OPINION:
While millions of people have been riveted to the Jodi Arias murder trial since January, another trial of far greater gravity has recently concluded with almost no national media coverage. Where this unspoken trial lacks the public’s enormous appetite for salacious details that often go with crimes of passion, it more than makes up for it with its murder count and stomach-turning gore. The trial I am referring to is that of Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia (“The reality of abortion — Kermit Gosnell is no outlier,” Commentary, May 8).
Dr. Gosnell is on trial, charged with killing four babies that were born alive and for the overdose killing of a patient in 2009. Since the indictment in 2011, 12 employees of Dr. Gosnell’s abortion clinic have pleaded guilty, including four pleas to murder.
The mainstream media’s blind eyes and deaf ears concerning the Gosnell trial is a crime in itself. One of the few reporters that followed the Gosnell trial throughout its entire five weeks was J.D. Mullane of the Bucks County Courier Times. To illustrate the media’s unwillingness to report on it, Mr. Mullane provided a picture of a completely vacant press galley. With abortion such a wedge issue and a Gallup poll identifying the American pro-life contingent up from 33 percent in 1996 to a peak of 51 percent in 2009, you would think this case would sell more papers. However, I can only assume including details of how the clinic routinely lied to patients about the development stage of their fetuses, how it induced labor on women in their third trimesters to kill infants after they were born, or explaining the technique Dr. Gosnell called “snipping” is just not making it past most news outlets’ editors.
In a civilized society, shouldn’t it be just as important to know that “snipping” — which it turns out is the insertion of scissors into the back of a breathing infant’s neck and the cutting of its spinal cord — was happening at a decades-old abortion clinic as it is to know about a woman accused of stabbing her ex-boyfriend 27 times?
RINGO LANZETTI
Falls Church, Va.
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