Lessons from the Kermit Gosnell Abortion Case

The jury is in, and thankfully, Kermit Gosnell was at least convicted of 3 counts of 1st degree murder. He did not receive the death penalty for his crimes, but he will at least spend the remainder of his days in prison, and without parole.

Gosnell is the Philadelphia abortion provider who made the news for his killing of babies who survived abortion procedures. He and his assistants killed the babies by snipping their spines with scissors.

Gosnell was also convicted of several other crimes, including performing abortions beyond the 24-week limit, failure to observe the 24-hour waiting period, and one count of manslaughter for accidentally killing a patient by a drug overdose. Investigators described his facility as a “house of horrors.” Baby bodies and body parts were stored in various places throughout the facility.

Some Lessons Learned:

1. We learn that even unborn babies have an intense will or instinct to survive. According to reports, one of the babies in the Gosnell case was heard whimpering prior to its death. Another was accidentally delivered in a toilet and was described as struggling to get out. Another was seen moving in a way that indicated that it was breathing or attempting to breathe. God designed humans with a will to live. This fact is reflected in the billions of dollars that are spent each year in the health and medical industry. People generally try to avoid death. Like adults, infants that survive botched abortions struggle to survive. Sadly, in Gosnell’s clinic (and in no telling how many other abortion clinics), not only were the babies not helped - they were actually killed! Such cruelty against such helpless beings defies the consciences of many of us. We recoil at such heartless and heinous acts of barbarism. According to Bible teaching, Gosnell should be executed for his crimes (Genesis 9:6; Romans 13:4; Acts 25:11).
2. We are reminded of the heinousness of abortion itself. Snipping the spinal cords of born-alive aborted babies is indeed a heinous crime, but what about the act of abortion itself? Many of us have observed for years that there is no essential difference between the baby in the womb and the baby out of the womb. There is no difference between abortion and infanticide. {Abortion is infanticide.} Using the common Hebrew word for born children, Genesis 25:22 says that Rebekah’s “children struggled in her womb.” They were just as much “children” in the womb as they would be out of the womb. Similarly, the New Testament uses the common word for born “babies” to describe the baby in the womb (cp. Luke 1:41 & 2:12). King David said that God “formed” him in his mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13-16). Gosnell was (rightly) considered “barbaric” for killing (murdering) abortion-survivor-babies, but what about his actions and those of hundreds of other abortion doctors, technicians and assistants in dismembering the bodies of millions of other babies in the womb? Is this not also “barbaric”? Of course it is! This leads me to my second point.
3. We learn that the practice of abortion is demoralizing. The devaluation of life in the womb has led to the devaluation of life out of the womb. The godless and barbaric practice of partial-birth-abortion has hastened this connection. Abortion providers obviously don’t accept the above Scriptures and scriptural principles regarding life, but they do know what they see and experience in their clinics. They know that unborn babies are still babies. They see the heart-beats, brain and other organic functions, the nerve activity, the will to live, the peculiarly human features and characteristics. In other words, they see in unborn babies the exact same things that they see in born babies! Though for different reasons than the Bible believer, these abortionists begin to question what the real difference is between the baby in the womb and the baby out of the womb. They rightly conclude that the only difference is purely locational and logistical. The next logical step is for the abortionist to see no difference between the killing of born and unborn babies. While the abortionist is right to conclude that there is no essential difference between born and unborn babies, he is wrong to conclude that it is right to kill either one. The Bible condemns the deliberate and premeditated killing of innocent life, consigning such people to eternal pain and misery (Revelation 21:8).
4. People can become desensitized to evil. Like the Gentiles of old, they can become “past feeling” (Ephesians 4:19). Their consciences are “seared as with a hot iron” (1 Timothy 4:2). This tends to be the general course of most societies, not because it is their inevitable course, but because of a lack of moral perspective and discipline. The Gosnell hearing coincided with two other dastardly cases - the Jodi Arias murder trial and the Ariel Castro kidnapping case. Jodi Arias was convicted of shooting her boyfriend in the head, stabbing him over 20 times and slitting his throat from ear to ear. Castro was arrested for having kidnapped 3 young women and sexually abusing them for a 10 year period of time. These things came to light not that long after the Boston terrorist bombings in which 4 people were killed and dozens of others were severely injured and maimed. Of course, these were just the headline news events. We tend to forget about the hundreds of other murders, rapes, kidnappings, assaults and other crimes that were committed over the same period of time. Even the Gosnell abortion case was ignored by most of the mainstream media outlets. The gruesomeness and salaciousness of some cases may make the murder of a few babies seem insignificant. This is a shame, for as I demonstrated in point #2 above, there is a logical connection between abortion and child murder, and murder in general. We must not allow the increasingly godless behavior of a “crooked and perverse generation” to lesson our hatred of sin (Amos 5:15; Prov. 8:13; Psalm 97:10; 119:104, 128; Romans 12:9; Jude 23).
5. Along with the problems of incrementalism and moral relativism, there is also the simple matter of the prevalence of this practice. As many of us knew, the Gosnell case was not the only case in which abortionists either killed born-alive aborted babies, or left them to die. I have read eye-witness testimony by witnesses in other abortion cases in which botched-abortion babies were simply left on tables to die. One report stated that a born-alive baby rolled off the table and died from concussive wounds. Since the Gosnell case, additional reports are emerging, claiming that babies are often born alive as a result of drug-induced abortions. Because of privacy standards, there is no way of knowing just how many born-alive abortion cases there have been, but I strongly suspect the number is very high.

We must not grow weary in our opposition to the abomination of abortion. Hopefully, cases like the Gosnell case will help to change the minds of at least some of the unpersuaded.

​~Tim Haile