Abortion's numbers game

PHILADELPHIA—It’s quite a coincidence. In Pennsylvania you may abort a baby up to 24 weeks of gestation. It just so happens that most of abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s second-trimester patient files introduced at his murder trial have the number “24.5” written in the column indicating gestational age. With a margin of error of two weeks in estimating, he probably figured he was safe.

One is reminded of the schoolboy assigned to read 10 pages a day of a novel in the summer, and to enter his performance daily into a log, using the honor system. Summer vacation somehow gets away from the young scholar, and his journal ends up embarrassingly blank. Then on the last day of August, he hastily jots in every column: “10,” “10,” “10,” “10,” “10.” He may throw in a “9” or an “11” for verisimilitude.

This is only the beginning of the numbers game.

An expert witness for the prosecution, who claims 40,000 abortions to his name, has scruples about gestational age. The latest he will do abortions in a hospital is 20.5 weeks; in an abortion center, 17 weeks; in his office, 14 weeks. Are you keeping all of this straight, baby?

My advice to unborn babies is to choose their mothers carefully. For the best chance of escaping the abortionist’s speculum, you may fare better in Pennsylvania (Gosnell notwithstanding), Oregon, Nevada, Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, Florida, or Maryland, where they can’t suction out your brains after 23 weeks, six days. The unborn in Colorado and New Mexico have to white-knuckle it till the 26th week.

But even then you’re not safe, really. The above cut-off times reflect advertised services; some abortion centers go later for “fetal anomalies” and for that loophole the size of the Grand Canyon known as “the mother’s health.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman’s majority opinion defined “health” to mean the woman’s “physical, emotional, psychological, [and] familial” wellness. In other words, if your mother is upset about your existence—with two “verys” in front of it—you are biohazard fill.

Living babies get draped in pink or blue. Unwanted babies get their special color, too. Those aborted under 16 weeks who end up at the medical examiner’s office need no death certificate, but babies aborted over 16 weeks who end up at the medical examiner’s office get a green death certificate, to distinguish it from the regular death certificate. If the ME determines the baby was born alive (“botched abortion”) and then died, he must file with the state both a birth certificate and a death certificate.

“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).