From Dehumanizing Word Games to Gosnell (how did America get to letting babies die?)

National Review ^ | 04/13/2013 | Andrew McCarthy

[SeekAndFind]

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.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

[Alberta's Child]

The mainstream media has a vested interest in suppressing this story. The one thing they can never allow to get out about the Gosnell case is not the grisly nature of his crimes, but the fact that the entire purpose of legalized abortion is to have people like Gosnell do exactly what he was doing: killing black infants (without regard to whether it was done before or after they were "born") as a eugenics measure.

Gosnell isn't a criminal, folks ... he's a paid executioner for the state.

[Blue Collar Christian]

By re-defining terms. Now we have a completely fabricated false morality: political correctness, which, of course, condemns those that still call conveniently terminating a pregnancy, murder, as the offender.

[narses]

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[beaversmom]

Audio: Obama argues against Born Alive legislation in IL state senate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YUkbuhXzbvI#!

[neverdem]

...step by step....one compromise at a time.

The RINO way...

[Fzob]

Grand jury Report found here

http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/pdfs/grandjurywomensmedical.pdf

[Cronos]

America is heading towards Stalinism at the exact time when former socialist countries like China and India are embracing capitalism.

I prefer a break-up of the country -- let New England and Californica and Washington break away to form liberalistan.

[Elsie]

Are you still killing your unborn?

-- GOD

 

[Elsie]

Great AMERICAN Values!!!

I'd like to thank the United States Government for protecting me and my kind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You see, 40 years ago, my odds of making it out of the egg, alive, were very poor; about 80% of us died. 

 (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rachel-carson-silent-spring-1972-ddt-ban-birds-thrive)

 

 

But a lady discovered our plight and wrote a book that addressed our problem,

and, in 1972, a law was ammended protecting us even further. (http://www.fws.gov/midwest/eagle/protect/laws.html)

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I find strange is that the same government passed a law the very next year that allowed for killing

of unborn, and apparently unwanted, humans.  Little ones still nestled safely in their Mother's womb.

Around 25% of them are dying before birth - on average nearly 3,300 - every day of the year.

 

 

I hear that by now, somewhere around 55 MILLION of them have perished.

Wouldn't that kind of mess up the humans plans for growth, and welfare, and

retirement?

 

 

 

 

 

Strange birds; these Homo Sapiens.  Perhaps they'll come to their senses

before they are ALL dead!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Elsie]

Symbolism over Substance!!!

[PapaBear3625]

Over at Belmont Club, former freeper Richard Fernandez makes a good point:

Though 3801 Lancaster Street seemed to stand on a major Philadelphia street in the apparent blaze of day its doorways were really guarded by a spell that guaranteed that no one inquired into what happened within because everyone knew what was happening already. A knowledge not only that infanticide was practiced within but that most of us, in small or big ways, had tacitly given our imprimatur to it.

For the House guarded one secret that has not been touched upon in the cultural debate. That the real purpose of abortion is to make it impossible, once we have acceded to it, to object to anything else.

To understand 3801 Lancaster street maybe we should go back to Moloch rather than to the system of industrial execution that flourished 70 years ago. “Child sacrifice — “the ritualistic killing of children in order to please, propitiate or force a god or supernatural beings” was long practiced by the Incas, Aztec, many cultures in the Middle East, North Africa and in pagan Europe. The question is: why? What was its purpose that Moloch should be worshiped thus in his many names?

One theory is that child sacrifice was a sacramental device used to kill what we used to call “God” Himself. Moloch’s problem was how to get everyone to belong to him and to no other. His answer was to arrange a radical crossing over, an extreme commitment, a journey beyond the pale so shocking that to embark upon it was to go beyond point of no return. There was no going back to God after that. And once you had offered your child to Moloch there was no point refusing him anything else.

Killing your own child – just as acquiescing to killing the Jews was to the German public — was a form of enlistment by complicity. It is the last and most decisive step in the extinction of freedom. Though apparently practiced upon the child the real target of abasement is the mother. And by extension it is all of us. That is the shame the conservative pundits felt. Not the shame of sexual guilt. It is the shame of having gone along. By consenting to be an accomplice in the destruction of her own child she binds herself mystically to the doctrine of Moloch. “You are nothing but meat. So take this child and eat. Do this in memory of you.”

[thirst4truth]

That was a hard one to take. What kind of human being can do this or watch this or read this and not cry for these little ones. You know this has got to be bothering alot of people, as it is a purposeful blackout on the network news.