Gosnell and the Journalists

Megan McArdle says she wasn't covering the Gosnell case because:

To start, it makes me ill.

Well, I can certainly understand that. But that can't be the universal explanation of why the national media has been avoiding the case. They cover a lot of stuff that makes everybody ill. Ann Althouse, reading McArdle, suspects there is more than disgust going on, in general. She suspects there's another feeling motivating the non-reporting:

There's a deep fear — true shame — about this other matter that I'm talking about.

What she's talking about is late term abortions themselves, which, the later they get, the more they look like the killing of a full term human infant.

Let's talk about the morality of the seen and the unseen. This is a shallow morality that infects our lives. If the human entity is inside the womb, and it is cut into pieces that is one thing, but if it's "partially born" so that a nurse sees it clenching and unclenching its fists as it meets its demise, it's another. And if it slips entirely out, and everyone sees a living child and then the doctor severs its spine, then everyone is supposed to know it's murder.

When late-term abortions became politically controversial, the reporting on them was always annoyingly scanty, and I was puzzled about all sorts of things - including why the mothers were engaging in the practice. I mean, what was the point of carrying the kid for more than 6 months and then aborting it? Were these cases of discovering that a child was badly deformed, or doomed to some horrid life? I could understand that, but I was not hearing that this was consistently the case. Were they cases of the mother's life being threatened by continuing to carry the child? Again, understandable, but I was not hearing that this was always true.

At some point you might think adoption
would be the better option.