The horror

Kermit Gosnell’s wife pleads guilty to assisting at his abortion shop of horrors

I'd forgotten about the awful Gosnell story, which has been grinding through the legal system, free of national media attention as you might predict.

I'm pro-choice, but I'm not pro-this.  Nobody is, because nobody but a monster could be.

A moral system is never self-sustaining, it has to have external supports. If the limitations of conscience could be counted on, we wouldn't need a legal system.  This was a failure of morality, a fact that different people will explain in various ways.  But that these were ghastly crimes against the most innocent and helpless is beyond doubt or interpretation.  This is about as bad as it gets.  If 'evil' can't be used as the descriptor in this case, then it's time to drop the word from our language.

From a purely instrumental point of view, the operating assumption from the git-go had to be that, given the temptations of money and the weakness of human beings, this kind of gruesome enterprise would come into existence, sooner or later.  And so it did.  But the continued existence of the Gosnell slaughterhouse was enabled by a massive, long-running, and inexcusable failure of oversight and legal enforcement.  The Gosnells are not the only people, by far, who should take the fall for what went on there.

Byron