On Kermit Gosnell and facing human evil.

e killed new­born babies—babies who had sur­vived the abor­tion and were already out­side the womb, living—by sev­er­ing their spinal cords with scis­sors.

Or he cut their necks.

He per­fo­rat­ed the wombs and bow­els of moth­ers with infect­ed instru­ments, and in two cas­es caused their deaths.

He took pic­tures of gen­i­talia, and—for what pur­pose the sto­ry in the Dai­ly Caller does­n’t say—saved the sev­ered feet of abort­ed babies.

He, accord­ing to the Grand Jury report, allowed his clin­ic to “reek of ani­mal urine, cour­tesy of the cats that were allowed to roam (and defe­cate) freely.” There is more:

Fur­ni­ture and blan­kets were stained with blood. Instru­ments were not prop­er­ly ster­il­ized. Dis­pos­able med­ical sup­plies were not dis­posed; they were reused, over and over again. Med­ical equipment—such as the defib­ril­la­tor, the EKG, the pulse oxime­ter, the blood pres­sure cuff—were gen­er­al­ly bro­ken; even when it worked, it was­n’t used. The emer­gency exit was pad­locked shut. And scat­tered through­out, in cab­i­nets, in the base­ment, in a freez­er, in jars and bags and plas­tic jugs, were fetal remains.

His toi­lets were clogged with abort­ed remains.

In the Dai­ly Caller sto­ry, there are these two curi­ous state­ments. First:

Over the years, many peo­ple came to know that some­thing was going on [t]here. But no one put a stop to it. … The alleged mal­prac­tice at Gos­nel­l’s clin­ic appar­ent­ly went ignored by for years by state agen­cies … despite numer­ous com­plaints.

And sec­ond:

Gos­nel­l’s ‘med­ical prac­tice’ was not set up to treat or help patients. His aim was not to give women con­trol over their bod­ies and their lives. He was not serv­ing his com­mu­ni­ty.

an inconvenient word

Evil is not a word we are meant to use. It is not polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect. It has the smell of wild-eyed judg­men­tal­ism and reli­gious super­ma­nia about it. Out­rage, we might say. Or, shock­ing. Or, trag­ic. Or, OMG!!!!!

But not: evil.

Why?

Or we might—as the sec­u­lar, left-wing media has done—ignore the sto­ry alto­geth­er. Why? The first, and most obvi­ous, rea­son that comes to mind is that they don’t want any neg­a­tive atten­tion focused upon the prac­tice of abor­tion; their judg­ment and their human­i­ty being col­ored by their pol­i­tics.

The less-often-talked-about rea­son, though, has to do with that most incon­ve­nient word “evil.” There are those who cow­er from the very idea the same way they cow­er from the human­i­ty of an unborn child. And they don’t want to talk about this sto­ry, because how can you talk about it with­out also talk­ing about the ugly real­i­ty of human evil? How can you talk about this sto­ry with­out being forced to admit the real­i­ty that you are run­ning away from; name­ly, that there is a moral law, that it is objec­tive, and that it flows from the very nature of who God is.

Good and evil are deter­mined by the real­i­ty and the nature of God Him­self, who cre­at­ed us and stamps each one of us with His image—from the just-fer­til­ized egg to the patient in the nurs­ing home with Alzheimer’s who can’t feed him­self any­more and does noth­ing but stare and gig­gle and sleep. And with­out that God—the God who cre­at­ed us and defines the Good—we no longer have our human­i­ty left.

That is what we don’t want to face.

But we must. T.S. Eliot once said, “Humankind can­not bear very much real­i­ty.” Rather, I think, humankind can­not bear very much denial.

When I was in high school, a his­to­ry teacher—the day before we were to begin study­ing the Holocaust—asked all his stu­dents to bring in a tele­phone book and drop it off first thing in the morn­ing. When his class­es met, there was a huge stack of hun­dreds of phone books in the front of the room.

He explained the visu­al prop: “Imag­ine all the peo­ple rep­re­sent­ed by all the names in all those phone books. That’s how many peo­ple Hitler killed.”

Count­ing Jews alone, Hitler killed about six mil­lion. Accord­ing to sta­tis­tics pro­vid­ed by Life Site News, count­ing the Unit­ed States alone, and only since Roe v. Wade, abor­tion has claimed the lives—as of Novem­ber 2012—of 55 mil­lion. My his­to­ry teacher would have need­ed nine times as many phone books.

Many stu­dents asked, dur­ing that unit on the Holo­caust, how peo­ple could allow it to hap­pen and remain silent and not try to stop it.

I don’t know the answer to that ques­tion. But don’t blame only the Ger­mans in the 1930s and 1940s. Look into your own heart. Exam­ine your own con­science.

What amazes me about the two state­ments I quot­ed above is what they reveal about the atti­tude toward abor­tion among the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion, out­side the con­text of pro-life activism. There seems to be a sug­ges­tion that author­i­ties did not want to look into Mr. Gos­nel­l’s prac­tice when com­plaints were made, because of pres­sures being brought to bear to keep things relat­ed to abor­tion hush-hush. There is also the sug­ges­tion that, as long as cer­tain stan­dards are followed—of pro­ce­dure, of clean­li­ness, of the train­ing of staff—then abor­tion is all well and good if its pur­pose is to help com­mu­ni­ties and give women choice over their bod­ies. Mr. Gos­nell was just this wild excep­tion, because he was in it for mon­ey.

What?

Look, I under­stand that many women are young, and their boyfriend got them in trou­ble, and they’re scared, and they don’t know what to do. But the politi­cians and pres­sure groups and doc­tors who make abor­tion pos­si­ble are in it for no oth­er rea­son than the prof­it. And for the prof­it they stand to make, they exploit women who are young, and whose boyfriend got them in trou­ble, and are scared, and don’t know what to do.

By what stan­dard do you say, Go ahead and mur­der the baby, as long as you do it inside the womb and you clean up after your­self?

The Ker­mit Gos­nell sto­ry should have us all ask­ing these ques­tions. Mr. Gos­nell mere­ly expos­es the evil of all abor­tion. It does­n’t mat­ter whether you sev­er the baby’s spinal cord inside the womb or out­side the womb. It does­n’t mat­ter whether you throw the remains in the toi­let or a cre­ma­to­ry or the ground [1].

It were bet­ter that a mill­stone were cast around your neck and you were drowned in the depths of the sea, than that you should offend one of these lit­tle ones.

mercy has a condition

God’s jus­tice is sure and fear­some. If Sodom and Gomor­rah had seen the things that we have seen, they would have repent­ed in sack­cloth and ash­es.

But there is anoth­er truth: The same God who died to save every sin­gle one of the babies mur­dered by abor­tion, also died to save Ker­mit Gos­nell.

In these cas­es, God’s mer­cy is hard­er to endure than God’s jus­tice.

But God’s mer­cy is depen­dent upon a con­di­tion.

Ker­mit Gos­nell must face the real­i­ty of human evil and his own par­tic­i­pa­tion in it. He must repent.

Thus may God have mer­cy on Ker­mit Gos­nell.

 

UPDATES

1. Conor Frieder­s­dorf at The Atlantic post­ed this sto­ry today offer­ing 14—count ’em—theories as to why the Gos­nell sto­ry has not received more media atten­tion. That’s a lot of the­o­ries. But I not­ed that not one of the four­teen involves a reluc­tance to talk about the real­i­ty of evil. To me, that sug­gests that even those who are talk­ing about it, even those who are angry that the MSM has not been talk­ing about this sto­ry, aren’t them­selves focused on this sto­ry’s con­nec­tion to the top­ic of Evil.

Here’s one of the few, from CNA News.

There may be more to say about this. …

2. Thomas McDon­ald at God and the Machine has some thoughts on “the wit­ness of mer­cy.”

ENDNOTES

[1] Jean­nie DeAn­ge­lis at Amer­i­can Thinker has more about this here: “the always-pre­dictible left will like­ly argue that hence­forth, legal­ized killing must be car­ried out in cheery, hygien­ic, gov­ern­ment-reg­u­lat­ed facil­i­ties. Then stricter man­dates can be put into place to ensure that prop­er­ly trained abor­tion­ists have mas­tered the fine art of ensur­ing that moth­ers live and the babies des­tined for the bio­haz­ard bag emerge dead from the womb as intend­ed.” In that day to come, we can be cer­tain that we won’t have to know of evil because a white pall of blithe and ster­il­ized unknow­ing­ness will be draped over it.