DC Trawler

Dear New York Times: If Kermit Gosnell was convicted of murder for killing fetuses, how is he different than any other abortionist?

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Vince Coglianese wrote about this yesterday, and it’s worth holding the NYT staff’s feet to the fire over it. Feet, by the way, that weren’t cut off in infancy and pickled in jars by a ghoulish abortionist. Because their mothers had a choice and made the right one.

Vince reported:

The New York Times referred to three murdered children as “fetuses” in an article about the conviction of Kermit Gosnell Monday…

The verdict came after a five-week trial in which the prosecution and the defense battled over whether the fetuses Dr. Gosnell was charged with killing were alive when they were removed from their mothers.
[…]
Dr. Gosnell was acquitted of one first-degree murder charge involving an aborted fetus.
[…]
Clinic workers who appeared as witnesses for the prosecution said some of the fetuses appeared to move or make noises.

And so on.

Which raises the question contained in my headline. That’s why the NYT didn’t want to cover this trial in the first place. It raises questions they’d rather we didn’t ask.

As Matt Lewis noted, the NYT had a front page story on 4/15 titled “Live Music’s Charms, Soothing Premature Hearts.” Here are a few excerpts:

Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City led the research, conducted in 11 hospitals, which found that live music can be beneficial to premature babies. In the study, music therapists helped parents transform their favorite tunes into lullabies…

The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, adds to growing research on music and preterm babies. Some hospitals find music as effective as, and safer than, sedating infants before procedures like heart sonograms and brain monitoring. Some neonatologists say babies receiving music therapy leave hospitals sooner, which can aid development and family bonding and save money.

Dr. Thomas Truman, the director of neonatal and pediatric intensive care at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital in Florida, which was not involved in the study, said infants who had music played to them went home earlier “at least by a couple of days, compared to babies that weren’t getting music therapy.”

How about that. In this context, those human beings are babies. But when Kermit Gosnell is convicted of killing human beings their age or even older, they become fetuses. Apparently, the only difference is whether their mothers want them.

In any war, the first rule of propaganda is to dehumanize the enemy. That makes him easier to kill. In the NYT stylebook, “fetus” just means “baby whose death we’d rather not think about.”