I was reading some of the statewide news articles today in the Lexington Herald-Leader and the Courier Journal, when an op-ed headline from the Leader caught my attention:
Protect women from Gosnells; Keep abortion safe and legal
The lead in the piece said the same idea worded differently:
If you want the Kermit Gosnells of the world to multiply and proper, outlaw abortion.
Followed by the line that gave me the idea for the title for my own article:
...Or keep putting up so many barriers that women must subject themselves to the kind of criminal butchery that earned the rogue doctor of Philadelphia three life sentences. [Emphasis definitely mine.]
I have a couple of objections to this that I'd like to highlight:
- The author is making the rather large and dangerous assumption that Gosnell was a "rogue" physician, an outlier, the exception and not the rule. Maybe. Maybe not. My response is to ask the author (or anyone else making this claim, and there are lots and lots and lots who are) to prove it. None of them can or have attempted to. Just a bald claim, often made casually as if to imply there's no need to further investigate such a no-duh sort of 'fact.'
- Criminal butchery? Really? Does the author even know how abortions are performed? During one kind of "medical procedure" a child's body is twisted and torn into pieces until the body is fully removed from the mother's womb. In another the child is given a medically induced fatal heart attack, dismembered and removed piece by piece. In yet another, the child is forced to swallow a fatal saline solution injected into the womb, which has the added effect of severely burning the child's skin. If the author thinks these aren't a "kind of criminal butchery" then I'd hate to think of whatever would meet their definition of it.
How about we work to create a society that doesn't celebrate the right to kill an unborn child? The only argument that abortion supporters never seem to want to fully engage in is the question of life. If an unborn child isn't alive why must "procedures" be used to "terminate" the non-life? If there's no life, what's the need for a fatal saline solution that poisons the child? Why give a medically-induced heart attack for a heart that maintains no life? It sure seems like there is a life there to me. Evidently these procedures are designed to kill something in order to remove the child from the woman...if its not life what else in the world is it?