By Dave Andrusko
The story that ran in the relentlessly pro-abortion Slate.com this week was listed under the categories of “human interest” and “Faith-based.” Hmmm.
So what is Ruth Graham writing about? “The White House Is Hosting a Screening of the Gory Anti-Abortion Film Gosnell.”
Who was Kermit Gosnell? This was a man prosecutors said would make $10,000-$15,000 a night performing late, late abortions almost entirely on poor women of color.
So, why, according to Graham, is President Trump’s administration inviting “pro-life activists [such as National Right to Life] and others” to a showing of the Gosnell film which “depicts second- and third-trimester abortions in gruesome detail”?
Seemingly, she writes, “as a gesture of support for the anti-abortion activist community at a moment when “late-term” abortions have become the focus of heated political and cultural debate.”
Let’s unpack the story, adding to the mix that the viewing comes (as Graham describes it) “just a few weeks after another bloody anti-abortion film, Unplanned, opened at No. 4 at the box office, taking in more than $6 million.”
*Graham puts late-term abortions in quotation marks, as if to suggest this is a collective hallucination on the part of “the anti-abortion activist community.” However, as NRLC and NRL News Today have written about dozens and dozens and dozens of times, “late-term” abortions are not rare.
At least 275 facilities offer abortions past 20 weeks fetal age. A very conservative estimate is that 11,000 to 13,000 abortions are performed on babies after 20 weeks. As NRLC President Carol Tobias once said, “If an epidemic swept neonatal intensive care units and killed 11,000 very premature infants, it would not be dismissed as a ‘rare’ event – it would be headline news on every channel, a first-order public health crisis.”
*Gosnell “depicts second- and third-trimester abortions in gruesome detail.” In fact, the movie treats what are, after all, hideous, soul-destroying “procedures” in the least shocking fashion possible. And that was not easy.
Remember why Gosnell was convicted and of what he was convicted of. He specialized in late, late abortions. Probably because of indifference and because he did not trust his “skills” (Gosnell was not an ob-gyn), he delivered the babies alive and then murdered them by severing their spinal cords.
The Philadelphia jury could only convict him on three counts of first-degree murder because Gosnell threw away almost all the medical records. The Grand Jury concluded that he had killed hundreds of viable babies.
Graham manages to miss that Gosnell was also convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 death of Karnamaya Mongar, Mongar died of a Demerol overdose during an abortion at Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society. Another woman, Semika Shaw, died following an abortion at Gosnell’s clinic in March 2000.
*Graham also avoids talking about the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. This is about extending equal (but no more) medical care to babies who survive abortions as any other baby of a similar gestational age. Exactly the kinds of defenseless babies that Gosnell slaughtered with abandoned.
*Lastly, Graham writes about “another bloody anti-abortion film, Unplanned,” which is about Abby Johnson, Planned Parenthood “Employee of the Year” turned pro-lifer.
In the movie, we see an unborn baby in the ultrasound as he or she is being pulled apart by the abortionist. At the last second, the remainder of the baby’s body is sucked out of their mother’s womb and into a canister.
This may bother Graham, but how would you realistically portray an ultrasound-guided abortion of a 13-week-old unborn baby without blood?
And in a great triumph of truth-telling, by portraying Johnson’s own second abortion, Unplanned shows what a “medication” (chemical) abortion actually is. It, too, is a bloody mess that leaves women oft-times in unimaginable levels of pain. The deaths of dozens of women have been associated with chemical abortions and there have been thousands of “adverse effects.”
By the way, a “gesture of support” from the White House? Good, great, wonderful. This President has raised high the pro-life banner going all the way back to his campaign.
Why wouldn’t we expect him to support us now as we labor to open the public’s eye to the cruelty and utter inhumanity of abortion?
Kudos to President Trump and his administration.