Something You Might Like: culture of death

Showing posts with label culture of death. Show all posts

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Not Ready for Prime News Coverage? Gosnell’s Drug and Death Center

Obama’s beloved policy, abortion on demand, is getting some (but amazingly little up to now) bad press in the wake of the trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, which a substantial percentage of Americans haven’t even yet heard of. If Dr. Gosnell’s lawyer is to be believed, Gosnell operated only a typical neighborhood clinic, and if you walk into an abortion clinic, abortion being the messy business that it is, you should expect to see blood on the walls, urine, etc. on the floor, fetal remains in the fridge, bodies of babies killed by “snipping” their spinal cords, and jars of severed fetal body parts in jars, not to mention heavily drugged women, many bleeding, some possibly dying. Gosnell’s alleged practice of using dirty instruments from one woman to the next, without cleaning, then, would seem to be a typical abortion-clinic matter. Gosnell claims that the prosecutors are trying to hold his clinic to a Mayo Clinic standard, when it is merely a neighborhood clinic. Of course, that’s because the prosecutors are, in his view, elitist and racist.

Here's one report by a Fox News affiliate (with added comments by the uploader of the video):

The charges and history of Gosnell’s gruesome but profitable butcher shop was surveyed in Fox News Channel's documentary “See No Evil,” hosted by Bret Baier, which details accounts of murders of viable babies by severing of their spinal cords, babies which exhibited the normal signs of being born alive, according to former Gosnell staffers. Some of those Gosnell employees pleaded guilty to murder and other charges. Based on Fox’s presentation and the Grand Jury report, it would appear that everything connected with the Gosnell establishment was tainted by murder, illegal abortions, illegal drug trafficking, filth, and generally, a horror show of blood.

If the Grand Jury report is to be believed, Gosnell is the worst mass killer or serial killer in American history. But he claims he is not guilty of anything illegal, just maybe a mistake here and there. It appears that in later times, Gosnell specialized in illegal late-term abortions (anesthesia optional at extra cost), which allegedly sometimes ended up in the murder of viable babies after their birth, and sometimes infection and death of the mother due to ill treatment in unsanitary conditions by unqualified staff members.

Not as bad as the crimes Gosnell is charged with, but, I believe, highly offensive and worthy of serious attention, are (1) the fact that Pennsylvania state authorities completely failed to investigate the clinic for decades, apparently due to political reasons, despite numerous complaints and lots of word-of-mouth evidence, patient deaths, etc., and (2) the mainstream media’s ridiculous lack of coverage, which, Fox reports, a poll found that people believe is mainly due to media bias. But of course, we don’t have media bias, right? It’s beyond bias, to the point of willful manipulation. What we have is a lapdog media that instead of “speaking truth to power,” instead distorts, neglects, and hides the truth on behalf of the powerful. Any way you look at it, it’s disgraceful. Of the major national news media outlets, it looks like only Fox News was willing to give the story anything like the coverage it warranted (see video below).

Like it or not, this episode is a serious test of America’s character, and highlights the political manipulation of law enforcement and media reporting. And it is a condemning indictment of public apathy and acquiescence to the unconscionable reality of the money-hungry, decency-be-damned death culture of the abortion industry. Gosnell’s shop is simply one of the most horrifying examples.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

The Culture of Death Marches On: What’s Next?

Photo: Dreamstime.com

An article by Jonah Goldberg (“The Pro-life, Pro-Infanticide Consensus”)* at National Review Online alerted me to an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (“After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”) that claims that killing newborn babies, whatever their condition, can be justified, since newborns are “morally irrelevant” and “have no moral right to life.” He cites an article (“Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say”) in the Telegraph (U.K.) that quotes and links to the journal article. The so-called “ethicists” who wrote the article are Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

The journal article abstract reads as follows:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

The authors call this kind of murder “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide.”

They “show” the moral irrelevance of newborns mainly by stating it. You can read the article to see that they do not support it with any argument that would convince anyone other than the most hardened abortion advocates. Yet to get this kind of drivel out there in a supposedly respected journal opens the door to wider consideration by people of borderline morality.

Goldberg says, “Now, my hunch is that for the vast majority of the civilized — and, frankly, uncivilized — world, the only thing these authors have demonstrated is their own ‘moral irrelevance.’”

This kind of thing could find a ready audience among Nazi war criminals, but if it achieves any level of acceptance in the “civilized” world, it is a disturbing and frightening development. Yet in the culture of death preferred by leftists, it should be shocking even if not surprising. Most people would object to killing a puppy, let alone a newborn baby.

The “slippery slope” of abortion which Goldberg mentions, indeed leads to infanticide as anti-abortion advocates warned, and as liberals said it wouldn’t.

We are on that slippery slope, and the sliding is starting to accelerate. Infanticide is a fact of life in many hospitals today, generally passive, and with attempted justification by some terrible condition of the infant. This paper recommends a further step by not considering the health of the infant.

It might be claimed that someone is harmed because she is prevented from becoming a person capable of appreciating her own being alive. Thus, for example, one might say that we would have been harmed if our mothers had chosen to have an abortion while they were pregnant with us or if they had killed us as soon as we were born. However, whereas you can benefit someone by bringing her into existence (if her life is worth living), it makes no sense to say that someone is harmed by being prevented from becoming an actual person. The reason is that, by virtue of our definition of the concept of ‘harm’ in the previous section, in order for a harm to occur, it is necessary that someone is in the condition of experiencing that harm.

If a potential person, like a fetus and a newborn, does not become an actual person, like you and us, then there is neither an actual nor a future person who can be harmed, which means that there is no harm at all. So, if you ask one of us if we would have been harmed, had our parents decided to kill us when we were fetuses or newborns, our answer is ‘no’, because they would have harmed someone who does not exist (the ‘us’ whom you are asking the question), which means no one. And if no one is harmed, then no harm occurred. [Emphasis added]

This so-called argument assumes that killing a newborn (or a fetus) does them no harm, nor does it do anyone else any harm. It is hard to imagine a more false argument. Fetuses and newborns definitely feel pain. They are harmed by their loss of life, as any murder victim would be. They are persons, like it or not. The parent who authorizes such a murder then incurs serious guilt which is not easily dealt with. All this, not to mention the horrifying spiritual consequences. But in one’s ivory-tower office, perhaps it’s easy to imagine oneself playing God.

Leftism in the West has become a secular religion, one that demands human sacrifices. Many millions of abortions, of which a very small percentage involved rape, incest, or life of the mother, have been performed, depriving the world of people we’ll never know.

Abortion is the cultural cancer eating away at civilization and spreading into other forms of death: “voluntary” euthanasia that soon progresses to murder, devaluation of little life that leads in due course to child abuse, sexualization of children and other evils. What next? “Ethicists” recommending cannibalism?

In ancient days, the Israelites had as neighbors some tribes that sacrificed their children by fire to the idol Molech. The Israelites were sternly warned to have nothing to do with those people, but some got involved with this evil practice.

Leftism involves the strong denunciation of Judeo-Christian morality, which we see happening increasingly in American society. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, when people give up believing in God, they won’t simply believe in nothing; far worse, they’ll believe in anything.

If a newborn’s life (or a fetus’s) is so inconsequential that it may be destroyed at will, where is the boundary? Wherever it is, it is soon to fall if these “ethicists’” thinking is given acceptance. May God help us to restore sanity and order to our civilization.

* * *

*Goldberg notes that while pro-life and pro-infanticide views are polar opposites, they agree that killing a fetus is morally like killing a baby.