Celebrating Abortion

As President Obama celebrated Roe v. Wade, the day that abortion became a constitutional right in this country, Dr. Kermit Gosnell sat in a jail cell charged with eight counts of murder.

The editors at NRO noticed something interesting:

Gosnell’s Philadelphia clinic’s lack of hygiene is not the detail that has captured the most attention, or inspired the most outrage. It turns out that Gosnell frequently, perhaps hundreds of times, fully delivered intact fetuses and then used scissors on the newborn. In his words, he engaged in “snipping” to “ensure fetal demise.” In many cases, the fetuses were in the third trimester.

This procedure, sometimes called a “live-birth abortion,” is illegal. But not thanks to President Obama. As a state legislator in Illinois, he argued that the law should offer no protection to neonates if they had been delivered before viability. He said that protecting them would violate Roe v. Wade and undermine the right to abortion. What looked like infanticide to most people was for him, it must be inferred, a “private family matter.” When Gosnell applied his scissors to pre-viable children, he was, on Obama’s terms, merely exercising a cherished freedom.

Read the whole thing.

Based on Obama's own logic on the issue, a presidential pardon for Gosnell is in order. Or does the president consider that decision "above my pay grade" too?