Thursday, January 20, 2011
The horror in Philadelphia
I have started several times writing a post about the horrifying recent reports coming from Philadelphia about "[a] filthy abortion mill where prosecutors say babies were delivered alive and killed with scissors".
In its report, the grand jury said failures of the Pennsylvania Department of Health and other agencies allowed Gosnell's "house of horrors" to persist for decades, with baby body parts on the shelves and clogging the plumbing, a 15-year-old high school student performing intravenous anesthesia, and Gosnell's wife, a cosmetologist, performing late-term procedures. . . .
Gosnell also kept jars of severed feet on his shelves, Williams said. Gosnell also had a taste for macabre jokes, once muttering that a nearly six-pound baby born alive to a 17-year-old who was 7 1/2 months pregnant could "walk me to the bus stop," the report said.
Under Pennsylvania law, abortions are illegal after 24 weeks of pregnancy, or just under six months, and most doctors won't perform them after 20 weeks because of the risks, prosecutors said. . . .
[In fact, my understanding is that not all abortions are illegal in Pennsylvania "after 24 weeks of pregnancy". UPDATE: I checked the soundness of this understanding and it now seems to me that, in fact, Pennsylvania's "health" exception is fairly robust and so it now seems accurate to me to say that most -- if not almost all -- abortions are illegal in Pennsylvania after 24 weeks.]
What can one say? The attack in Tucson -- the "massacre", it is often and reasonably called -- on innocent public servants and bystanders by a deeply disturbed young man prompted not only hasty and unfounded partisan attacks, but also more sober reflections about (among other things) gun-control laws, legal protections for students' privacy, the mental-health system, and the "tone" of our political discourse. Will these revelations from Philadelphia prompt any similar or analogous kinds of reflection, even critical self-examination?
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/01/the-horror-in-philadelphia.html
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the
comment feed
for this post.
This was certainly a horrific situation in Philadelphia, but I am not sure why the abortion-rights advocates should react any differently to it than the gun-rights advocates did to the shootings in Tucson.
The following is a generalization and not meant to apply to any particular group or individual, but I think political conservatives who might tend to want the Philadelphia incident to result in some kind of reform or another would overlap to a significant degree with the political conservatives who do not want to see tighter regulations on guns, more money spent on mental health, and so on, as a response to the Tucson incident.