Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 10:19am

Kirsten Powers and the Still Small Voices

 

Kirsten-Powers

 

11 And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:

12 And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

13 And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah?

1 Kings 19: 11-13

One of the ironies of the Gosnell case is that a liberal Democrat, Kirsten Powers, is largely responsible for shaming the Mainstream Media into covering the Gosnell case.  A supporter of abortion, who now believes that life begins at conception, she wrote a fiery series of columns in which she called out the media for their obvious bias in refusing to cover the Gosnell murder trial for fear of jeopardizing the right to abortion.  Yesterday she called for banning late term abortions:

 

 

But Gosnell’s clinic was not illegal. It was a licensed medical facility. The state of his clinic was well known: there were repeated complaints to government officials and even the local Planned Parenthood. He wasn’t operating under the radar but in plain sight, and he received referrals from abortion clinics up and down the East Coast. Gosnell performed plenty of abortions within the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania and worked part time for a National Abortion Federation–accredited clinic in Delaware.

 

The woman Gosnell is on trial for allegedly killing, Karnamaya Mongar, perished during a legal abortion while she was 19 weeks pregnant. Gosnell was not forced to operate in the dark because of anti–abortion rights regulations. It’s the opposite: he was able to flourish—pulling in $1.8 million a year—because multiple abortion rights administrations decided that to inspect his clinic might mean limiting access to abortion. It’s all in the grand jury report, if you don’t believe me.

 

One of the bodies discovered in the raid of the clinic was of a 22-week-old baby with a surgical incision on the back of her neck, which penetrated the first and second vertebrae. The only thing that would make her death illegal would be if Gosnell failed to finish her off in her mother’s womb.

 

Does that statement make you uncomfortable? Good.

 

What we need to learn from the Gosnell case is that late-term abortion is infanticide. Legal infanticide. That so many people in the media seem untroubled by the idea that 12 inches in one direction is a “private medical decision” and 12 inches in the other direction causes people to react in horror, should be troubling. Indeed, Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack J. McMahon has relied on the argument that Gosnell killed the babies prior to delivering them, therefore he is not guilty of murder. His exact words were: “Every one of those babies died in utero.”

 

Gosnell is accused of aborting infants past the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania. But those same deaths – if done in utero – would have been perfectly legal in many states with sometimes abused health exceptions, which can include the elastic category of “mental distress.”

Go here to The Daily Beast to read the rest.  She is a woman clearly in transition from her ardently pro-abort prior stance.  She still wishes abortion to be legal in the first 12 weeks, but I have noticed that once someone calls for late term abortions to be illegal they usually, sooner or later, come to the position that all abortion is the killing of the most innocent among us and must be stopped.

Why is she doing this?  Still small voices I think.  Raised an Episcopalian, she was an atheist for most of her adult life.  Now she calls herself an orthodox Christian, by which I think she means the Mere Christianity of CS Lewis.  She has hearkened to the still small voice of God that is within all of us, no matter how fiercely some of us pretend not to heed it.  The second still small voice is that of the victims of Gosnell.  Most of her life Powers has been turning her head, pretending that the victims of abortion somehow do not count.  Clearly, the Gosnell case has caused her to hear the stilled small voices of the murdered children.

In this vale of tears two of the great gifts given us by God is compassion and repentance.  I think Kirsten Powers is in the early stages of the exploration of those two divine gifts in regard to abortion, and she needs our prayers.

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Tuesday, May 7, AD 2013 11:44am

[…] & Obama – M. R. Hasson The Self-Defeating Argument About Intelligence – Stacy Trasancos PhD Kirsten Powers and the Still Small Voices – Donald R McClarey JC, TAC C. D. F. Corrects Crd. João Braz de Aviz on L. C. W. R. – […]

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Tuesday, May 7, AD 2013 12:18pm

The distinction is not new. In 1797, David Hume (a nephew of the philosopher and the leading authority on the criminal law) says this: “A child, though it has become quick is regarded as pars viscerum matris and not a separate being and it cannot with any certainty be said whether it would have been born alive or not. The destruction of an unborn infant therefore, though an atrocious crime and severely punishable under a different denomination is not murder. But if breathing once has begun, it is immaterial how frail may be the tenure by which life is held … A child which is only a minute old, or an old man on the brink of the grave are equally entitled to have their lives protected by the pains of murder; for it belongs to the Supreme Disposer of events, not any human hand to determine the duration of life. (Commentaries on the Law of Scotland Respecting Crimes 1:186)

I believe the law of England was to the same effect.

Elaine Krewer
Admin
Tuesday, May 7, AD 2013 7:42pm

Horatio Storer is probably one of the greatest American pro-life heroes that no one has ever heard of. Notice also that the AMA committee represents both Northern and Southern states, at a time when they were on the verge of war; perhaps they themselves or their own family members fought one another on the battlefield just a few years later. Yet they all agreed on the need to halt the “wanton and murderous destruction” of unborn children. It would be interesting to know whether any of the Confederate states, in the period between their secession and readmission to the Union, attempted to carry out the AMA’s recommendation for tougher abortion laws.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Wednesday, May 8, AD 2013 3:28am

Alison, a student of Hume’s, writing in 1832, certainly recognized the humanity of the child, for he says, “the life of one human being is by such practices seriously endangered, and an incipient existence stifled in another.” Note that he says “incipient” and not “potential.”

Hume’s reason is that “it cannot with any certainty be said whether it would have been born alive or not.” and Alison stresses that “Administering drugs to procure abortion is an Offence at common law punishable with an arbitrary pain and that equally whether the desired effects be produced or not,” which obviates difficulties of proof, especially in a system that requires proof beyond reasonable doubt and on corroborated evidence. I once checked the indictments for abortion in the Books of Adjournal for the period 1900-1967. I looked at about 40 of them and all were for administering drugs or using an instrument with intent. In only two was it averred that the pannel actually “caused or procured [the woman] to abort, or part in an untimely manner with the foetus or child in her womb;” In both, the actual delivery was averred to have taken place in the Casualty Ward of a hospital, and one was coupled with a charge of murdering the mother. Clearly all these charges were based on what the prosecutor could prove.

Louise Gonya
Louise Gonya
Wednesday, May 8, AD 2013 2:54pm

I e-mailed her on this same point last week but she never answered. Orthodox, Indeed!

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