Unthinkable ... unspeakable.

• Author: Barber, Matt
• Position: WORDS & IMAGES - Barack Obama on abortion

WHY ARE WE SURPRISED that an abortionist and his staff would, behind the walls of an always-lethal abortion clinic, commit one of the most horrific serial killings in U.S. history? What did you think abortionists do, heal people? Why are we taken aback that there was no oversight, no regulation, or that Planned Parenthood, though privy to the clinic's filthy, medieval conditions, refused to report it to the Department of Health? After all, Planned Parenthood, Pres. Barack Obama, and the Democratic National Committee vehemently have opposed all laws--such as those in Virginia, Mississippi, and elsewhere--designed to prevent exactly the same kind of squalid conditions found in Kermit Gosnell's clinic (and others), laws that simply direct abortion mills to meet the same minimal safety standards required of all other medical facilities. You did not really buy that whole "women's health" nonsense, did you?

Who cares about "blood smeared walls," or babies left to drown in toilets, or snipped spinal cords, or dismembered body parts kept in jars, or screaming, crying newborns silenced by decapitation? What did you think women were "choosing" with abortion, some kind of medical treatment? We are not removing a tumor here. The only difference between what happened in Gosnell's Philadelphia clinic and what happens every day in Planned Parenthoods across the country can be measured by a matter of inches--by the child's proximity to his or her mother in the room. Besides, what is an abortionist to do if that resilient little human life does survive, if the baby is born alive?--or, as Gosnell's attorney Jack McMahon noted during the trial, it is "ludicrous ... to say a baby is born alive because it moves one time." Apparently, we anti-choice zealots do not get to define the terms here. One man's "alive" is another woman's "unwanted pregnancy."

Moreover, why are we stunned that the mainstream media has spiked a story with all the bloody and salacious newsworthy trappings that, had abortion not been involved, would have filled the news cycle 24/7? You think some now-barren, 40-something copy editor who has had a few abortions herself wants to draw attention to its grisly reality? You think she wants to be reminded of her own string of dismembered little choices? No, better to sip apple-tinis with the boys down at the National Press Club and pretend it never happened. Now that's reproductive freedom--and freedom of the press.

In reality, to the media...