In 2013, I attended the closing arguments of the “Abortion Trial of the Century” in Philadelphia. Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a veteran abortionist, was convicted of murdering three infants after using drugs to induce labor as well as the death of one woman during an abortion. It was a victory for the prosecution, but it was scarcely justice – Gosnell was revealed to be a coldblooded serial killer who had perfected the practice of “snipping”: delivering babies alive, flipping them over, and plunging scissors into the backs of their necks to sever their spinal cords. Hundreds of babies died like that at the hands of Gosnell and his staff – perhaps more.
Memories of watching Gosnell’s strange, smiling face in the courtroom came back as I read a BBC News report by Judith Moritz titled “What I learned about Lucy Letby after 10 months in court.” Lucy Letby is a 33-year-old British nurse and serial killer who was found guilty on August 18 of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others at the Countess of Chester hospital between 2015 and 2016.
Letby, the Manchester Crown Court heard, was a calculated killer, injecting infants with air into the blood and stomach, overfeeding them with milk, poisoning them with insulin, and even physically assaulting them. As the children deteriorated, Letby attempted to convince her colleagues that the babies were dying of natural causes.
Her own handwritten notes told a different story. One read: “I am evil I did this.”
Moritz wanted to find out how a pretty, young nurse could become the U.K.’s most prolific serial killer of modern times. I remember Gosnell smiling around at those in the courtroom, seemingly impervious to the blood-spattered evidence sitting in the front of the room and the impassioned, gory details being provided by the prosecutor. Moritz found something similar: “My berth on the press bench was no more than five metres away from Letby’s seat. Every so often I’d look across at the nurse, to try to catch a glimpse of character. As bereaved parents recounted the horrors of watching their children die, the nurse maintained a neutral expression. No matter how emotionally charged the evidence was, she sat passively.”
Reading this young woman, Moritz concluded, was impossible. “Very rarely, as she was brought in and out, she’d look up and catch my eye, but just as quickly, she’d look away again,” she wrote. “I tried to look into her soul. I drew a blank. I started to question whether we’d ever see the real Lucy Letby.” Most have concluded that Letby was obsessed with “playing God” by murdering children while pretending to care for them, later searching the social media profiles of her victims’ families to gauge their suffering and grief. She attacked and poisoned the most helpless of victims, and she appeared to take genuine satisfaction in it. It is difficult for the rational mind to understand.
But National Review’s profile of Letby, titled “The British Baby Killer,” led with an interesting detail: “Lucy Letby’s youngest victim was born at just 23 weeks’ gestation, which is under the legal abortion limit.” That is not insignificant. Judge Goss described Letby’s murders as a “cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder” and noted that the babies she killed were “extremely vulnerable” and “fragile.” One of those victims could have been legally killed under the U.K.’s abortion laws. Presumably that child would have been equally “vulnerable” and “fragile” in those circumstances – and an abortion at that stage would have been even more barbaric than Letby’s horrific methods.
The medical establishment has been “playing God” with the lives of innocent babies for decades now. We’ve grown callous to the lives of tiny children because we have legally killed so many of them. Indeed, the argument made by Gosnell’s defence lawyer was that the infanticides he perpetrated were not so bad because legal abortion was just as gruesome.
So, to those abortion supporters horrified by the spectre of baby-killing by medical professionals: don’t turn off the TV. Watch this unfold. Turn up the volume. You helped write this script.
