the lust to kill

By Diogenes ( articles ) | May 01, 2004

To veteran pro-lifers, the name of Dr. Kenneth Edelin brings a shudder similar to that of Dr. Josef Mengele, as the medical careers of both men serve as milestones on the slippery slope of human degradation. An ALL account gives a thumbnail of Edelin's place in the history of health care.

On October 3, 1973, Edelin, a Boston abortionist, performed an abortion on a 17-year old girl who was 22 weeks pregnant. His saline abortion attempt failed, so he performed a hysterotomy (Caesarian) abortion the next day.

He detached the placenta (cutting off blood oxygenation to the baby) and held the child inside the mother's uterus for three minutes as he watched the clock. Satisfied that the baby was finally dead, he removed it and disposed of it. A pathologist testified that the baby had been able to take at least one breath before Edelin suffocated it.

Edelin was charged and convicted of manslaughter by a jury, but the verdict was thrown out by an appeals court on a minor technicality. It is significant that every major national pro-abortion group rallied to Edelin's defense, and went so far as to pay for most of his court costs.

Sardonically known as "The Boston Strangler," Edelin has gone from strength to strength in the abortion establishment. Today he has an op-ed in the Boston Globe exhorting Colin Powell, as a fellow black man, to greater exertions on behalf of abortion-on-demand:

W.E.B. DuBois, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, championed the cause of Margaret Sanger and the family planning movement because he knew that this would help black women have more control of their lives.

Wordsworth once wrote, "In a course of criminal conduct every fresh step that we make appears a justification of the one that preceded it, it seems to bring again the moment of liberty and choice." Think what it must be like to feel, in your own latex-covered hands, a warm slippery baby twist and twitch as you squeeze squeeze squeeze -- and then grow still -- all snugged by the pelvic muscles of the very woman who engendered the struggling child. Strange dreams and black thoughts have to intrude in the intervening years, and it's no surprise that, once having brought off The First Big Lie, Edelin's conscience drives him to positions further and further out on the same limb in order to to justify his initial decision.

Enlisting Margaret Sanger in the cause of civil rights for blacks is of a piece with "being physician to" a newborn by choking it to death. Falsehoods create debts for which new falsehoods stand surety. Let no one argue that Edelin -- and the editors of the Globe, for that matter -- are not marvelously consistent characters.