Guilty of murder for late term abortions

[Kendhni]

Sometimes you read a story that just makes you shudder (and this one is not for the faint hearted).

A Philadelphia doctor has been convicted of the first-degree murders of three babies delivered and killed with scissors in late-term abortions. ... but the bit that got me the most was "Dr Kermit Gosnell, 72, was acquitted on another charge of killing a fourth baby, who let out a whimper before he cut its neck".

Surely no matter which side of the argument you fall on this has to be considered wrong? ... and to play the 'racist' card is an insult to those who have been on the end of racist attacks (and smacks of desperation)

[Mo2013]

How horrible. Firstly the women must have been desperate; secondly, and more importantly, this man is cold-blooded and has no scruples or morals. What he has done is absolutely wrong and his colour and creed is nothing to do with it.

[Boris+]

Hi Ken,

I know this is serious, but what got me was the name of the man involved - I just picture him as a sassy sort of frog! Kermit! Blast my boots.

Em

[Andrea S]

Sadly desperate people make desperate decisions.
This Doctor not only aborted babies past the legal guide lines he then physically took away any possible life they may have had by cutting their spine with scissors.
Irrespective of his colour he made millions of dollars performing illegal operations.
At the time these abortions took place it was possibly the only solution available, but after hearing this case I wonder if it will leave the females concerned shocked and have long term effects.
His motive was money and he deserves no mercy.

[Dancing Queen]

Horrendous ... but shouldn't those who testified who also aided him be standing trial, obviously someone blew the whistle eventually but how long did it take !!

[paultheeagle]

There are some things I would prefer not to know, igorance is bliss and all that.....and this is one of them.

[HK phooey]

This horrendous specimen of a man needs executing, snipping his spine shoud do it. I'd also like to see the women that went to him for the illegal abortions prosecuted, surely they share some responsibility here.

[Mo2013]

Clearly there are no limits to the depths to which some people will sink for money. I expect this person did not take any responsibility for his actions but will say he was 'providing a service'. If he hadn't have done it, some other person would.

[Dark Knight]

sometimes , you just have to agree that the death penalty is justified, horrendous story

[emjay45]

This horrendous specimen of a man needs executing, snipping his spine shoud do it. I'd also like to see the women that went to him for the illegal abortions prosecuted, surely they share some responsibility here.

I agree with you HK I am very much against abortion anyhow but why wait SO late. Poor babies.

[Silver_Shiney]

This article by Lita Cosner may prove interesting reading:

"Abortion-rights activists, especially among the modern feminist movement, proclaim abortion to be an important right for women. They often resort to scaremongering, claiming that if it were revoked, it would send the world back to the (largely mythical) era of back-alley abortions, and would represent a huge step backwards for women’s rights.

Of course, abortion activists who proclaim that a woman has a right to do what she likes with her own body are ignoring the fact that another body is involved. However, the early feminists used exactly the same terminology! (The following statements are documented by Feminists for Life).

For example, The Revolution, the newsletter of Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), described abortion as ‘child murder’, ‘infanticide’ and ‘foeticide’. Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), the first female US presidential candidate, said: “Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth. If it is okay for a mother to abort because she doesn’t want a baby, why is it wrong for her to abort because she doesn’t want a girl? “

These comments were consistent with the strong opposition to abortion from other feminists. Anthony’s friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), who organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY (1848), called abortion a ‘disgusting and degrading crime’, and argued pointedly, "When you consider that women have been treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit."

The mother of the feminist movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) had earlier written, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, where she condemned those who would ‘either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born.’

It should be obvious that science has shown even more definitively that the unborn is really human, so the pro-life case is even stronger now. That is why former leading abortionist Bernard Nathanson became a pro-lifer. 4D ultrasound is clearer still, and genetics evidence even forced the pro-abortion magazine New Scientist to admit (189(2543):8–9, 18 March 2006): “The task force finds that the new recombinant DNA technologies indisputably prove that the unborn child is a whole human being from the moment of fertilization, that all abortions terminate the life of a human being, and that the unborn child is a separate human patient under the care of modern medicine.”

There are some conversions the other way, but they seem to be motivated by political opportunism rather than science. For example, the pro-life secular writer Nat Henthoff writes on one passionate black preacher who helped convince him that the pro-life cause was right: ‘There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life.’

‘That’, he continued, ‘was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned.’

This passionate reverend used to warn: ‘Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a foetus isn’t a human being. That’s how the whites dehumanized us … The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do—and not even feel they’d done anything wrong.’

This preacher was Jesse Jackson, and like a number of his political colleagues who also used to defend the unborn, he has moved to a pro-abortion stance — and they never even bothered to refute their own arguments for the unborn’s humanity.

However, ironically for feminists, widespread abortion has greatly caused extreme violence against females in particular, that is, the availability of abortion in countries where sons are preferred to daughters is causing a huge rise in sex-selected abortions, which universally target females.

In some parts of the world, this has caused the male-to-female ratio to be skewed from the natural balance of around 105 boys to 100 girls to anywhere from 115 to 150 boys born for every 100 girls. This trend has permanently altered the male-to-female ratio in China. The Courier Mail (Brisbane), p. 54, cited a study in the British Medical Journal, and reported: “Selective abortion in favour of males has left China with 32 million more boys than girls, creating an imbalance that will endure for decades, an investigation warns.”

This imbalance is also large in India. Many countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa also show signs of this trend.

Since 1994, the UN has recognized that son preference is discriminatory to women and girls, and the Beijing Platform for action includes sex-selected abortion among incidences of violence against women. So which is it: is abortion an indispensable right that makes women more equal to men, or a practice of violence against women? Noticeably, an October 2006 UN Violence Against Children study ignores abortion entirely.

If society cannot interfere with a mother’s choice to abort for any reason she wants (‘abortion is between a woman and her doctor’), how can it be wrong for her to abort based on the sex of the baby? If it is okay for her to abort because she doesn’t want a baby, why is it wrong for her to abort because she doesn’t want a girl? In fact, the ability to choose the sex of a child is a logical extension of the ‘right to choose’ if that ‘right’ exists. If abortion is not objectionable in and of itself, why should we be troubled by the growing trend of baby girls being aborted in disproportionate numbers? After all, it is the woman’s choice!

The eugenic idea of aborting babies with defects also logically contributes. This teaches that it is acceptable, or even right, to abort children for birth defects such as Down’s syndrome, blindness, deafness, sickle-cell anemia, spina bifida, although many with such conditions live worthwhile lives. If a genetic defect is a valid reason to abort a child, why is it not acceptable to abort babies for what many in these countries consider the genetic ‘defect’ of being female?

In reality, the horrific problem of sex selected abortions, and abortions in general, is due to the rejection of absolute moral laws, in turn due to the rejection of the absolute moral Lawgiver (the teaching of evolution from ‘goo to you via the zoo’ has undermined this foundation in the eyes of many.

There is no reason, under their own belief system, for evolutionists to see males and females as equals. Males and females faced different selection pressures, so natural selection is unlikely to produce sexes of equal worth.

There is no reason, under their own belief system, for evolutionists to see males and females as equals. Males and females faced different selection pressures, so natural selection is unlikely to produce sexes of equal worth (if a term like ‘worth’ can even have meaning in this belief system). In fact, many animals show huge differences between the sexes. Indeed, historically, evolutionists have seen females as the inferior sex.

Corollaries of evolution pose another problem for women. Nowadays, it’s fashionable in the educational and media system to teach moral relativism, where there is no absolute right or wrong (except that it’s wrong to claim there is right and wrong!). This is a logical deduction from evolution, as admitted by Richard Dawkins, the leading atheistic evolutionist and a eugenicist. But if all moral viewpoints are equal, then how can it be morally wrong to devalue women?

A related fashion among the secular intelligentsia is cultural relativism, which teaches that we should not judge other cultures (except the absolutist culture of Christianity of course!). Following this worldview, it would be wrong to judge the many societies throughout history that have tended to prefer sons over daughters, and have endorsed infanticide or abortion to eliminate unwanted baby girls. The modern feminist-pushed abortion industry has merely made this easier.

Conversely, the Bible affirms the value of women, despite the claims to the contrary (see one CMI refutation, ‘Female inferiority’ raises questions). The fact that men and women are both created in God’s image (Gen. 1:26–7) disproves a common radical feminist claim that the Bible is anti-women. Jesus’ chosen Apostle, Paul, (maligned by many feminists as being anti-women), affirms that spiritual privileges in the body of Christ come equally to both sexes (Gal. 3:26–29).

Indeed, the Bible honours many women. E.g. the Old Testament honours Ruth, Esther, prophetesses Deborah, Huldah and Hannah; Miriam who celebrated the Exodus in song; and the splendid woman in Prov. 31, inspired advice King Lemuel’s mother gave him. In the New Testament, even higher honour is given to women. Mary bears the God-man in her womb, while other women were the first witnesses to His resurrection. Paul praises many women, such as Dorcas, Eunice, Lois, Priscilla, Phoebe and Julia, as ‘servants of the Church’.

This is even more astonishing considering that many ancient texts reflect a misogynistic view of females, but this is noticeably absent in the Bible. In fact, the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament had protections built in for females, and many of the provisions in the Law that are commonly seen as misogynistic to the modern eye were actually beneficial to women when looked at in its cultural context.

Thus simply passing laws to prohibit sex-selected abortions won’t fix the problem in cultures where females are seen as intrinsically less valuable. And as shown, it is illogical to claim both that abortion is an unconditional right for the mother for any reason she chooses and that abortion should be forbidden if the reason is that the baby is female! There must be a fundamental change in how people perceive women and the sanctity of life. And historically, this change has been effected by the Gospel.

I’ll leave the final word to the famous anti-slavery activist Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In another book, Woman in Sacred History (1873), she stated in the Introduction (p. 11): "The object of the following pages will be to show, in a series of biographical sketches, a history of WOMANHOOD UNDER DIVINE CULTURE, tending toward the development of that high ideal of woman which we find in modern Christian countries." "