Kirsten Powers wrote a powerful piece in USA Today on the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. (The 72-year-old Gosnell is charged with killing a woman patient and seven babies.) 

By all accounts Gosnell was a butcher of newborn, or about to be born, babies. The specifics are gruesome but probably necessary to comprehend the level of depravity we’re talking about. So here we go.

This account comes to us courtesy of delawareonline.com (h/t Allahpundit): 

A Delaware woman who worked for Kermit Gosnell testified Tuesday that she was called back to a room at his abortion clinic in Philadelphia where the bodies of aborted babies were kept on a shelf to hear one screaming amid the bodies of aborted babies kept on a shelf….

“I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” [Sherry] West said, telling the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas judge and jury that the body of the child was about 18 to 24 inches long and was one of the largest babies she had seen delivered during abortion procedures at the Women’s Medical Society clinic….

West, who said she called aborted babies “specimens” because “it was easier to deal with mentally,” said a co-worker had called her back to the room that night because she did not know what to do. West said the baby’s eyes and mouth were not yet completely formed and it was lying on a glass tray on a shelf and she told the co-worker to call Gosnell and fled the room.

She later made it clear that she called it “a baby” in her testimony “because that is what it is.”

And this from NBC Philadelphia:

An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions.

Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.”

About all this I wanted to make several points, the first of which is that this is the kind of brutality many people in the pro-life movement warned was at the end of the lethal logic behind the abortion rights movement. If we accept–and in some quarters, celebrate–abortion as a modern emancipation, you end up with people like Kermit Gosnell, who view an unborn child that has been targeted for abortion as marked for death even after birth. And before you dismiss Gosnell’s views as rare among those who champion abortion rights, consider the views of representatives of Planned Parenthood, an organization which (a) receives $500 million in government subsidies and (b) is the most conspicuous abortion rights group in America.

As George Will tells it:

Recently in Florida, Alisa LaPolt Snow, representing Florida Planned Parenthood organizations, testified against a bill that would require abortionists to provide medical care to babies who survive attempted abortions. Snow was asked: “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?” Snow replied: “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family and the physician.” She added, “That decision should be between the patient and the health care provider.” To this, a Florida legislator responded: “I think that at that point the patient would be the child struggling on a table. Wouldn’t you agree?”

As I said, there is a lethal logic at work here. 

In light of this, perhaps it’s worth reconsidering how absurd it is to portray those who oppose abortions as waging an imaginary “war on women” while ignoring the very real war on the unborn and the newborn.

Which brings us, finally, to the matter of media bias. As Powers points out, the elite press obsessed over Rush Limbaugh’s reference to Sandra Fluke as a “slut”–a comment for which Limbaugh apologized–while they have paid almost no attention to the Gosnell trial. Perhaps it’s because the Limbaugh story allowed many journalists to zero in on someone they loathe while the Gosnell story poses a terribly inconvenient challenge to their sanitized, settled views on abortion. It complicates matters immensely when you have to make room in this discussion for the baby who suffers a severed neck before being aborted, doesn’t it? 

My guess is most journalists (and most people who consider themselves pro-choice) would not feel comfortable defending what Dr. Gosnell did, even if they can’t articulate where exactly (or why exactly) a line should be drawn that separates a woman’s right to choose and a baby’s right to live. Rather, I suspect they are avoiding the story because it demonstrates an undeniable fact: abortion is an act of violence against an unborn child.

It isn’t easy to defend such things. So why not just ignore them? Because that’s what journalists are supposed to do. Isn’t it?