THE BLACK REDNECK VERSION OF “RESPECT”

“You can’t give respect unless you get it first.”  That was the ethical maxim presented to me over a decade ago by a young black high-schooler. The assertion possesses a superficial plausibility that attends so many pop-cultural aphorisms—like the bogus observation that folks can’t love others unless they first love themselves. It would have been nice had the student put forward his dictum in my class as a topic for reflection.  Instead, the saying was proffered in a hallway as justification for the chip he carried on his shoulder toward a classmate.   

Fortunately, as an ethics instructor I was able to offer what I considered a convincing refutation of his  motto by asking the young man to envision a room full of strangers all demanding respect of everyone else because, “You can’t give respect unless you get it first.” Under this not-so-implausible scenario, a simple meet and greet is transformed into a confrontational game of “respect chicken.” “You respect me first.” “No way!  You respect me first.” No individual can respect anyone else because he or she hasn’t “first” been respected by the others. The issue at the center of this interpersonal standoff revolves around the term “first”—with one party required to submit to another and offer respect without “first” having received it. Clearly, what’s at stake here isn’t mutual respect but rather establishing a pecking order that’s akin to kissing Godfather’s ring.

By contrast, the traditional moral view is that all persons should be afforded respect unless there is some good reason not to do so.  And even in the latter circumstance, politeness is, with few exceptions, the default position. The cultural basis for this practice is largely religious—grounded in the belief that all persons are created in God’s image, though one could also argue for mutual respect on philosophical (e.g. Kantian) grounds. What interests me, however, is the cultural genesis of my student’s faux-maxim. Where did he come up with this very flawed vision of respect?

In the last half-century “respect” became a very important term in black communities and especially in what is colloquially called “the hood”—neighborhoods characterized by broken families, substandard housing, and a degree of violence most Americans would find appalling. In this milieu being “respected” came to be associated more with being feared than with being the by-product of respectable behavior. Gang leaders, for example, were “respected” because of the terror they instilled in subordinates and the power they possessed to do as they pleased.

Not being “respected” thus became a challenge to one’s manhood akin to the “it’s on” or “you’ve been served” idioms. The idea that receiving respect implied acting with reasonable concern toward others was lost thanks to a survivalist environment and innumerable media images that glorified this misbegotten vision of black life via tough guy stereotypes like those made famous by Samuel L. Jackson. Meanwhile, morally condescending white liberals reinforced hip-hop and gangsta-rap perversions of civility by hailing them as authentic expressions of “black” or “African-American” culture.  Thus, these self-appointed moral mandarins succeeded, as Thomas Sowell ironically describes in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, in saddling blacks with a violence-soaked, respect-me-first identity akin to the racist Southern culture they had struggled against for centuries and whose origins can be traced back to the Scottish highlands.

In short, like millions of other young persons (not just African-Americans), my aggrieved student had been indoctrinated by an incestuous cadre of Hollywood, New York, and D.C. elites in an ethical formula that’s guaranteed to produce violent confrontations and resentment. What better way to keep that large cohort of individuals perpetually dissatisfied, mostly marginalized, and overwhelmingly Democrat!  

     

  

Harvey Weinstein, Socialism, and Mass Murder

“The frivolity of evil” -- that’s the phrase coined by British author and physician to the poor, Theodore Dalrymple.  The words appear in his 2005 book, Our Culture: What’s Left of It.  Dalrymple’s analysis of the precipitous decline of British society provides a salient response to the “motive” question that currently permeates our media in the wake of the “senseless” murders in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs.  

Dalrymple’s professional life as a psychiatrist working almost exclusively with prisoners and England’s underclass gave him a perspective miles apart from shrinks who massage the egos of celebrities and millionaires on New York’s Upper East Side.  Dalrymple (nee, Anthony Daniels) actually has the temerity to focus on the self-destructive actions of his patients and especially on their abysmal family lives.

Dalrymple speaks of “the frivolity of evil” (a telling modification of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”) to fit the self-conscious actions of women whose serial romantic choices condemn both themselves and their luckless children to neglect, assault, and rape.   The same applies to aimless, drug-addled men who, without compunction, sire children by various women and thus multiply the number of souls who’ll endure the same paternal abandonment they themselves curse.  

When considering why such irresponsible behavior has become endemic in Britain, Dalrymple points in two directions -- first, toward a welfare structure that undermines personal responsibility and even rewards irresponsible choices.  In this system mothers without husbands or employment are set up by the government with housing, food, and enough money to focus on something that gives their lives meaning.  Often that something revolves around romance and domestic trauma -- even at the expense of their children.

If one asks why the government supports this dysfunctional system, that query points in another direction, toward intellectuals and their cohorts in the media, including “novelists, playwrights, film directors, journalists, artists, and even pop singers.” According to this mélange of moral miscreants, the poor must be viewed as victims who aren’t responsible for their actions.  External factors such as poverty, “food deserts,” and capitalism are seen as the true culprits -- an analysis that bolsters the ego of nonjudgmental elites and places ever more power in the hands of government officials, therapists, and social activists “who have themselves come to form a powerful vested interest of dependence on the government.”   

Moreover, these benefits showered on the poor are seen as theirs “by right.”  Thus, no moral stigma attends failure to make personal choices that would secure these basic benefits, and no government is so callous as to suggest that most folks should care for themselves. 

In addition to these beliefs, intellectuals and their media cohorts have embraced the notion that the elimination of taboos constitutes the royal road to personal and social Nirvana.  In the world of entertainment, I note, this process is uncritically hailed as “pushing the envelope” -- where taboos like cursing, adultery, drug use, and ever-increasing depictions of violence and sexual perversity fall by the wayside.  Dalrymple observes that “the prestige intellectuals confer upon antinomianism soon communicates itself to non-intellectuals.  What is good for the bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, the unemployed, the welfare recipient -- the very people most in need of boundaries to make their lives tolerable or allow them hope of improvement.”

Instead of obligations, especially to one’s children, emotional self-fulfillment becomes the primary basis for action.  After all, as the popular saying goes, “How can you love others unless you first love yourself?” Ignored in this self-destructive psychological calculus is the fact that self-respect derives precisely from fulfilling one’s obligations.

My conclusion:  Who better in contemporary American society to symbolize the philosophy of taboo-breaking than a member of the media establishment who embodies the very antinomianism he disseminates constantly to the general public -- namely, Harvey Weinstein.  And lest we dismiss Weinstein as an anomaly, let us not forget the standing ovation given at the Academy Awards to child rapist Roman Polanski.  

In an environment where personal responsibility is undermined by Socialist dogma and where intellectuals and their media groupies constantly tout the elimination of taboos, is it any wonder that some folks (as in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs) will take these beliefs and actions to their logical destructive conclusions.

I’m not responsible.  Others are the reason for my failures and disappointments.  Child rape is now ok. Harvey Weinstein got away with all kinds of illegal acts.  Society owes me.  Now “society” is going to pay for my misery -- Quentin Tarantino style!   

 

A culture with over a million abortions each year and illegitimacy rates well north of 70% in some communities shouldn’t have to scratch its head when mass murders occur.  Intellectuals and media powerbrokers, however, never look at the destruction their ideas and actions have wrought.  If they did, “they might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behavior” or give up the cherished notion of their moral superiority.  Consequently, “neither pols nor pundits wish to look the problem in the face.” 

Nuclear families that eat together and acknowledge legitimate obligations and reasonable moral boundaries are what hold a society together.  Socialism, intellectuals, and Harvey Weinsteins in the media pull it apart -- sometimes violently.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle . This article appeared in American Thinker Magazine (online), 

11-12-17.

Book Review -- The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D’Souza,

Nazism and fascism are “right wing” movements -- the polar political opposites of socialism.  Fascists and Nazis employ appeals to traditional morality to gain support.   Progressives deplore fascism and always have.  Fascists support capitalism. Trump is a fascist.  These are aspects of The Big Lie that Dinesh D’Souza exposes in his recently released book.

The absurd claim that fascism and Nazism are not socialist movements owes it origin to the hideous reputations those leftist regimes earned after World War II.  How could progressives expect to thrive in America if the Holocaust and other atrocities were linked to its political relatives?  Consequently, a gigantic lie was perpetrated by leftist intellectuals and slavishly spread by a sympathetic media -- namely, that fascism was a movement of the “far right” and that conservatives were also on “the right.”  This “big lie” has long been a staple of Democrat propaganda and the basis for the absurd notion that President Trump is a fascist -- not his violent, GOP-assassinating, speech-suppressing, “Antifa” opponents   

Most conservatives are aware of links between fascism and socialism.  After all, the term “Nazi” refers to a “National Socialist” party.  What many of them, and certainly most Americans, don’t know, thanks to a mendacious media and institutions of advanced deception, are the countless ties (centralized government, racism, eugenics, state-sanctioned violence, and enforced cultural uniformity) that link fascists and even Nazis to the progressive movement. 

Indeed, a mutual admiration relationship existed between Mussolini and FDR -- a romance evidenced not only by a White House-organized ticker-tape parade for Mussolini’s aviation minister, but also by New Deal policies like the National Recovery Administration that effectively put the American economy under Roosevelt’s dictatorial control.  Not surprisingly, a New York Times journalist praised FDR for following Mussolini’s example -- though the Supreme Court, not yet cowed by FDR’s later fascistic court-packing threat, did not cheer this unconstitutional power grab.  

In 1933, FDR himself said of Mussolini, “There seems no question he is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished…”  Mussolini, for his part, was thrilled to be called “the Italian Roosevelt.”  Even more surprising to Americans weaned on “the big lie” is the fact that Germany’s Nazi press frequently praised FDR in the early 30s.  One magazine lauded “the fascist New Deal” in which the central government (as in fascism) exercised substantial control over “private” industry and finance.  

Fascism itself, as D’Souza explains, arose due to the spectacular failure of Marx’s predictions about proletarian revolutions.  Mussolini and Lenin, both Marxists, proposed different reasons for this failure, but both remained socialists dedicated to centralized government and totalitarian societies.  Thus, the bloody feud between fascism and communism was an internecine war akin to the ongoing hostilities between Sunni and Shiite sects within Islam.     

D’Souza’s work contains a fair amount of material also found in Jonah Goldberg’s less strident book, Liberal Fascism -- especially information about the “proto-fascist” proclivities of the Constitution-despising Woodrow Wilson under whose resegregated regime the “domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party,” the KKK, reemerged in spectacular fashion.  The Big Lie, however, goes beyond Goldberg by linking Progressivism to Nazism via their kindred eugenics-based racist beliefs.  D’Souza notes, for example, that Hitler’s anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws were explicitly patterned after Democrat-instituted segregation and anti-miscegenation laws in the South and that progressives in America “outpaced the Nazis in initiating mass programs of forced incarceration and forced sterilization…”

D’Souza also fully addresses a question I posed to Mr. Goldberg after a book lecture in San Diego -- to which question I received an unsatisfactory answer: “How did it come to pass that fascism is commonly called ‘rightwing’?”  To this query The Big Lie provides a detailed response.  The leftist historian Richard Hofstadter began this project by linking Social Darwinism in America to capitalism -- thus transferring racist eugenics from its progressive spawning ground to the conservative “right.”  Two Germans émigrés from the Marxist Frankfort School, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, subsequently developed the big lie that fascism wasn’t so much a political philosophy as a personality disorder associated with morally repressed conformists and traditional religious folk.  In short, fascism became an “authoritarian” neurosis rooted in conservative sentiments.

Never mind that Hitler was a bohemian who despised Christianity, that Mussolini was an atheist, or that fascists hoped to create a new society filled with “supermen” and not suburbanites lounging in hot tubs.  Ignore also the fact that fascism is a political philosophy with a background that’s been erased by the primary practitioners of the big lie -- academia, the media, and Hollywood.  According to D’Souza, fascism’s philosophical founder was Giovanni Gentile, an Italian who, like Mussolini after him, moved from Marxism to fascism. Most of Gentile’s program could easily be mistaken for any recent Democrat platform.   

D’Souza correctly, in my view, sees the “resistance” to Trump as a grave threat designed to undo America’s constitutional system and to institute a progressive conformity of thought and action throughout the country -- a uniformity that is already being enforced by fascistic thuggery and intimidation at Berkeley, Middlebury College, and elsewhere.  Unfortunately, talking conservative heads seem largely oblivious to this clear and present danger.

D’Souza’s concluding “Denazification” suggestions, however, don’t inspire confidence.   How does one pass Trump’s economic agenda, reach out to minorities, prosecute Obama-era abuses of power, or develop alternative media and entertainment resources in today’s social and political environment?  While D’Souza has been successful with his documentaries, one would think it will take decades to make serious inroads into the left’s academic and media dominance.  We might not have that much time.  Nevertheless, D’Souza has provided conservatives with substantial ammunition.  They need not simply scream out the window, “I’m as mad as hell…”  They can also tweet, message associates, and vigorously assert to whoever will listen, “Fascism and progressivism are both leftist, socialist disasters! Read this book!”             

 Regnery Publishing, July 31, 2017 (256 pages, $17.99, Hardcover) 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle .

MORAL ILLITERACY by Richard Kirk (Amazon Kindle)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0713Y4VMM

Most Americans are now morally illiterate—incapable of engaging in serious moral analysis. Exhibit A in favor of this proposition is the frequency with which the rhetorical challenge, "Who's to say what's right or wrong?" is used to shut down moral discussion--and then met with confused silence by the question's victim. The first chapter of this book provides a succinct and convincing reply to that challenge. Subsequent chapters analyze other comments designed to avoid serious moral reflection--statements like the following: "It's just entertainment," "Ethics is really personal," "I gotta be me," "Be true to what you believe." The substitution of the term "value" for "virtue" and the modern redefinition of the term "hypocrisy" are additional linguistic shell games that have contributed to Americans' inability and unwillingness to engage in meaningful moral discourse. The former change makes possible the morality-negating declaration that one is "entitled to his own values," while the latter disposes of the no-longer-popular aphorism, "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice gives to virtue." A concluding chapter explains "What went wrong?" and points an accusing finger at the electronic traveling salesmen who replaced the moral guides who provided most of our ethical instruction prior to the advent of mass electronic communication. This changing of the moral guard is an immensely important and little-discussed cultural event that substituted advertisers, celebrities, and media movers and shakers for the ministers, parents, and persons of character who traditionally provided the lion's share of moral messaging in actual communities. The philosophical roots of our nation's moral illiteracy are also discussed briefly in this work, but these comments do not by any stretch of the imagination constitute a ponderous philosophical lecture. On the other hand, individuals who find moral discourse quite distasteful, will find the contents of this book hard to swallow.

My Review of "Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer"

Not since Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Adolf Eichmann has there been a more provocative analysis of evil as that provided in Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer’s work detailing the crimes, trial, and personality of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, “America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.”

“Banality” was the word Arendt chose for Eichmann’s bureaucratic officiousness in the Third Reich’s Ministry of Death.  That term, however, hardly fits the acts of a self-assured abortionist who regularly snipped the spinal cords of babies born alive, kept infants’ feet as trophies, ran an illegal prescription drug mill, and hired assistants who were totally unqualified to perform medical duties in a filthy, ramshackle facility.  What’s surprising about Gosnell, however, is that his greed and macabre callousness existed alongside an often cheerful disposition that accompanied various acts of charity.  Consequently, Gosnell had a good reputation among most of the poor community he both served and exploited.

Additionally, the authors’ prison interview with Gosnell gives the impression of a self-confident individual with at least moderate intellectual and artistic talent -- a man with a positive outlook on the future who enjoyed traveling abroad, namedropping (a friend of slain late-term abortionist, George Tiller), and playing Chopin on the piano.  Nevertheless, Gosnell clearly overestimated his professional and intellectual abilities as indicated by his desire to represent himself in the trial at which he was ultimately found guilty on three counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison -- a sentence the doctor is confident will one day be overturned.

The term “banality” does comport, however, with the lassitude and indifference displayed by Pennsylvania’s abortion-oversight bureaucracy --  whose officials were all too willing to forego inspections, let gross violations slide, and dismiss even complaints associated with the deaths of two women Gosnell treated.  Pennsylvania’s pro-choice Republican governor, Tom Ridge, comes in for special criticism by the authors for his “hands-off” policy vis-à-vis facility inspections -- though they also note that the state’s bureaucratic malfeasance extended well beyond Ridge’s tenure.   

Accordingly, Gosnell’s late-term abortion house of horrors was exposed not by folks charged with the responsibility of making abortions “safe,” but rather by a cop investigating the source of some illegal prescription drugs.  The unsanitary conditions in Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society

clinic -- e.g. cat feces, urine stench, milk jugs stuffed with aborted baby parts -- raised enough concerns to begin a probe of Gosnell’s “official” practice. 

The death of another patient opened additional investigatory doors.  This immigrant from Bhutan (mislabeled “the Indian woman” by Gosnell) had the misfortune of being heavily anesthetized by one of Gosnell’s unqualified assistants who took orders over the phone from the absent doctor.  Lies told by Gosnell and his staff about the treatment of Karnamaya Mongar didn’t deflect Detective Jim Wood and district attorneys from finally attempting to determine how far Gosnell had gone beyond the illegal distribution of prescription drugs.

Eventually the prosecution brought seven murder charges against Gosnell for killing live babies plus another charge for Mongar’s death.  Though the practice of “snipping” the spinal cords of late-term babies was common at Gosnell’s clinic, the prosecution required clear evidence that infants long since deceased had actually been alive before being murdered.  However, since there was no other logical reason for utilizing this unusual procedure on aborted fetuses, the authors estimate that Gosnell, who specialized in late-term abortions, killed “hundreds” and possibly “thousands” of live babies over the decades.

McElhinney and McAleer’s work provides an extensive account of Gosnell’s defense, presented by one of the state’s premier attorneys, Jack McMahon. McMahon’s cross examination of a prosecution witness who occasionally performed legal abortions at a prestigious hospital contains some of the most damning testimony in the book.  The defense lawyer argued skillfully that there is precious little difference between what Gosnell is accused of doing to live babies at his poor community facility and the legal approach to a live fetus (i.e. baby) after an attempted abortion in an upscale hospital.  In the halting words of a respected female physician, they would “just keep it warm you know.  It will eventually pass.”         

The book also highlights other legal absurdities.  In Pennsylvania, for example, it is legal to abort a fetus at 23 weeks and 6 days, even a minute before day 7, but it is a crime to carry out the same abortion a minute later -- a distinction akin to legally sucking the brain out of a baby a few inches before it exits the womb or illegally snipping its spinal cord moments later.  Ironically, Gosnell, who regularly manipulated ultrasound data to fit abortions within the state’s legal limit, appears to have believed Pennsylvania permitted abortions up to 24 and a half weeks, as his incomplete and often inaccurate records regularly noted the age of late-term fetuses as 24.5 weeks.

Given the brutal nature of late-term abortions, it’s hardly surprising that our pro-choice national press devoted minimal time to Gosnell’s trial.  After all, wall-to-wall coverage would doubtless raise profound questions about the morality of abortion and especially late-term abortions -- as it did with Gosnell’s pro-choice jury and the book’s once pro-choice author, Ann McElhinney.  Only a prominent USA Today editorial penned by The Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers prodded mainstream journalists into providing slightly more coverage.

This gripping and detailed book about Gosnell is a further attempt by McElhinny and McAleer to remedy that widespread media blackout.  In the near future the same husband-wife team will release a feature-length film to further publicize the largely suppressed truth about “America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.”   

When one considers what this book reveals about the gruesome details, moral incoherence, and institutional trappings surrounding late-term abortions, it becomes easier to see how an arrogant, controlling doctor like Kermit Gosnell could continue for decades cheerfully snipping live babies’ spinal cords and committing medical malpractice on a grand scale.  After all, Gosnell is precisely the type of person who would be drawn to such a macabre specialty, all the while deeming his den of depravity a service to the community.     

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Cf. http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/02/abortion_and_the_banality_of_evil.html

Abortion and the Banality of Evil

By Richard Kirk

Not since Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Adolf Eichmann has there been a more provocative analysis of evil as that provided in Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer’s [work] detailing the crimes, trial, and personality of Dr. Kermit Gosnell ...

"Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer"

I have long thought that the widespread practice of abortion (c.50 million since 1973, and over a million a year currently) is the "original sin" at the heart of America's moral depravity. The upcoming book and movie about abortionist Kermit Gosnell exposes in gruesome detail the largely unspoken and unseen reality of this depravity.

The following material is from BREITBART:

Gosnell — who has been called America’s “most prolific serial killer” — operated what the 300-page grand jury report later called a “baby charnel house,” in which he regularly killed babies born alive at his clinic, which itself was staffed with inexperienced nurses and littered with blood-stained furniture and the remains of fetuses stored in basement freezers. Gosnell was later convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and hundreds of lesser charges, and in 2013 was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But before the film comes out, McAleer and McElhinny will release Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, through Regnery Publishing on January 24. The book details the investigation that ultimately brought Gosnell down, and also examines the mainstream media’s reluctance to cover the story due to its subject matter.

In this exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming book, McElhinney describe how she came to investigate Gosnell’s story and why it changed her thoughts about the practice of abortion forever.

"I never trusted or liked pro-life activists. Even at college I thought them too earnest and too religious. I thought the shocking images they showed were manipulative. I distinctly remember my argument: a heart transplant is gross to look at, too. I don’t want to look at pictures of that, and heart transplants are brilliant. So back off, prolifers with your scary pictures. I also didn’t trust the provenance of the pictures; I was sure they had been photo shopped.

If the anti-abortion position was so strong, it should be able to argue without resorting to emotionally manipulating its audience with fraudulent horror pictures.

Once you have this mentality, it’s very easy to completely dismiss pro-life activists. And the universities of the world are teeming with young people just like that young person I once was.

Fast forward to April 2013 and Kermit Gosnell’s trial in Philadelphia, when everything changed.

Nothing in the intervening years had shaken my feelings on the subject.

But the images shown in the courtroom were not from activists, they were from police detectives and medical examiners and workers at the 3801 Lancaster Ave clinic. The expert testimony describing “good” abortions was from OB/GYNs who had been performing abortions for thirty years. The witnesses swore an oath to tell the truth and to present the evidence, and they did, under pain of penalty for perjury.

What they said and the pictures they showed changed me. I am not the same person I was.

Abortion arguments from pro-abortion advocates tend to avoid any actual talk of how an abortion is done and what exactly it is that is being aborted. I know a lot about both now.

I now know that what is aborted is a person, with little hands and nails and a face that from the earliest times has expression. The humanity in all the pictures is unmistakable, the pictures of the babies that were shown as evidence in the Gosnell trial—first, second, and third trimester babies, in all their innocence and perfection.

I also know that in a proper, legal abortion babies are poisoned in their mother’s womb by injecting a needle filled with potassium chloride into the baby’s heart. Then the baby is suctioned out in pieces. If the baby is bigger, forceps are used to pull it out in pieces— an arm, a leg, the head often torn from the torso. If the head is too big to pull out, the abortionist makes a hole in the base of the skull and the brain is sucked out to collapse the skull so the head can come easily. That’s how it’s done when it’s done well.

Reading the testimony and sifting through the evidence in the case in the research for this book and for writing the script of the movie has been brutal. I have wept at my computer. I have said the Our Father sitting at my desk. I am no holy roller—I hadn’t prayed in years—but at times when I was confronted with the worst of this story I didn’t know what else to do.

I have had a profound sense of the presence of evil in the actions of Gosnell and his staff and their complete lack of conscience. Most disturbing of all is the banality of the evil; in the clinic they joked and laughed amidst the carnage.

I am absolutely certain that the dead babies spoken of in court were unique people whom the world will now never know. I hope this book and the movie go some way to mark the fact that they lived and in their short lives made a difference. Time will tell. This story can change hearts and minds; it has mine.

I can’t reconcile the certainty of the babies’ humanity with the fact that killing babies in the womb at these same ages is perfectly legal in many parts of the U.S. Kirsten Powers put it eloquently: “Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb—as in a routine late-term abortion—is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.”

The jurors had to listen to the stories of the lives and deaths of Baby Boy A Abrams (29.4 weeks), whose photograph is on the Internet; Baby Boy B (twenty-eight weeks), whose frozen remains were found in the clinic—the medical examiner’s photograph of him with his neck slit is online—Baby C, who breathed for twenty minutes before Lynda Williams “snipped” his life; Baby D, who was delivered in a toilet and tried to swim to safety before Adrienne Moton slit his windpipe; Baby E, who cried before Dr. Gosnell cut his neck; and Baby F, who moved his leg up to his chest before he was killed. They saw pictures of the forty-seven dead babies discovered at the clinic the night of the raid, their remains stuffed into old milk cartons and kitty litter containers.

These babies sent Gosnell to prison. But more than that, they are the most eloquent evidence we have ever had of the reality of abortion.

The media have tried to ignore their stories.

We will not."

"Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer," is due out January 24 from Regnery Publishing.