Overheard on Gosnell

Ramesh Ponnuru:

The question that should haunt us now is not how many victims Gosnell killed, which we will never know, but how many more Gosnells there are in our country.

Robert George:

Late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been convicted of first degree murder for killing babies after delivering them alive.

The trial now moves into the penalty phase, and we wait to hear whether prosecutors will seek the death penalty. But Dr. Gosnell is only the front man; and the real trial has only just begun. The defendant is the abortion license in America.

Matthew Franck on President Obama's speech at Planned Parenthood:

Evidently he is not afraid to come into contact with our own "class of native tyrants," who carry on the despicable business of destroying hundreds of thousands of human lives each year, and have the audacity to say they are serving "women's health." But then this is, after all, the same politician who voted against an Illinois law to protect the lives of newborns who survived failed abortions.

There is a limit even to Obama's audacity, though. The president mentioned the "right to choose" four times in his brief speech, but somehow this transitive verb never took an object. Choose what? He never uttered the word "abortion," though it was plain that the entire speech was about the centrality of abortion to the president's notion of women's "health." Is there any other constitutional right, real or invented, that does not go by its true name when its defenders speak of it?