The Right To Choose What?

Dwarfed by the tragic events in Boston last week but no less horrific is the ongoing murder trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. If that name doesn't send disgusting chills down your spine then read about him here and here. Is there any doubt that abortion is murder? Can proponents of a woman's right to choose be honest with themeselves and the public at large by admitting that the choice to abort is a choice to end a life rather than simply a choice to remove "tissue?"  Douglas Wilson has an important article concerning our hypocrisy on the abortion issue titled "Our Gosnell Gulag."  Here is just a snippet:

"Partial birth abortions (which Obama does not want restricted) do exactly what Gosnell was doing, only with the baby half in and half out. This makes a major ethical difference, apparently. Regular abortions do these things with the baby all the way in. Gosnell does these things to the baby with the baby all the way out. And he's the freak show? If he put the baby back inside the mother, in a reverse Caesarian, and cut the spinal cord then, is he a responsible medical professional again? If it happens here, in the middle of the room, it is a protected constitutional right. If he carries the baby over to the corner where the light is better, then he can be charged with murder. And he's the freak show? What about the lawyers and lobbyists that insist on this? What can be said on behalf of a nation that is even a little bit okay with this?

It is like having laws that say you can shoot your mom in the kitchen, but not in the living room -- and then demanding that everybody continue to respect the majesty of the law. But demented is as demented does. When the Court upheld Roe, their argument was that they did not want to undermine respect for the judicial system by overturning a terrible law. Right -- there is nothing like doubling down on lunacy to help persuade everybody that everything is just fine.

It is as though some horrible event happened in Canada that caused a stream of refugees to head for our border, and someone with very precise legal reasoning skills developed the schizophrenic policy of shooting the refugees on their side of the border, but demanding the ultimate in medical care for them if they managed to make it across the border alive. You can learn a lot of amazing things in a Harvard grad class.

Gosnell's problem is not with what he was doing, which countless progressives have defended with their special kind of passionate malice, but with where he was doing it. You see, he was doing it where people could see."

We are a nation haunted by the cries of the unborn.