The anatomy of a non-story

Although redoubts of conservatism do exist, the media is overwhelmingly leftist.  Sometimes, this is merely annoying, but it can be pernicious as well.  For instance, while the media occasionally covered Bush's wars, when the reigns of power were handed over to Obama, coverage declined--even as drone strikes increased. 

Recently, the right has been incensed over the paucity of coverage in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell.  For a good write-up, albeit a gruesome one, see here.  Gosnell was illegally aborting children past the 24-week barrier set by the State of Pennsylvania, but his murderous run only comprises part of the story.  Descriptions of his clinic remind one Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or a Civil War hospital tent. 

The story itself is fascinating, although so ghastly that I can readily see why some would be reluctant to cover it.  Yet the flippancy of the media toward someone whom Terry Moran rightly describes as "probably the most successful serial killer in the history of the world" deserves a more serious investigation.  It's also worth contemplating the reasons such a significant story would be given short shrift.  So, in no particular order:

1) Unborn children are seen as far less important than babies.  Without a name, and a mother who weeps for her, an unborn child does not lay a claim upon at least the pro-abortion among us.  Which leads us to...

2) The line of demarcation that separates a child that can be murdered from one that cannot is very thin, often only a few inches.  Given that children born early in the third trimester still often survive, it is, at this stage, only the location of the child that makes murder permissible.  Shining a light on late-term abortions might cause us to point out this absurdity.

3) The left views abortion as somewhat embarrassing.  Smart people know to use their birth control so that this doesn't happen, but if it does, they take care of it quickly, they don't wait until 28 weeks into pregnancy.  I doubt that anyone will be so brash as to insist that the lesson here is that women need to be able to dispose of their children more quickly, but that's not to say that this isn't an angle some in the media would like to take.

4) Given the sanctity of abortion, its practitioners can get away with a lot.  One of the lessons of the Gosnell case was that the regulators who are meant to keep abortion "safe"--at least for the mother--failed completely.  This house of horrors had been running for years, and people knew about it.  But Gosnell was doing Moloch's work, and an investigation into his practice would have been the action of a turncoat.  Sure, women died in his clinic, but those lives must be balanced against the great good this man did.

5) There was no grounds for a leftist political program.  When children get mowed down in schools, it's horrible, but at least it provides an opportunity to talk about taking away guns.  Any takeaway here is bound to be bad for the abortion brand.  Everyone knows not all abortionists are like this, so let's just move it along.

6) Gosnell is black.  Perpetrators should be white, like Zimmerman, I mean the Duke lacrosse team that (practically) raped that stripper. 

7) Gosnell was racist--against blacks and Hispanics.  This one really irks the media, because if Gosnell was white, we could work the old racist angle.  But that dog won't hunt, even if it's another interesting aspect of this remarkable story.

8) A healthy percentage of the left knows that abortion is wrong, and they know that we know.  The parallel in terms of death is Nazi Germany, or perhaps Stalin's gulags, but there's a better example in black slavery, in this sense: just as slavery was indispensable to the south, abortion is indispensable in our society.  We're certainly not going to give up our illusions of sexual autonomy, and, although birth control is usually effective, we must be given recourse to abortion--just in case.  So you'll have to forgive us if we don't examine the issue too closely.  It's too important to do away with.

I actually agree with them in this regard, but if the price for maintaining one's lifestyle is millions of dead babies, that's a price I'm not at all willing to pay.  Eventually, we will dispense with our lifestyle, as the south did.  For now, we must be content to know that while we're not winning the cultural battle, the case against the evils of abortion becomes easier to make by the day--even if the media remains disinterested in that case.