Yet more hoopla (from the French, houp-là, interjection, first known use: 1877) for the radical, extremist right to mentally masturbate itself with (an activity also in the “news” the same extremists have so much fun ejaculating all over the rest of us normals): a reporter asked Nancy Pelosi, “What is the moral difference between what Dr. Gosnell did to a baby born alive at 23 weeks and aborting her moments before birth?”
Nancy Pelosi answered: “You obviously have an agenda. You’re not interested in having an answer.”
This was her error, and unfortunately has added even more fuel to a fire that should never have started to begin with. We reasonable, normal people need to start taking every opportunity to throw the water of common sense and reason over this extremist conflagration. I believe she should have answered the question this way: “Legal abortion in this country is by definition a medical procedure; a standardized series of actions, carefully dictated by medical textbooks and undertaken in a sterile environment, resulting in the termination of a woman’s unwanted pregnancy. You may not like it, you may not approve of it, but the practice of medicine is solely between a doctor and a patient and that relationship is privileged under every legal tradition currently existing in the United States of America; outsiders to that doctor/patient relationship need not apply for admission; it will never be granted. What criminal Defendant Gosnell did is, by stark and obvious contrast, not a medical procedure in any way, shape or form; rather, it is a random, bizarre, and dangerous series of actions which are not found in any medical text ever written in the history of the medical profession. If you are too uneducated or too biased to be able to understand the vast gulf between safe, legal, medical abortion and Gosnell’s illegal, nonmedical, chaotic actions, you need to go back to school and retake all the journalism courses you obviously slept through; so for the sake of your beloved country, stop engaging in ridiculous sensationalism simply for the sake of gaining publicity, get off the merry-go-round of insanity you have been placed upon by the radical, extreme right, and please stop soiling the reputation of honest journalism, one of the noblest professions ever invented.”
“He started out as a good practice doctor but eventually just became a money-generating machine,” [one of the citizens sitting on Gosnell’s trial jury] said. Money is usually at the root of most illegal conduct. Money or mental illness, or both.
Kimberly Townsend Palmer 