Why Obama And The Left Don’t Care About Kermit Gosnell

By: David Harsanyi  

OBAMA: “I am pro-choice.”

REPORTER: “In all situations including the late term thing?”

OBAMA: “I am pro-choice. I believe that women make responsible choices and they know better than anybody the tragedy of a difficult pregnancy and I don’t think that it’s the government’s role to meddle in that choice.”

– President Barack Obama, 2003

You can’t be clearer than that. Obama, who has the state meddling in virtually every aspect of our lives, doesn’t want the state to do anything on abortion, except to keep it legal in all circumstances and subsidize it. Surely there has to be a more compelling reason to kill a child who is viable, or mere days from being so, than a difficult pregnancy? I hate to break it to the president, but most pregnancies are difficult to some extent. Is morning sickness a difficulty strong enough to justify an abortion? Is financial hardship? Is a baby with a disability like Down syndrome a future difficulty to be aborted? He’s never said.

Late-term abortions are rarely needed for purely medical reasons, yet there were around 18,000 late-term abortions performed in this country last year. These are babies—or fetuses, if you like—with advanced neural development, including, often, the ability to feel pain. These are babies who are “viable” outside the womb but are denied the chance to live.

Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia doctor who, among other horrible acts, was killing babies with scissors after “botching” late-term abortions. The doctor, it was reported in 2011, appeared confused by the charges against him at his arraignment. (His trial that is now being rigorously ignored by the media.) And if you’re the kind of guy whose idea of a “botched” medical procedure involves someone surviving, well, perhaps being charged with murder is a distinction without much of a difference. What distinguishes a late-term abortionist from an abortionist who uses scissors to sever the spinal cords of babies born alive is little more than a matter of tools and technique. The results, and the facts, are the same.

Gosnell was charged with his crimes only a week before the president released a celebratory statement for the thirty-eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that declared abortion a constitutional right.

While the media was barely covering the Gosnell story, Obama hailed “reproductive freedom” as a “fundamental principle.”  Our rational president, who lectured religious Americans about “universal values,” voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act as an Illinois senator. The same senator who voted “present” regularly to avoid other contentious issues took time on four separate occasions to vote against medical care for newborns who survived “botched” late-term abortions. Later, when this became a slight embarrassment, Obama claimed that he would have supported a born-alive act that didn’t weaken Roe v. Wade—an interesting argument from a politician without any noticeable qualms about weakening the First, Second, Fourth, or Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out, the law did nothing more than extend the right to life for babies whom physicians deemed to have “sustainable survivability,” which shouldn’t have endangered Roe v. Wade at all. Moreover, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, we might expect Obama to know that the Bill of Rights is integral to the Constitution, while Roe v. Wade, as even many liberal legal scholars, like his former Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, have confessed, is pretty hard to justify as constitutional law, essentially having been confected out of Justice Harry Blackmun’s personal preferences.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, where a madman massacred all those children in Newtown, Connecticut, the president gave a heartfelt speech that included this line: “If there is even one step we can take to save another child . . . then surely we have an obligation to try.” Wouldn’t one such step be to ban the nihilist practice of murdering children who’ve survived outside the womb? Obviously, as a state senator, Obama was so ideologically wedded to defending abortion in all circumstances that moderation—if you can call voting to protect a born, living child moderation—was out of the question. As president he shows no signs of changing his views—in fact, his hard-line position on abortion is now Democratic Party dogma.