic to that position. As an abstract matter, birth is as
arbitrary a point as any to draw the line between abortion and homicide. If a
woman has a "right to choose" to hire a doctor to kill her baby in
utero or partway down the birth canal, why should she lose that right simply
because he's slow in getting the job done? Or, to put the shoe on the other
foot, if infanticide is murder, how can an abortion of a child at the same
stage of development be acceptable?
To
avoid confronting the reality of what they were doing, Gosnell and his
employees spoke in an elaborate euphemistic code. A baby wasn't born, "the
fetus precipitated." Gosnell didn't slash it to death, he
"snipped" it to "ensure fetal demise." The Times, in that
A17 story, adopted the Gosnell code, referring repeatedly to the babies Gosnell
is charged with murdering as "fetuses."
So
did Roger Simon, we're guessing out of "pro-choice" habit. This
Orwellian use of language was a commonality between the Gosnellites and the
"safe and legal" abortion crowd. "Pro-choice" itself is one
such euphemism. Lots of political movements are in favor of one or another form
of "choice," but this is the only one we can think of that cries foul
if you specify the choice that they're pro. The National Rifle Association
surely would not object to being characterized as "pro-gun." (We
should add that we're not wild about "pro-life" either. But it is
merely tendentious. Its aim is to persuade but not to conceal.)
Most
news organizations have adopted this pro-abortion doublespeak as a matter of
style. The New York Times, for example, characterizes the two sides as
"abortion-rights" and "antiabortion." That at least has the
virtue of acknowledging that the debate is about abortion, but it still tips
the scale in favor of the pro-abortion side by acknowledging its claims of
rights but not the antiabortion side's. And then there's the ever-popular
"procedure whose opponents call it partial-birth
abortion." What do its supporters call it? And who are
they?
The
most jaw-dropping example of pro-abortion Orwellianism is the one we cited last
week: the fierce objection to the assertion that life begins
at fertilization. As we noted, that is a simple statement of scientific fact--a
tautology. MediaMutters
responded, in essence, that human embryogenesis is just a theory. The proof
was--you guessed it--an appeal to authority, namely the majority opinion in Roe
v. Wade:
The law has been reluctant to endorse
any theory that life, as we recognize it, begins before live birth or to accord
legal rights to the unborn except in narrowly defined situations and except
when the rights are contingent upon live birth.
Justice
Blackmun says it, I believe it, and that settles it!
We'd
like to cite one more example because we find it especially neuralgic, though
we must acknowledge this is one that professional abortion advocates typically
have the sense to avoid. It is the characterization of an unborn child as a
"parasite" because it depends for sustenance on its mother. Again,
this is at best scientifically illiterate: In biology, a parasite by definition
is a creature of a different species from the host. At worst, calling a baby a
parasite is an act of rhetorical dehumanization, of a piece with likening hated
minorities to insects or rodents or pigs.
Which
brings us to the poisoning of American politics. In this respect neither side
is innocent, though it is our impression that the pro-abortion side is far more
aggressive. We hasten to acknowledge that our observation here may be biased by
experience. We have lived almost all our life, and the entirety of our
professional career, in big cities or upscale suburbs where the
"pro-choice" view is dominant. Someone from Houston or Salt Lake City
might have a different perspective. Then again, we are very widely read, and it
seems to us that, say, National Review is a lot more respectful toward opposing
viewpoints than the New York Times editorial page, and that antiabortion news
sites are models of civility and reason compared with leftist and feminist
ones.
Perhaps
the most pernicious manifestation of this incivility is the effort to turn the
sexes against each other--or perhaps more accurately the effort to cow men into
submission. The imaginary "war on women" rages on: "Man, the
feeding frenzy over Gosnell is a sobering reminder of how much hatred there is
out there towards women," tweeted Slate's Amanda Marcotte Saturday. Over at
Salon, Irin Carmon casually dismissed
critics of the media's noncoverage as "almost uniformly male," a
gendered argumentum ad hominem and quite a thigh-slapper given that she, like
this column, opened by citing Kirsten Powers.
If
you're a man and you're opposed to or uncertain about abortion, you've almost
certainly had a woman tell you that because of your sex, you have no right to
your opinion about the subject. (We've heard it from antiabortion women too,
though much more rarely.) It's idiotic, offensive and indicative of a war on
men.
The
gist of Carmon's argument is that the horrors of the Women's Medical Center
were caused by "politicized stigma, lack of public funding or good
information, and a morass of restrictive laws allegedly meant to protect
women." She favorably quotes a Philadelphia writer, Tara Murtha: "The
bottom line is that politicizing abortion led to Gosnell. Their answer?
Politicize it more."
In
other words, if only abortion opponents were out of the picture, abortion would
be safe and legal in no time. Problem solved. That conclusion, while arguable,
strikes us as dubious. But the premise is delusional.
We
live in a free society. People have an absolute right to form opinions about
matters of public concern, and a nearly absolute right to express those
opinions, individually or in concert with others of like mind. "Congress
shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the
press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
Government for a redress of grievances."
The
Supreme Court, by interpreting (or misinterpreting) the Constitution, has the
capacity to impose vast and sweeping changes in the law, as it did when it
decided Roe v. Wade. What it cannot do--what it lacks not only the
authority but the slightest ability to do--is control people's thoughts.
One
suspects that when the justices decided Roe, they expected a consensus
would quickly jell in favor of legal abortion. That is certainly what they
hoped for when they decided Casey 19 years later. "The Court's
interpretation of the Constitution calls the contending sides of a national
controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted
in the Constitution," Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy and
David Souter wrote in their joint opinion.
That
was a wish, not a command. There was no consensus on abortion in 1973, nor in
1992. Nor is there in 2013. If the Supreme Court, with all its authority and
majesty, cannot conjure a consensus into being, it is silly and vain for Irin
Carmon to imagine that she can.
All
of which is to say that the bitter polarization around the question of abortion
is inseverable from the Roe regime.
A
variant of the if-only-the-other-side-would-disappear argument appeared in
Michelman's Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed. One Gosnell patient, she wrote,
"told the Associated Press that she had intended to go to a Planned
Parenthood clinic but was scared away by antiabortion protesters."
Well,
why were the protesters there? Again, the answer comes back to the Roe regime.
Normally if you think a law is unjust, you take your case to lawmakers. But a
march on Harrisburg would be futile. Even if Pennsylvania legislators agree
with the protesters that abortion is murder, they can't do anything about it.
The Supreme Court has tied their hands. So the protesters, driven by a sincere
belief that innocent children are in jeopardy of being murdered, go to the
scene of the "crime" to try to stop it before it happens, through the
power of persuasion.
And
what were the prospective patients afraid of? In her next paragraph, Michelman
describes their "fear of violent protesters." But she provides no
evidence to support her characterization of the protesters as violent, and a National Abortion Federation list of
incidents of "extreme violence" against abortion providers and
facilities, which goes back to 1997, includes not a single incident from
Pennsylvania. Maybe Planned Parenthood frightened potential clients away by
slandering the protesters as violent.
But
maybe the prospective patients were averse to the message rather than the
messenger. In a fascinating piece last week for LiveActionNews.com, Sarah Terzo (whose shirttail bio
describes her as "a member of Secular Pro-Life and Pro-Life Alliance of
Gays and Lesbians") reports that "pro-choice counselors at abortion
clinics occasionally have to deal with a woman who asks, point blank: 'Is
abortion killing my baby?' "
The
clinic workers are trained to say no, naturally:
Linda Couri, who worked at Planned
Parenthood, described how she responded when a teenager considering abortion
asked her the following question: "If I have an abortion, am I killing my
baby?"
Couri said: " 'Kill' is a
strong word, and so is 'baby.' You're terminating the product of
conception."
You're
terminating the product of conception. The fetus precipitates. Again the
Orwellian doublespeak, in this case employed therapeutically. Euphemism is an
analgesic for the psychological pain that "strong words" aggravate.
And the protesters exercising their First Amendment rights outside Planned
Parenthood refuse to stop administering "strong words." It's not hard
to understand, or to sympathize with, the woman who decides to go elsewhere.
But
strong words can be therapeutic too. They promote wakefulness as well as
inflammation:
Couri was haunted by the girl's
question and troubled about her [own] response. She began questioning whether
providing abortions was really moral. She recalls asking her supervisor if she
had done the right thing. The supervisor did not deny that abortion was killing
a baby but told her that in the teenager's case, abortion was a "necessary
evil." Struck by the use of the word "evil," Couri continued to
question her position at the clinic. Eventually, she left, and now she is a
pro-life speaker.
Here,
then, is another reason it is vain to expect opponents of abortion to
disappear: The abortion industry itself is a breeding ground for them. Even
Norma McCorvey became an antiabortion activist later in life.
One
advantage the abortion lobby has is widespread complicity. If abortion is evil,
almost everybody is at least a little bit guilty. There have been more than 50
million abortions in America since 1973, according to the Alan
Guttmacher Institute. Maybe you've had, or facilitated, one.
Very likely someone you know has had one, and do you want to call her a
murderer? (If no one you know has had an abortion, what makes you think you
know that?) Probably you've had sex for the pleasure of it, not wanting a baby
to result. People were doing that before Roe, of course, but the
nationwide deregulation of abortion made it a lot less risky, or at least made
it seem so.
The
Linda Couri story illustrates the antiabortion side's corresponding advantage:
Sometimes the guilty repent. Many abortion opponents, being Christians,
recognize that as a central insight. And the guiltiest, by virtue of having
borne direct witness, can be the most zealous penitents.
One
of the strongest practical arguments in favor of the Roe regime is that
abortion has been around since time immemorial and outlawing it only drove it
underground, leading women to endanger themselves by seeking out the services
of back-alley quacks. The Philadelphia grand jurors recounted a powerful
example from their own city's history.
It
was called the Mother's Day Massacre. A young Philadelphia doctor "offered
to perform abortions on 15 poor women who were bused to his clinic from Chicago
on Mother's Day 1972, in their second trimester of pregnancy." The women
didn't know that the doctor "planned to use an experimental device called
a 'super coil' developed by a California man named Harvey Karman."
A
colleague of Karman's Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption as
"basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. . . .
They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be
inserted into the woman's uterus. And after several hours of body temperature,
. . . the gel would melt and these . . . things would
spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus."
Nine
of the 15 Chicago women suffered serious complications. One of them needed a
hysterectomy. The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.
It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried out the
Mother's Day Massacre would go out of business. His name is Kermit Gosnell.
Back-alley
abortions were indisputably a problem before 1973. That's no defense of the Roe
regime, which failed to solve it.
What
do we mean when we call for the abolition of the Roe regime? Simply
this: a reversal of Supreme Court precedent, an acknowledgment by the court
that it erred when it decided Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v.
Casey. That would turn the question of abortion back to the states and the
people, where the 10th Amendment makes clear it belongs.
The
abortion debate needs more politics, not less. As we noted above, drawing the
line between acceptable abortion and homicide is necessarily an arbitrary
exercise. For judges to issue arbitrary rulings is a corruption of the judicial
function. But the production of arbitrary results--imperfect but workable
arrangements that can be revised if necessary to adapt to new circumstances or
knowledge--is the essence of politics.
A
reversal of Roe and Casey would no more yield a consensus than
the decisions themselves did. Neither the worst pro-abortion fears nor the
fondest antiabortion hopes would be realized. Abortion would remain legal in
many states, and any hope for a "Human Life Amendment" to the
Constitution would be a pipe dream, the same as it is today. But in the absence
of consensus, politics in a democratic republic would produce that least bad
outcome: compromise.
Some
will say it's unrealistic to call for a reversal of Roe and Casey.
But Casey was decided 5-4, and, as we noted last
July, it reportedly came within a hair's breadth of going the
other way. Although several new justices have yet to weigh in on the abortion
question, it is generally believed that the balance of the court is similar
today to what it was in 1992.
Look
at it this way: For Irin Carmon to succeed in realizing her dream of Safe and
Legal Utopia, all those who disagree with her have to change their minds, and
supporters of her view have to lock in their agreement permanently. For us to
succeed, a change of one well-placed mind would suffice. The odds are probably
against us, but they look awfully good by comparison.
The Banality
of Evil
Journalists are awfully liberal, Arendt they?
The
New York Times has finally produced
a second news story on the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit
Gosnell--almost a month after its other story, which briefly recapped the
trial's first day. Like the Times's first story, which we cited in yesterday's
column, this one appears deep inside the paper (on page A12).
You almost get the impression the Times doesn't want to be there. More than
almost: The paper's editors make it explicit with their headline: "Online
Furor Draws Press to Abortion Doctor's Trial."
What
an amazing headline that is. The editors of the New York Times declare that
they're covering the trial under protest, yielding their news judgment to an
angry online mob. It's probably the most honest thing they've ever published.
(As
an aside, the "online furor" was sparked by a Kirsten Powers op-ed in USA Today.
Although USA Today is a website, it is also a newspaper with a circulation of
1.8 million, second only to The Wall Street Journal.)
Meanwhile,
the Associated Press, which to its
credit has been filing daily dispatches throughout the trial, published an odd
human-interest story the other day:
They say they were just doing what the
boss trained them to do.
But eight former employees of a
run-down West Philadelphia abortion clinic now face prison time for the work
they did for Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Three have pleaded guilty to third-degree
murder. . . .
In testimony at the capital murder
trial this past month, an unlicensed doctor and untrained aides described long,
chaotic days at the clinic. They said they performed grueling, often gruesome
work for little more than minimum wage, paid by Gosnell under the table.
But for most, it was the best job they
could find.
The
hard-luck stories include an unlicensed doctor who went to medical school in
Grenada and was working as a bartender when Gosnell hired him, a doctor who
"relinquished her medical license in 2000 to deal with 'post-traumatic
stress syndrome,' " and Gosnell himself, whose history the AP
sanitizes by describing him as a "gifted student" who "put his
medical school education to work as a 1970s-era champion of drug treatment and
legal abortions."
Apparently
the AP reporter didn't read deep enough into the grand-jury report to learn of
the "Mother's Day Massacre" of 1972. In case you didn't read deep
enough into our yesterday column either, National Review's Ed Whelan excerpts the relevant part.
We
were going to file the AP dispatch under "World Ends, Poor Hardest
Hit," but reader Damien Bennett persuaded us it was worth more serious
consideration. The AP story reminded Bennett of a 1999 essay by Ron Rosenbaum in the New York
Observer, titled "Eichmann and the Banality of 'the Banality of
Evil.' "
The
phrase "the banality of evil" comes from the subtitle of Hannah
Arendt's 1963 book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil." Arendt, a philosopher by profession, had covered the 1961 trial of
Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official, for The New Yorker. Rosenbaum began with
praise for Arendt: "Few would dispute her eminence as a philosopher, the
importance of her attempt to define, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, just
what makes totalitarianism so insidious and destructive."
He
then proceeded to scathe her quite persuasively, calling her "the world's
worst court reporter":
When Eichmann took the stand and
testified that he really didn't harbor any special animosity toward Jews, that
when it came to this little business of exterminating the Jews, he was just a
harried bureaucrat, a paper shuffler "just following orders" from
above, Arendt took him at his word. . . .
She was completely conned by Eichmann,
by his mild-mannered demeanor on the stand during his trial; she bought his act
of being a nebbishy schnook. Arendt then proceeded to make Eichmann's
disingenuous self-portrait the basis for a sweeping generalization about the
nature of evil whose unfounded assumptions one still finds tossed off as
sophisticated aperçus today.
A generalization which suggests that
conscious, willful, knowing evil is irrelevant or virtually nonexistent: that
the form evil most often assumes, the form evil took in Hitler's Germany, is
that of faceless little men following evil orders.
That's
an excellent point, and it seems applicable as well to the employees of Kermit
Gosnell--though one should note that they did plead guilty rather than attempt
the just-following-orders defense in court.
And
while Rosenbaum seems correct in rejecting "the banality of evil" as
an overarching theory, surely it has some explanatory or descriptive power.
"Faceless little men following evil orders" surely is a fitting
characterization of the Pennsylvania bureaucrats who, because of a mix of
indifference, incompetence and politics, failed in their oversight of Gosnell's
clinic and allowed it to keep operating for decades.
It's
also true that banality is a tactic of evil, a method it employs to make
orders easier to follow. One of Gosnell's employees might have blown the
whistle on him had he expressly commanded them to slash babies to death after
they were born, rather than to "snip" them after they
"precipitated" to "ensure fetal demise."
Today's
New York Times story, like the one last month, refers to the infants Gosnell is
accused of murdering as "fetuses," although it also refers to them as
"babies." This is another fascinating slip. Abortion proponents
resolutely adhere to the convention of calling unborn children
"fetuses" so as to conceal the similarity between (at least late-term)
abortion and infanticide. By using the terms interchangeably, the Times
unwittingly defeats this pro-abortion obscurantism, revealing what it means to
conceal.
The
Washington Post has also started
covering the Gosnell trial, and in its first news story it is careful to
observe the distinction between babies (the alleged murder victims) and fetuses
(human remains of mostly indeterminate developmental stage that were found at
the clinic). Meanwhile in the Style section an article by Paul Farhi asks: "Is Media Bias
to Blame for Lack of Gosnell Coverage? Or Something Far More Banal?"
The
banal "something" is simple ignorance of the story, which is
executive editor Martin Baron's explanation for the failure to cover it.
"We never decide what to cover for ideological reasons, no matter what
critics might claim," he says. "Accusations of ideological motives
are easy to make, even if they're not supported by the facts."
Margaret Sullivan, the Times's public editor, says
something similar:
The behavior of news organizations
often owes more to chaos theory than conspiracy theory. I don't think that
editors and reporters got together and decided not to give the Gosnell trial a
lot of attention because it would highlight the evils of abortion.
I
do think that it wasn't on their radar screen--and that it should have been.
The murders of seven newborn babies, done so horrifically, would be no ordinary
crime. Any suggestion, including mine on Friday, that this is just another
murder trial is a miscalculation. And it's certainly possible that journalists
who were more in touch with conservative voices and causes would have picked up
on the importance of this trial sooner.
Do
liberal journalists really think that accusations of bias amount to a
"conspiracy theory"? That seems to us a lazy assumption, and sheer
laziness is surely a major element of media bias. Others are prejudice against
ideological outgroups and hubris, which leads newsmen to make categorical
assertions like "we never decide what to cover for ideological
reasons" rather than reflect on whether that's really true.
Laziness,
prejudice and pride are ordinary human failings. As we've seen from the press's
treatment of the Gosnell story, they can lead those whose calling is to bear
witness to avert their eyes from radical evil. Call it the banality of bias.
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