Over the years, Gosnell specialized more and more in late-term abortions, and his preferred method in cases of the most advanced pregnancies was to induce labor in the women who came to him. What resulted in hundreds of cases was a live birth. And thus the issue that has garnered the most attention to the Gosnell case: The doctor is charged with murdering seven babies born alive in his clinic, whom he, or one of his staff under his direction, killed in the first minutes of their post-natal lives by “snipping” their spinal cords (that was the doctor’s own word for it) with scissors at the neck. The grand jury is morally certain there were many hundreds of “snipping” victims, but these seven are the only ones of whose deaths there is solid evidence today.The women who came to Gosnell’s clinic — poor and desperate, late in their pregnancies, and willing for whatever reason to endure the horrors of his ministrations — wanted to be rid of their babies. This result he provided them. But it is difficult to locate the moral difference between the deaths Gosnell brought about in utero and those he accomplished post-natally. Does an unborn child at 26 weeks of fetal development have less moral standing than a born child at 25 weeks of fetal development? Does the latter’s living and breathing outside the womb for ten minutes, or ten seconds, confer a status that the former lacks? How can that be?
This is the absurd moral corner into which the Supreme Court backed us in 1973. Not that it bothered Dr. Gosnell. He was in the getting-rid-of-babies business, and no one was going to be sent home with a live one. Viewed in a coldly rational light, the doctor’s logic was admirably consistent: before birth, after birth, it made no difference.
In Roe, the Court’s majority opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun assured readers that in the late stages of pregnancy, when a fetus was “viable” and thus a live birth was possible, the state could prohibit abortion entirely. Except not really entirely: Blackmun carved out an exception where an abortion “is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.”
This seems a minor and reasonable exception. But in the companion case of Doe v. Bolton, decided the same day, Blackmun wrote for the Court that in determining what is “necessary” for the “health” of a pregnant woman seeking an abortion, a physician’s “medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age — relevant to the wellbeing of the patient.” Such broad language resulted, in practice, in the total elimination of the state’s power to prohibit post-viability abortions, not just a narrow exception to that power. All that is required to defeat any attempted prohibition is a woman who desires an abortion and a doctor who wishes to provide one. The pregnant woman’s emotional health or familial situation can always be cited afterward, if need be, as a complete and perfect defense.
This is how America’s regime of abortion on demand came about. Since 1973, states have been powerless to prosecute an abortion at any stage of pregnancy, if the charge is merely that the procedure was undertaken too late, or after viability. Thanks to Doe, prosecutors have simply desisted from bringing criminal cases on such a basis. And unscrupulous doctors have been licensed to kill viable unborn children. Hundreds, if not thousands, are aborted every year.
This is the legacy of Roe and Doe. A culture which had been rooted in respect for the sanctity of every human life has been unhinged from its moral moorings and cast adrift in a sea of moral relativism which not only elevates the value of one life over another but also celebrates the destruction of the less valued life as an exercise of a person's "fundamental rights." It is a despicable legacy of death, slaughter, and bloodshed. But while the Gosnell case puts his particular abortion practice in the spotlight, he is undoubtedly not the only one.
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