Gosnell nightmare: What if there are more?

by Bob Unruh
30th April, 2013

The whispering has started: What if Gosnell isn’t the only one?
The closing arguments in the Philadelphia trial for late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell today mean that the jury soon will deliberate on whether he broke the law by removing babies from their mothers’ wombs and snipping their spinal cords, calling it an “abortion.”
The establishment media largely has ignored the horrors of the Gosnell case – the babies big enough to “walk” the doctor to the bus stop, the infants’ feet kept in jars, the remains kept in freezers. Some did report on the murder charges against Gosnell when the pressure mounted.
But the case has been portrayed by abortion supporters as a one-of-a-kind case by a rogue who didn’t operate the way the rest of the abortion industry does – with care, tact and an emphasis on women’s safety and health.
But over the weekend, LiveAction.org, which has conducted a series of undercover investigations of the abortion industry, released recordings showing Gosnell is not the only abortionist to advocate letting a child born after an abortion attempt die or killing it.
It was enough to prompt a media reaction.
In the New York Post, columnist Kyle Smith noted President Obama’s advocacy for children when he said, in support of gun control, “If there’s even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.”
Smith wondered what would happen if that standard of care was applied to the abortion industry.
“Obama bemoaned the influence of a rich, well-connected, absolutist influence group (the gun lobby) at the time. Will Gosnell’s murder spree cause the president to bemoan the influence of a rich, well-connected, absolutist influence group (the pro-abortion lobby) this time?” he wrote.
“Will he call for new laws? Better enforcement of existing laws? Will he say anything at all?”
Smith wrote: “Gosnell is not a one-off. A Delaware Planned Parenthood clinic recently suspended operations after five patients had to be rushed to the ER this year.”
And then there are the videos from LiveAction.org and its president, Lila Rose.
Here’s one:
One of the videos shows an undercover Live Action operative going to the Dr. Emil Women’s Health Center in the Bronx.
There, the undercover activist is told that if the unborn infant would emerge at home, after the abortion procedure is begun, she should “flush it.”
Also on video from another undercover sting-type operation by LiveAction.org is Washington, D.C., abortionist Cesare Santangelo, who told a potential patient that there would no be trouble with an infant who would survive an abortion procedure.
“Usually at this point in your pregnancy, it’s too early to survive, usually. It will expire shortly after birth. … It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point,” he said.
“We would not help it.”
In context, Santangelo said: “Technically – you know, legally we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive. But, you know, it probably wouldn’t. It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point. Let’s say you went into labor, the membranes ruptured, and you delivered before we got to the termination part of the procedure here, you know? Then we would do things – we would – we would not help it. We wouldn’t intubate. It would be, you know, uh, a person, a terminal person in the hospital, let’s say, that had cancer, you know? You wouldn’t do any extra procedures to help that person survive. Like ‘do not resuscitate’ orders. We would do the same things here.”
Attempting to explain his comments later, Santangelo said in a LifeNews.com report he was trying to reassure the woman.
“What I said is, basically I wouldn’t do anything extraordinary. We would call EMS. We would call 911. But I wouldn’t do intubation or anything. … You let nature take its course.”
The videos reveal, according to Rose, that Gosnell is “just the tip of the iceberg.”
The Post’s Smith said Rose’s recording “raises the alarming possibility that some abortion clinic employees think it’s illegal not to murder any infant who survives an abortion.”
“A similarly horrifying attitude prevailed at the Philadelphia abortion clinic of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who is facing five counts of murder,” he said.
“Gosnell both illegally aborted fetuses that were past 24 weeks and ignored the distinction between abortion and infanticide by inducing labor then severing the spinal cords of babies after they were born.”
The Bronx video reveals the pregnant woman asking, “I don’t want to, like, go into labor at home. Like, what if it like pops out, like, at home?”
“If it comes out, then it comes out. Flush it,” the Bronx abortion worker said.
At The American Catholic, Donald R. McClarey wrote: “One of the myths of the murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell is that he is not representative of the abortion industry. In regard to the manner in which Gosnell performed late term abortions, and his indifference to state laws restricting late-term abortions, Gosnell is typical.”
Then there were those who blasted the messenger.
At Media Matters for America, Jeremy Holden wrote: “Lila Rose, the proprietor of the group Live Action and a veteran anti-choice crusader with a long history of mounting deceptive campaigns targeting abortion rights, released a video on April 28 of an undercover activist’s experience at a New York women’s health clinic that she dishonestly said illustrated ‘illegal and inhuman practices’ that should lead to a murder investigation.”
The comments of abortion providers in the LiveAction videos indicate live births after abortions occur.
But Media Matters said the case is biased, “allowing anti-choice activists to make the entire discussion of reproductive health defined by an exceptionally rare procedure in order to achieve their political ends.”
Actress Patricia Heaton took to Twitter to express her opinion: “#Gosnell is just the less sanitary version of what goes on every day – the cheapening of human life. Lord have mercy.”
The Post’s Smith asked: “So, how many Gosnells are out there right now? Isn’t it in the interest of any of our various governments to find out?”
And he noted the absence of inspections at Gosnell’s business for years on end.
“Obama often speaks of the need to cool the rhetoric, to get opposing sides out of their trenches and meet in the middle to shake hands, Smith wrote. “His attempt to do so in the field of gun control was a miserable, indeed embarrassing, failure. But there are lots of abortion-related issues that enjoy broad public support from virtually everyone except extremist interest groups. Starting with the principle that abortion clinics should e at least a interesting to regulators as dogs or restaurants.”
Live Action’s previous videos have included documentation of gender-based abortions, a cover-up of sex trafficking, medically incorrect information dispensed by abortionists, a cover-up of sex abuse on children and how abortionists target race in abortions.

So Long, Queen Beatrix

by Bruce Bawer
April 30th, 2013

Today is Queen’s Day in the Netherlands. It’s also the last day on the job for the reigning monarch, Beatrix, who’s stepping down after having been on the throne since her own mother, Juliana, abdicated in 1980.
I’ve been in every kingdom in Europe, but in none of them, I think it’s fair to say, are the people as enthusiastic about their sovereign as in the Netherlands. Take Queen’s Day itself: it’s the Dutch equivalent to the Fourth of July, but the focus is not on the people and their history but on the head of state, whose birthday it celebrates. Go on a pub crawl in any Dutch town and you’ll encounter – guaranteed – one framed (and, quite frequently, enormous) portrait after another of Beatrix, usually over the bar, sometimes with a big vase of fresh tulips in front of it. One grows accustomed to hearing Brits complaining about the Windsors’ luxurious lifestyles, and in Norway the levels of cynicism about and indifference to the royals is surprisingly high. But don’t ever say a critical word about Beatrix to a Dutchman, unless you want to end up with a bicycle frame wrapped around your neck.
This high level of affection for Beatrix is rather surprising, given the fact that her ride hasn’t always been a smooth one. Start with her 1966 marriage to Claus von Amsberg, who before marrying her was a German diplomat, and, before that, a member of the Hitler Youth and Wehrmacht. In a country where the anti-German sentiment engendered by World War II is still palpable to this day – probably higher than anywhere else in Western Europe – the match didn’t go over well, and the wedding day was marked by massive protests.
Then there’s her wealth. Everyone knows that Queen Elizabeth II is rolling in dough, but so is Beatrix. When Forbes claimed in 1999 that Beatrix (who is exempt from taxes) was worth tens of billions of dollars, scandal erupted in the egalitarian Netherlands – not only over the amount but over the secretiveness surrounding the royal estate. (“She’s very, very clever at making sure no one can trace her money,” one expert told the Guardian.) More recent estimates of Beatrix’s wealth have been far lower, but even after reportedly being taken to the cleaners by Bernie Madoff (a claim the palace denied), her family fortune is still said to amount to something in the vicinity of a billion dollars. Last year, with Europe hurting economically, Spain’s King Juan Carlos, who isn’t especially rich and lives modestly, voluntarily returned some of his paycheck to the government; when asked if Beatrix would contemplate doing the same with her annual salary, which is in the million-dollar range (she also receives several million a year to cover expenses, and the 300 employees at her various residences, not counting security personnel, cost Dutch taxpayers about $50 million), her spokespeople replied with a quick, succinct nee. Yet the Dutch people still love her.
Fine. But for anyone who sincerely cares about the Netherlands, the defining day of Beatrix’s reign was November 12, 2004. On November 2, the Dutch movie director, author, and TV personality Theo van Gogh had been slaughtered in open daylight in an Amsterdam street by a Dutch-Moroccan jihadist. The murder was payback for van Gogh’s forthright criticism of the illiberality of Islam. But it was also a warning to Beatrix and her subjects. A knife thrust into van Gogh’s corpse held in place a note by the killer, Mohamed Bouyeri, declaring that, just like van Gogh, America, Europe, and the Netherlands would “go down.” It was a time at which any responsible head of state would have felt compelled to make a powerful symbolic statement about her country’s dedication to its freedoms and its determination not to yield to jihad.
Beatrix failed the test – ignominiously. She turned down the van Gogh family’s invitation to his funeral, saying she had other plans. Many Dutch people longed for her to speak to the nation about the atrocity, but she rejected that idea, too. What she did instead, apparently on the advice of Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen (a loathsome dhimmi of the first order), was to pay a visit to a Moroccan youth center in Amsterdam. There she spoke with a number of young Dutch-Moroccans, made remarks about the equality of all Dutch citizens, and was presented with a gift book about the history of Morocco. (One wonders how familiar these kids were with Dutch history.)
The center was in the city’s Oud-West neighborhood, and if Beatrix insisted on going there, it might at least have been useful had she found some way to bring up the tyrannical domination of Muslim families in that part of town by local religious authorities, who are their rulers in a much realer sense than she’s ever been. She might have expressed some concern about the countless Muslim wives and mothers in the neighborhood who don’t speak Dutch, rarely if ever get out of the house, and don’t even know where their children’s schools are located. She might have tried to acquire insights into the neighborhood’s sky-high levels of crime, unemployment, and welfare dependency. But no: Beatrix didn’t want to address reality. Look, after all, where a determination to face up to reality got van Gogh.
In an open letter addressed to Bouyeri, a group of van Gogh’s friends sarcastically posed as so many perfect dhimmis: “How terrible that everything went as it did. We had no idea that this was such a sensitive issue. We have learned our lesson….Could you soon give us guidelines showing us what are allowed and not allowed to say?…We will make it a point to study your religion to prevent further misunderstandings….That we brought you into such a difficult position is surely our own fault.” Alas, Beatrix, in her interactions with the Dutch-Moroccan youths that day, seemed to be following a script that was very much alone those disgraceful dhimmi lines.
As for Beatrix’s successor – well, let’s just say there’s no reason to dance in the streets. Beatrix’s son Willem-Alexander, who becomes king today, is a colorless dimwit who, in 2007, in an obvious reference to Geert Wilders, criticized politicians who use strong language when speaking of Islam and integration. “Not for nothing,” said the prince, “do we have the saying: ‘Speech is silver, silence is golden.” In other words, a guy who was born into a extremely well-paying job – the only requirement of which is that he keep his nose out of public affairs – was putting down a guy whose job, into which he had been placed by the Dutch electorate, obliges him to speak up. Don’t expect, then, that the new king of the Netherlands will do anything but hinder his most courageous subject’s efforts to rescue their country from disaster.