Congress and the Gosnell Case

The trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who is being prosecuted for killing babies and at least one woman at his Philadelphia clinic, has drawn attention to the shocking failure of the Pennsylvania government to protect the basic rights of some of its most vulnerable citizens. As the grand-jury report explains, state governments (beginning with the administration of “pro-choice” Republican governor Tom Ridge) made a deliberate decision not to monitor these clinics.

What has gone unnoticed and unmentioned in coverage of the trial are the federal government’s responsibilities. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution requires all states to afford the equal protection of the laws to “all persons.” The Supreme Court has ruled — wrongly, in our view — that unborn children in the early stages of pregnancy do not count as “persons” entitled to that protection. There is no debate, however, that infants have a right to the law’s protection.

Well, almost no debate: President Obama, as a state senator in Illinois, argued against protecting those infants who had not reached the stage of “viability.” He claimed that such protection was incompatible with the Court’s abortion rulings. The Court itself has never said so. Instead it has ruled that as soon as a child is even partially out of the womb it may be protected. It has never even suggested that infants fully outside the womb are anything other than persons whom states are constitutionally obligated to protect.

Read more at the National Review.