On Feb. 18, 2010, the FBI raided the “Women’s Medical Society” in Philadelphia searching for evidence of illicit prescription drugs sales; what they found, instead, were horrors unimagined by the most gruesome Hollywood film: “The search team discovered fetal remains haphazardly stored throughout the clinic—in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers.” Investigators also “found a row of jars containing just the severed feet of fetuses,” which prosecutors believe were kept as “some kind of bizarre trophy.”
The mainstream media ignored the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the “doctor” who presided over this enclosed back-alley butcher-shop, for as long as it possibly could. But, eventually, even the uncurious media was shamed into incredulous coverage of this horrific story and its grizzly details. Pundits now wonder at the fact that safety inspections were inexplicably skipped and ask why repeated tips to government agencies were ignored. But their own resistance to this story is the very answer they seek: the media’s reaction exactly mimics the state’s – it was, of course, only a coincidental drug raid that finally brought Gosnell’s crimes to trial.
The real point of the story has not yet come into focus for the press. Auschwitz, after all, was not shut down for health code violations; the Allies did not come to create a cleaner, kinder death camp. Our outrage at Gosnell is not for dealing so much death in an unhygienic dump, nor for the inhumane, abusive, and racist way he treated the mothers from whose wombs he tore children, nor even for the barbaric relics which he kept. Our outrage is at the act itself; the story here is abortion as such. The murders that the media find heinous because they were committed after birth are just as abominable when they are inflicted in utero.
The soul-search that this story has caused in the American media is certainly welcome – and rather surprising. But the revelations that have produced this rare moment of reflection need to be restored to their rightful contexts. While the media was focused on the mistreatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Gosnell was severing the heads of healthy babies in downtown Philadelphia. And, last year, while Democrats were claiming that any opposition to abortion was tantamount to a “war on women,” the scores of women whom Gosnell scarred, the handful that he and his staff killed, and the untold hundreds, if not thousands, of little girls whose spines he cut with scissors lay forgotten in freezers, dumpsters, and food containers.
Members of the press – so quick to cover sensational stories and promote causes they find sympathetic – have not yet recognized the real reason why this story causes them unease: they helped create the conditions for the very crimes which they now say are so shocking. The distractions, linguistic distortions, and outright propaganda that they earnestly repeated had their predictable effect: these screens of euphemistic lies obscured defenseless infants in the womb, as well as the hideous crimes that Gosnell committed against them. What the media finds so disturbing in the horrific story of Gosnell crimes, then, is the echo of its own complicity, the terrible referents to which its own language referred.
In 1999, a sentimental, soft-focus film about an unlicensed abortionist was released to great success and critical acclaim: The Cider House Rules grossed $88 million while its real-life equivalent was being played out in a Philadelphia charnel house behind bloody, dirty doors. The movie now stands as a shameful symbol of the discredited conception of abortion peddled in the movies and repeated by the media.
Is it too much to hope that our culture’s long delayed day of reckoning with the real horror of prenatal infanticide has finally come? Will we, at last, weep, repent, and encounter the terrible truth which has been obfuscated and ignored for so long? Only time will tell; for now, however, we must simply mourn the dead.
