Why I don't think Kermit Gosnell should get the death penalty

DA to seek death penalty for abortionist Gosnell:

Assistant District Attorneys Joanne Pescatore and Christine Wechsler confirmed that the death penalty is under review for former Gosnell employees Lynda Williams, 42, of Wilmington; Steven Massof, 48, of Pittsburgh; and Adrienne Moton, 33, of Upper Darby.

All three are accused of aiding Gosnell in seven abortions in which infants were born live and viable - and then allegedly killed by the 70-year-old physician.

.... Prosecutors officially notified defense attorney Jack McMahon that they will seek death by lethal injection if a jury finds Gosnell guilty of first-degree murder in the abortions that took place at his Women's Medical Society clinic at 3801 Lancaster Ave.

I am probably nearly as astonished as Kermit Gosnell is himself that he is being so vigorously prosecuted for what he was doing. Anybody who has paid close attention to abortion practice in America knows that Gosnell’s crimes were far from unique, and that he would have had absolutely no reason to believe that he would be on trial for his life.

Yes, to the average layman, it’s glaringly obvious that the things that went on in that clinic were appalling and inexcusable. But Kermit Gosnell was not an ordinary layman. He was part of the inner workings of abortion in America, and they operate in a different world.

Perhaps the best way to explain this to a jury would be to recall the Millgram Experiment, in which ordinary volunteers administered what they were made to believe were fatal electric shocks to other volunteers. The presence of an authority figure reassuring the participants that their actions were acceptable overrode ordinary compassion and common sense.

The moral authorities to whom Kermit Gosnell would look were doing nothing but reassuring him of the justice of his practices:

The National Abortion Federation, a highly respected professional organization, was providing patients to him for illegal third trimester abortions. They treated him as if he was a poor woman’s George Tiller – who himself blatantly performed illegal third-trimester abortions and was able to do so with impunity because of an abortion-rights political atmosphere. If George Tiller, caught dead to rights performing elective third-trimester abortions, was “a national treasure”, performing “vital reproductive health care services”, how could Gosnell believe himself to be anything else? Our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, was Governor of Kansas when her own Attorney General was trying to prosecute Tiller; her appointees rallied around and protected him, just as they are currently protecting a Planned Parenthood facility that brazenly performs illegal third-trimester abortions.

The President of the United States himself, when he was a State Senator in Illinois, went on record as believing that babies born alive during abortions are not to be afforded the same care and treatment as other babies, because to do so would unduly “burden” the woman and her doctor.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, when looking into the harvesting of fetal tissues and organs for sale at an abortion clinic in Overland Park, Kansas, pressed no charges, in spite of credible witness testimony – substantiated with records – that viable infants were being aborted and their body parts sold. The witness reported, very credibly, that the doctor would often present him with a live baby – up to 30 weeks of gestation – and that when the witness protested that the baby was alive, the doctor would drown it in saline or snap its neck. (Note that even abortion opponent Mark Crutcher had become so calloused by extended exposure to the abortion mentality that he instructed Dean Alberty to return to the clinic and keep gathering evidence, rater than instructing him that the next time he was presented wit a live baby he should call 911 and save the child's life -- a decision Crutcher's staff also evidently went along with.)

Law enforcement around the country have treated infants born alive during abortions as not worthy of protection, and have hesitated to press charges even with multiple witnesses and a child’s corpse as evidence. Even when such cases are prosecuted, as in the William Waddill case in California, prosecutors are often unable to get a conviction because just one strong abortion rights advocate on the jury can result in a hung jury.

Planned Parenthood has been caught on tape admitting that they sometimes have live births – but that the mothers need not fear being saddled with a live baby to take home. And, as I mentioned before, they have been caught doing illegal third trimester abortions, counting on Sebelius cronies to go on the offensive for them.

Every authority figure in Kermit Gosnell’s moral universe held that the right to abortion was absolute, and that to so much as question the woman’s commitment to going through with the procedure was “condescending” and evil. And this holding of the right to abortion as absolute extended past the birth of the child, as long as the effort to end the child’s life began while he or she was still in the uterus.

I have provided on this blog and elsewhere an abundance of examples of filthy abortion mills, unqualified staff administering general anesthesia, live babies being killed or left to die, and patients killed by carelessness, which didn’t even shut down a clinic temporarily or result in the loss of a medical license. That Kermit Gosnell is to be tried for his life for doing what our society has relegated to being entirely at his own discretion is inexcusable.

That his employees -- who had not only those moral authorities but Gosnell himself reassuring them that they were doing right -- should face the death penalty is staggering.

In normal society, routinely murdering infants for money would indeed be a capital crime. But the seedy abortion underbelly we have permitted to thrive is not a normal society. It's a death machine, lauded and supported up to and including the President and the Supreme Court.

We created this monster. We have no business taking out our own guilt on him.