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Obama And The Banality Of Kermit Gosnell


“He just calmly watched and occasionally took notes with a vague hint of a smile on his face from time to time.” Thus did a reporter describe Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s demeanor in court at his trial. The imperturbable Mr. Gosnell was referred to trial by a grand jury after law enforcement officers had raided his office on a complaint that the doctor had engaged in drug dealing, and what the officers found on arrival shocked them. More than forty fetal bodies were stuffed in “bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even cat food containers.” Some were found frozen in an office refrigerator, and Mr. Gosnell maintained “rows of jars” containing several baby feet.

The Grand Jury found that Mr. Gosnell was possessed of a macabre sense of humor, joking that one of the corpses found at his abortion clinic – Baby A, weighing 6 pounds – was so large that he could “walk me to the bus stop.” After Mr. Gosnell had snipped the baby’s spine with a scissors, the method preferred by Mr. Gosnell to dispatch babies born alive after botched abortions – baby A’s remains were stuffed into a shoebox, its arms and legs trailing out. Another child, Baby C, was deposited on a countertop while Mr. Gosnell attended to the child’s mother. It lay for 20 minutes calmly breathing and waving its arms before an assistant snipped its neck.

The Grand Jury found that Mr. Gosnell had during his long career snipped the necks of hundreds of babies. The fates of Babies A and C “were not even the worst cases.” Many late term abortions were performed by Mr. Gosnell and his wife on Sundays, when no staff was on the premises to bear witness. These case files Mr. Gosnell prudently destroyed at his home. “We may never know,” the Grand Jury concluded, “the details of these cases.”

The expression “the banality of evil” was first coined by Hannah Arendt in a 1962 work entitled “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” Her working thesis was that the great evils of history as a general rule were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who, for whatever reason, accept as normal the operative conditions of their state and time.

How else to account for Mr. Gosnell’s “crimes,” as viewed by the Grand Jury?

Mr. Gosnell’s almost weary smile says it all: Why am I here when you who now sit in judgment upon me have made everything I have done permissible and even necessary? To be sure, my office was a bit untidy. But I am performing a legal and necessary social service, a service very much in demand. So then, apart from the shoe boxes, what exactly is the problem?

In the minds of men who lack moral imagination, great evil is necessarily reduced to banality – a question of law rather than a question of ethics; and this is especially true in times and places in which it is assumed that ethics is a product of the law, for in that case, everything that is legally permissible must also be morally right. Such moral dissonance is essential in the understanding of both Eichmann and Gosnell.

 
When some of Mr. Gosnell’s adult victims went to Planned Parenthood to complain of Mr. Gosnell’s house of horrors, they were told by staff to write a letter if they had not enjoyed Mr. Gosnell’s unsanitary – not to mention murderous – abortion factory.



Coincident with the prosecution of Mr. Gosnell, President Barack Obama, never one to retreat an inch in a battle in which he is leading from the front, bestowed at a conference in Washington some kind words upon Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States. Mr. Obama’s views on abortion while a U.S. Senator and president are consistent enough to have earned him a 100% approval vote from NARAL: He voted against a ban on partial birth abortion  in 2007, proposed a born-alive treatment law in 2008 and blocked a Born-Alive Infant Protection Act.

Continuing a theme stressed during his last presidential election, Mr. Obama told the group that the Republican “war on women” is still in full flower. "The fact is, after decades of progress, there's (sic) still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century. And they've been involved in an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women's health."

Mr. Gosnell’s post-third trimester abortion factory had not had a public inspection for 17 years before the grand jury returned indictments against him, one of the reasons his war on born infants continued so long without interruption. A 281 page report on Mr. Gosnell’s house of horrors concluded, “We have no idea how many facilities like Gosnell's have remained out of sight, out of mind of DOH for decades," because “ "officials [from the Philadelphia Department of Health had “concluded that inspections would be 'putting a barrier up to women' seeking abortions."

One may wonder whether Mr. Obama, at the rick of receiving a less than 100% rating from NARAL, would consider frequent inspections of abortion facilities as part of an unfortunate return to the 1950s, a time when the birth of the future president and staunch advocate of Planned parenthood was ten years short of a glint in his daddy’s eye.
  

Comments

Laurel O'Keefe said…
Repulsive but necessary to be aware that this has happened and is happening elsewhere in this country. This "DOCTOR" was enjoying what he was doing reveling in it. Obviously a sadist taking out and discarding live fetuses - tiny breathing babies treating them asd objects/ things.

Or....WORSE scenario perhaps this slug recognized fully their humanness and understood all too well thier pain making him akin to a sociopath of the Dr Mengele;

This terrible story reminds me of clip of film I saw of a Chinese market where people were selling various animals and animal products which are illegal in this country and are supposed to be illegal there; A women was skinning cats alive SELLING THEIR FUR and leaving the poor things skinned alive and still struggling to breathe, their little chests still moving in and out despearte to take in air to cling to life as they experienced what must have been terrible pain and fear! This little pold chinese woman was smiling and beckoning to buyers in the market like a used car salesman selling her wares. As these animals lay suffering from her butchery and avarice. She had no regard, nor any compassion for these animals that anyone recognized were in terrible distress and pain. That was 10-15 years ago and I so deeply affected that this gaggle of marketeers human beings could be so cruel and apathetic to any living beings in such overt pain, pain in which this case she had inflicted skinning them alive! I am sure some folks will take issue with the comparison of a cats and a babies, but suffering is suffering and it is a sadist that is able to disregard and in the case of this "Doctor": seemingly enjoy his power over these infanticides. This man needs to be hung out to dry c criminally and there is a special pl;ace in hell for him.
Anonymous said…
So the media goes and finds a guy whose hair Romney cut when he was 16, but this has been going on for years and not a peep - and they had to be goaded into covering at all by one of their own. A real reporter would now be looking for more of these "services." Then again, if one or more was found that would show Gosnell is NOT an aberration, which would ruin the (all ready thin) narrative being pushed on this story.
Don Pesci said…
Anon

Right.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/antiabortion-group-releases-videos-of-clinic-workers-discussing-live-births/2013/04/28/36678eb0-adf5-11e2-98ef-d1072ed3cc27_story.html
peter brush said…
"officials [from the Philadelphia Department of Health had “concluded that inspections would be 'putting a barrier up to women' seeking abortions."

--------------------
Alan Colmes:
If anti-abortion legislators had given women more options, Gosnell wouldn’t have done as much business. Tara Murtha outlines the issues from a local Philadelphia standpoint. Options for women diminished for one thing, and a lack of enforcement helped keep Gosnell in business.
Here in Pennsylvania, already one of the most anti-choice states in the country, the (primarily white male) legislature used the Gosnell case to pass some of the strictest abortion clinic regulations in the country. Though, at first blush, such action would make sense to anyone who doesn’t carefully follow abortion policy, it was, in short, a ruse. See, Gosnell’s clinic was operating illegally. The immense failure that enabled Gosnell’s years of alleged crimes to happen was not a failure of law; it was a failure of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia departments of health to enforce existing law.
http://www.alan.com/2013/04/12/restrictive-pennsylvania-abortion-laws-and-lack-of-enforcement-empowered-gosnell/
--------------------
Harry Reid:
“Government is not inherently bad. Government is inherently good.”

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