The man who may have been the most prolific mass murderer in American history died in prison last week at age 85. Kermit Gosnell, a Pennsylvania abortionist, was convicted in 2013 of murdering three babies.
Now, if your first thought is, “Yes, that’s what abortionists do. They kill babies. Others have probably killed more than he did,” I understand your point. But Gosnell’s case carried an added horror: infanticide. He killed babies who had already been born. That means everyone in the abortion debate should agree that these were human beings with rights.
Gosnell’s crimes reveal something ugly about American culture — something many would rather not face. They also reveal the providence of God.
Even the most ardent abortion-rights advocate usually stops short of openly defending infanticide. Most draw the line at first breath. When Peter Singer made the case for infanticide, the argument was so grotesque that many assumed he was merely pushing abortion logic to the edge to expose its absurdity.
A grand jury concluded that Gosnell likely killed hundreds of babies this way, though their bodies were destroyed and will never be recovered. The details remain horrific. Witnesses reported that if babies were breathing or showing signs of life, Gosnell would cut their spinal cords with scissors. The grand jury described his clinic, the Women’s Medical Society, as a “house of horrors.” Investigators found fetal remains stored in plastic bags, milk jugs, cat-food containers, and specimen cups. They found blood on the floor and furniture, cat feces, dust, and bags of biohazard waste piling up in the basement and freezer.
As a philosopher, I find myself asking two questions: How can a human being do such things to babies? And what does that say about our world?
In “The Brothers Karamazov,” Ivan Karamazov wonders whether God can exist if children suffer. He is less troubled by the suffering of adults, who may deserve some of what they endure. But when children suffer, his doubts explode. Gosnell’s crimes would have pushed Ivan past outrage and into open metaphysical revolt. Where was God when this happened?
But I would reframe the question. Where were we?
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Gosnell’s story broke through — barely — only because of the infanticide. Had he confined himself to killing babies in the womb, countless people would have walked past his clinic every day and thought nothing of it. That is part of the indictment. The same culture that teaches young Ivan Karamazovs to doubt God often teaches them to defend abortion. Many of the professors who train students to sneer at divine justice also promote the practice that made Gosnell possible.
Could anything be more demonic?
It is almost as if they are saying, “If God existed, then I could not exist, because God would not permit evil like me.”
Some Democrats have defended late-term abortion and even flirted with arguments that edge toward Singer’s position. Such people cannot turn around and blame God for Gosnell. They are implicated in the same moral disorder. But the question presses beyond them. What sort of world should we expect when large numbers of people accept the killing of babies in the womb as normal?
Gosnell’s crimes reveal something ugly about American culture — something many would rather not face. They also reveal the providence of God, both in judging sin and in calling a nation to repent. That pattern runs throughout the Old Testament prophets.
America failed to learn the lesson of human dignity from the evil of slavery. Now many of the same arguments once used to justify slavery reappear in defense of abortion: They are not persons with legal rights; they are inferior; their lives depend on the will of another. The language changes. The moral logic does not.
And the logic has grown uglier over time.
Roe v. Wade was framed as a matter of medical privacy. The public, we were told, had no right to know what passed between a woman and her doctor. Supporters appealed to pity. An unwanted child, they argued, would face a hard life anyway. But the debate has since shifted. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous essay “A Defense of Abortion” compared pregnancy to having an unwanted violinist attached to your body. That argument now gets invoked to justify abortion at any stage on the grounds that “it is the mother’s body.”
Ivan would answer: Yes, but you are dismembering the baby’s body.
What happens to a culture that treats pregnancy and babies this way? Population decline follows. So does a dehumanization that spills into the rest of life. But providential consequences follow, too. Gosnell is one of them. America has tolerated the horror of baby-killing for decades, and Gosnell forced the country to look directly at what that horror becomes when pursued to its logical end: deny the unborn legal rights, then deny personhood to infants, then empower abortionists to decide that a baby becomes human only when the mother says so.
RELATED: Paul Ehrlich died. His contempt for human life didn’t.
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We cannot keep one foot inside this evil and one foot outside it. Either human beings possess rights no matter where they are, from the womb to hospice care, or they do not.
It is time to repent.
I am also a pastor, and one of the most sobering truths in this entire story is that Gosnell did not cease to exist when he died. He stood before the throne of God to answer for those innocent lives. The babies he killed did not cease to exist either. They stand as witnesses to his crimes. Their blood cries out.
And those who have participated in abortion will one day face those they helped destroy.
That truth should drive every one of us to the cross of Christ, confessing our sin and looking to Him for mercy and redemption.
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