Kermit Gosnell: Epiphany for Birthers?
The conviction of murderer Kermit Gosnell reminds us of the horror of cruelly mauling helpless young people to death, as Matt Franck argued here at Public Discourse last week. Yet the coverage of the event uncovered a revealing confusion on the part of the press—many accounts referred to the infants murdered by Gosnell as “fetuses,” unconsciously recognizing the continuity of life from one minute to the next, from the beginning to the end of the miracle of life.
Of course, in this second decade of the twenty-first century it is perfectly legal, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to kill a 168-day-old fetus, provided she has not yet emerged from her mother, but a moment after she does the legal panorama is transformed and snipping her neck to make her stop crying is defined as murder.
But how different is the child? What transformation has come over her in the half dozen or so sweeps of the second hand around the clock on the wall of the abortionist's abattoir that take her from unwanted appendage to little girl?
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