The Gosnell nightmare: Ideas have consequences
By Gene Tarne – 06/14/13 03:00 PM ET
The horrors revealed at the trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell have put abortion advocates on the defensive. One Pennsylvania newspaper has characterized the Gosnell case as “the abortion industry’s worst nightmare.”
The trial is over, but the details of Gosnell’s crimes are haunting. Gosnell would “snip” the spine of newborn infants, killing the child — a grisly circumvention of the partial-birth abortion ban, which involves puncturing the skull of a born-alive infant and suctioning out the brain.
The abortion industry dismisses Gosnell as an “outlier” not reflective of most abortionists. However, that assertion should not obscure the fact that arguments justifying late-term abortions and infanticide are not outliers among abortion advocates. Indeed, over the past 40 years, such arguments have been repeatedly made.
In 1972, Michael Tooley published “Abortion and Infanticide.” Tooley offered an ethical rationale for both. He expanded on this in a 1983 book by the same name.
In his books Practical Ethics (1979) and Rethinking Life and Death (1994), Princeton University Professor Peter Singer offers a similar argument in defense of abortion and infanticide. “If we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants.”