This morning I heard a report about the jury who convicted Kermit Gosnell of the murder of several babies. Here are a few paragraphs from the story and my responses:
“He started out as a good, practicing doctor. But eventually, it just became a money-generating machine,” juror Joseph Carroll said Wednesday, after Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison without parole. “Most of us felt it probably came down to a greed factor.”
Greed is constantly blamed for all sorts of ills in our modern American society. I am certainly not pro-greed, but I take the fins versus sharks approach on this one (I think this comes from Gospel Transformation). Are we looking for the visual marker of the evil or are we actually trying to deal with the evil itself? Unfortunately, in this case it seems likely that everyone will continue to talk about the external circumstances and incentives that ‘drove’ this man to such heinous crimes and forget about the inherent corruptibility of the human soul.
Gosnell, 72, had been the rare black student from his working-class neighborhood to go to medical school. He became an early proponent of therapeutic abortions in the 1960s and ’70s, and returned from a stint in New York City to open up a clinic in the impoverished Mantua neighborhood, near where he had grown up as the only child of a gas station operator and government clerk.
At this point I do not know whether to laugh or vomit. Is a therapeutic abortion like a therapeutic massage? That word does not seem like it could be used for both things…
His Women’s Medical Center treated the poor, immigrants and teens, offering free basic medical care to elderly people, many of whom were seen in recent years by unlicensed doctor Eileen O’Neill.
But Gosnell made millions performing abortions, charging up to $2,500 or more in cash if women were in their second or third trimester. District Attorney R. Seth Williams said Wednesday that Gosnell put women through labor, then killed their babies, “because it’s cheaper to do that.”
He was a good guy, a formerly poor man working his way out of a tough neighborhood. He wanted to give back to his community by providing necessary abortions to those in need, like “the poor, immigrants and teens.” It was that nasty greed that drove him to start murdering babies…
Gosnell by then was also attracting lawsuits from women who said they were injured during botched abortions at his clinic. One woman said he left fetal remains inside her, another sued over a perforated uterus, and a trial witness said she spent two weeks in a hospital with sepsis after an abortion at age 17 that allegedly took place when she was nearly 30 weeks, or more than seven months, pregnant. Stunned clinic workers took cellphone photos of that baby boy, photos that provided key evidence in the murder charge over “Baby A.”
How about this as a process: 1. You do a bad thing and no one cares (‘Therapeutic abortions’). 2. You try something else and no one cares (Cutting the spinal cords of wriggling babies). 3. You diversify (Selling painkillers). Still no one cares. 4. You get caught and suddenly everyone is indignant. But where does this indignant attitude come from when the boundaries between good and evil are imaginary things invented by lawyers and judges in a courtroom?
“This is Philadelphia in the year 2013. This isn’t some third-world country,” Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore said in opening statements in March.
I can agree with half of that statement. The rest seems to cling to some belief in American Exceptionalism. It reeks of arrogant thoughts like ‘nothing like this could possibly happen in our advanced civilization.’
“To call him a monster, maybe it’s convenient for the press, but that is not accurate,” McMahon said Wednesday. “He never intended to kill a live baby.”
This is where Bill Cosby would say, “Riiiiiiight.”
With his fate sealed, Gosnell plans to plead guilty to federal drug charges related to his high-volume pain medicine practice, McMahon said. And his client hopes people will someday understand his motives. McMahon has noted that his client didn’t pluck women off the street and force them to have abortions.
This is not a rare case of one evil man. There are plenty of complicit people throughout this affair: the women who came for the abortions (both ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’), the workers in the clinic, Gosnell, and the government. This line of thinking is not popular, as ours is a society that hopes to avoid thinking about the imaginary line government has created between the aborting of fetuses and the murder of infants.
Filed under: Good and Evil, Government overreach, I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means, What a curmudgeon hears, Why am I not surprised? Tagged: abortion, civilization, evil, Gosnell, jury, Kermit, murder
