Jarring headline. Not that abortion doesn’t take human life every day. But startling to see that law enforcement and media actually noticed.

It took a particularly gruesome example to get their attention.

A Philadelphia doctor performed thousands of illegal late-term abortions and murdered newborns after inducing labour, prosecutors have said.

Dr Kermit Gosnell, 69, was charged with murder and other offences in the deaths of a patient and viable babies born as late as the eighth month of pregnancy.

Prosecutors said he made millions of dollars treating and sometimes maiming mostly poor minority women.

Nine clinic workers are also charged with murder and other counts.

Lawyers on both sides tried to find the right words to put to this horror, given abortion’s legality and all. The defense attorney called the allegations “very, very serious.” The DA started his statement acknowledging that abortion is “a hot-button topic.” He also said…

“A doctor who knowingly and systematically mistreats female patients, to the point that one of them dies in his so-called care, commits murder under the law.

“A doctor who cuts into the necks severing the spinal cords of living, breathing babies, who would survive with proper medical attention, is committing murder under the law.”

Horrible. But wait….that’s what happens in partial-birth abortions, which the pro-choice movement refers to as the ‘so-called partial-birth abortion’ procedure which they prefer to call ‘late-term abortions.’ And to look at this even more closely and clearly…living, breathing babies who survive abortion attempts would be protected under the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which a certain Illinois senator could not support when it came up for a vote….because it would confer constitutional protection on a fetus and render abortion illegal….

See how entangled this becomes when we follow an idea or argument through to its logical conclusion?

Justice Anthony Kennedy was so firm in his written opinion about the Carhart (partial-birth abortion) ruling that he spelled out clearly for the record what grisly things happen when a doctor performs one.

The New York Times stated flatly in its headline Doctor is Charged in Killing of Newborns. Here’s the lede:

An abortion doctor who served minority and immigrant women in his clinic in Philadelphia was charged with multiple counts of murder on Wednesday in the deaths of a woman and seven newborn babies whose spinal cords had been cut with scissors, the district attorney’s office said…

When labor was induced and a baby was born, Dr. Gosnell would kill it by cutting into its neck and severing its spinal cord in a process he referred to as “snipping.”

But the difference between that and the ‘late term abortion’ the pro-choice movement has vigorously defended is a matter of inches  and minutes. When the baby is in the middle of being born and the scissors are plunged into the base of his or her skull etc…it’s still called abortion. When the scissors end the life of that child moments later outside the birth canal, it’s murder.

That should generate a vigorous debate. As well as the obvious question raised in the grand jury report, noted by the Philadelphia Archdiocese.

The 262-page jury report, available at the Web site of the Philadelphia Office of the District Attorney, devotes considerable attention to the question, “how did this go on so long?”