Alien Termination

By Mr. Curmudgeon:

You might not know it, but a Philadelphia doctor is on trial for his life. Most of his victims, say prosecutors, were babies born in his clinic, the West Philadelphia Women’s Medical Society, where Dr. Kermit Gosnell worked unmolested for seventeen years. The reason you won’t hear much about the doctor’s trial is that it conflicts with the political narrative of the Democratic Party and its powerful mainstream media mouthpiece.

Abortion, you see, is sacred. Any limits placed upon its practice or funding are considered acts of war perpetrated against women. By this measure, Dr. Gosnell was a stalwart soldier in the war to protect a “woman’s right to choose.”

That narrative suffered a setback when the Philadelphia Grand Jury indicted Dr. Gosnell on seven counts of murder for performing late-term abortions, in which he and his staff are accused of killing still-living babies by severing their spinal cords – with scissors. The unsanitary conditions of the clinic, its untrained staff and the improper use of drugs, said the grand jury, also led to the deaths of at least two mothers.

In court testimony, a former employee of Gosnell recalled that during one abortion procedure she heard the baby scream. “I can’t describe it,” she said, “It sounded like a little alien.”

Her description is telling. She chose to define the unearthly cries of a dying baby as “alien.” She, of course, meant visitors from other worlds as depicted in science fiction, but she could have been describing American society’s view of the unwelcomed suspended object of inner space – a child in its mother’s womb. Their otherness is a product of time.

Writing for the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority, Associate Justice Harry Blackman wrote in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, “With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb.” The high court based its decision on the prevailing medical understanding that “viability” begins after the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy. This relegated human life falling before that time-frame as an “unviable tissue mass.”

Having been robbed of their humanity, it’s understandable why the “alien” screams of an aborted, dehumanized baby struggling for life might startle killers in a Philadelphia abortion clinic.

The Supreme Court has a long, dehumanizing tradition. In its 1857 Dred Scott decision, the high court ruled Americans of African descent had no standing before any court in the land, that they were nothing more than property, barred from citizenship.

Two months later, an outraged Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave, delivered an impassioned speech on behalf of the dehumanized Dred Scott at the American Abolition Society of New York:

“Your fathers have said that man’s right to liberty is self-evident. There is no need of argument to make it clear. The voices of nature, of conscience, of reason, and of revelation, proclaim it as the right of all rights, the foundation of all trust, and of all responsibility. Man was born with it. It was his before he comprehended it. The deed conveying it to him is written in the center of his soul, and is recorded in Heaven. The sun in the sky is not more palpable to the sight than man’s right to liberty is to the moral vision. To decide against this right in the person of Dred Scott, or the humblest and most whip-scarred bondman in the land, is to decide against God. It is an open rebellion against God’s government. It is an attempt to undo what God has done, to blot out the broad distinction instituted by the All-Wise between men and things, and to change the image and superscription of the ever-living God into a speechless piece of merchandise.”

Douglass’ remarks – and his understanding of natural, God-given rights – proved he was no “speechless piece of merchandise” … in direct contradiction to the evil notions of the nation’s high court.

In a West Philadelphia abortion mill, the cry of a dying baby, born with a self-evident right to life and liberty (even “before he comprehended it”), was the equal of Douglass in eloquence.