Two years ago yesterday, a jury convicted Dr. Kermit Gosnell, now the nation’s most notorious abortion doctor, of Murder One. He now must serve three life sentences. Yesterday, on a fitting anniversary, the House of Representatives took a concrete step to forbid what he did under federal law. They passed H.R. 36, the Pain-capable Unborn Child Protection Act. That Act now goes to the Senate. The debate will put the Senate Democratic Caucus, and de facto President Barack H. Obama, on the spot. And it puts the rest of us on the spot. We must decide what activities, and groups, we will support, oppose, and denounce.

What does H.R. 36 say?

First: no advocate of abortion dares sympathize with Kermit Gosnell. No one, that is, except Gosnell himself. Four months after a jury convicted him, he told reporters he practiced abortion as “a soldier in the war against poverty.” Philadelphia magazine reporter Steven Volk said this of him:

He believes if he could have spoken about his rationale for doing things, he wouldn’t be in jail … There is no anger, no desperation [in his voice.] He believes he was in a war, and that “they” won.

Who “they” were, Volk never made clear. Maybe because neither he nor Kermit Gosnell could ever invent a truly credible antecedent for that pronoun they.

So what does H.R. 36 say? That anyone who performs, or tries to perform, an abortion after twenty weeks, except when this law says they may, commits a federal offense. A doctor may do an abortion only if it’s either the baby or the mother, or if she fell pregnant from rape or incest (and then only if the mother is under age). Even then, the doctor must take care to save the baby alive, if he can.

Does the left want abortion that much?

Doctors removed this 10-week unborn child after the mother was found to have carcinoma in situ of the cervix. Photo: User “drsuparma” on flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic License

Barack Obama already says he will veto this Act if it ever crosses his desk. But of course. He once said he would not want anyone to “punish” either of his daughters “with a baby.”

The Senate Democratic Caucus, when they controlled the Senate, would not even let a bill like this come to a vote. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) once said she would respect a child’s right to live after the mother brought the child home. She never said she would respect that child’s right to live earlier than then.

Neither Obama nor Boxer said what they said in a vacuum. Let us remember who really put them up to this, who funds their campaigns, whom they go to for their position papers and talking points.

From “Ultra-Violet“:

Plain and simple – when politicians introduce inhumane bans on abortions, they are tying the hands of physicians who want to help couples going through heartbreaking situations like serious fetal anomalies.

See the mind-set: some babies don’t deserve to live, because they come into this world with an ugly shape. Once we decide that, we can set no limit. Peter W. Singer makes that abundantly clear. He makes a case for infanticide. Even some pro-abortion people have a problem with that. But why should they? Where can they draw the line between those who have a right to life, and those who do not?

The current head of “NARAL Pro-choice America” said, before the vote:

Americans have said time and again that they don’t want politicians inserting themselves in vital reproductive-health care decisions.

In the first place, she’s wrong. Marist University ran a poll showing 84 percent of Americans, including 65 percent of pro-abortion voters, would like to restrict abortion to some degree.

But in the second place (for CNAV wouldn’t want to stand guilty of special pleading for the right to advance an argumentum a populo), human life is human life. An unborn child has harmed no one. No unborn child deserves to die. So any such argument, even if true, is incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial.

Most of those who advocate for abortion, and especially late-term abortion, haven’t seen what happens to the unborn child. They have not examined such a child in the laboratory of surgical pathology in a community or teaching hospital. They have not stared, as this writer has done, into the severed eyeballs of such a child.

But several doctors testified before relevant committees of the House that unborn children, as young as ten or twelve weeks, do feel pain. By setting a threshold at twenty weeks, the House made any challenge before the Supreme Court orders-of-magnitude more difficult.

But the challenge does not lie there. It lies with the American people. This is a test of our community. This will show whether the American people still have any respect left for human life.