Immoral Laws Encourage Immoral Acts

Imagine that we changed our laws so that from nine to noon shoplifting was legal. If stores stayed open during those hours, some people would probably still buy their goods, feeling it was wrong to take what wasn’t theirs. Others, however, would legally shoplift, reasoning that stores could afford some losses and no one was getting hurt. Now imagine this had been the law for thirty or forty years. Children would have learned, by law and custom, that shoplifting was okay. Their sense of its wrongness would be diminished. In time, they may recognize that the restriction on the hours for legal shoplifting was arbitrary and decide that shoplifting at any time was permissible.
Consider now Kermit Gosnell. He legally aborted infants younger than 24 gestational-weeks old. However, he is now on trial for the murder of one mother and seven babies. He is accused of killing viable infants, older than 24 weeks gestation, by cutting their spinal cords at the back of the neck after delivery. His clinic has been called a “House of Horrors” in the news. People are rightly disgusted, but should they be shocked? While the law distinguishes between killing a 23-gestational-weeks-old infant and killing a 24-gestational-weeks-old infant, should we be surprised if someone like Gosnell decides there is no essential difference and then kills both? I think not. In the end, the law is relatively arbitrary.
People don’t want to hear or think about the results of abortions, such as the severed feet, displayed in a glass jar in Gosnell’s clinic, but that is the result of abortion. About the time most women discover they are pregnant – by just 6 weeks gestation – the infant has a beating heart. Most abortions, therefore, kill something that is a good deal more than “just a blob of tissue”. The essence of what made Gosnell’s clinic a “House of Horrors” is not unsanitary conditions, or that he displayed the body parts of the infants he aborted, or that he killed some a few days or a few weeks later than the law allows.  The essence of the horror is simply abortion itself.