"The modest first step was thus also an eminently teaching moment of the law: It showed the tension in the thought of those who both deplored infanticide and applauded abortion, a tension that the Gosnell case has now once again vividly brought to our attention."

Christopher Tollefsen:

The stakes of the abortion debate are thus of overwhelming significance. For the problem of abortion is, in fact, not one problem. It is, on the one hand, the problem of a massive injustice done to the weakest and most vulnerable members of the human community, but it is also a challenge to the existence of our own—or that of any comparable society’s—political community, the fabric of which is undermined by an unsustainable and manufactured “right to choose.”

Kermit Gosnell’s clinic, with its stench and decay, is here both a symptom and a metaphor for a culture, legal and moral, that has lost its principled grounding in human dignity and human rights. It is only in the legal recognition of the moral rights—the natural rights—of the unborn, that this two-sided tragedy of law, politics, culture, and morality, can finally be exorcised and the promises made in our nation’s founding documents on behalf of the rights of all human beings finally be realized.

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