Religion & Law

I have started several times writing a post about the horrifying recent reports coming from Philadelphia about "[a] filthy abortion mill where prosecutors say babies were delivered alive and killed with scissors". 

In its report, the grand jury said failures of the Pennsylvania Department of Health and other agencies allowed Gosnell's "house of horrors" to persist for decades, with baby body parts on the shelves and clogging the plumbing, a 15-year-old high school student performing intravenous anesthesia, and Gosnell's wife, a cosmetologist, performing late-term procedures. . . .

Gosnell also kept jars of severed feet on his shelves, Williams said. Gosnell also had a taste for macabre jokes, once muttering that a nearly six-pound baby born alive to a 17-year-old who was 7 1/2 months pregnant could "walk me to the bus stop," the report said.

Under Pennsylvania law, abortions are illegal after 24 weeks of pregnancy, or just under six months, and most doctors won't perform them after 20 weeks because of the risks, prosecutors said. . . .

[In fact, my understanding is that not all abortions are illegal in Pennsylvania "after 24 weeks of pregnancy".] 

What can one say?  The attack in Tucson -- the "massacre", it is often and reasonably called -- on innocent public servants and bystanders by a deeply disturbed young man prompted not only hasty and unfounded partisan attacks, but also more sober reflections about (among other things) gun-control laws, legal protections for students' privacy, the mental-health system, and the "tone" of our political discourse.  Will these revelations from Philadelphia prompt any similar or analogous kinds of reflection, even critical self-examination?