Originally posted at American Thinker.
Kermit Gosnell and Amanda Berry have already done damage to the pro-choice movement — Kermit for exposing the grisly details of late-term abortions, and Amanda for loving and defending a daughter sired by a rapist. Next, Ariel Castro, via Ohio Cuyahoga County prosecutor Thomas McGinty, is about to push the national abortion debate over a cliff for sure.
McGinty believes that Ohio law calls for the death penalty for a man the prosecutor described as one of the “most depraved criminals [to] commit aggravated murder during the course of a kidnapping.” The victims of those aggravated murder charges are the five children slain in utero by their father, Ariel Castro.
Currently, self-described “sexual predator” Castro is in jail on suicide watch, held on $8-million bail. Mr. Castro is accused of kidnapping and raping three women who were held for 10 years inside a house of horrors at 2207 Seymour Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.
At the time of their abductions, the girls were 14, 16, and 20 years old. The women, now in their 20s and 30s, vanished separately between 2002 and 2004 after accepting a ride home from a helpful ex-bus driver named Ariel Castro.
Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight then spent a decade confined to a basement, tied up with ropes and chains and holed up in separate rooms. The women claim to have left the house only twice, and that was when they walked a few steps to the garage dressed in disguises and then back again.
When not being starved or physically assaulted, it’s alleged that the women were sexually abused. Assistant county prosecutor Brian Murphy said Castro used the women “in whatever self-gratifying, self-serving way he saw fit.”
The repeated rapes resulted in six pregnancies, out of which only one baby, Jocelyn, the six-year-old daughter of Amanda Berry, survived.
For whatever reason, Castro’s first victim, Michelle Knight, seems to have suffered the worst of the abuse and endured the greatest loss. It is believed that the five babies that were victims of forcible miscarriage were conceived by Michelle, who was beaten so badly over the almost 11 years she was held in captivity that her grandmother, Deborah Knight, said, “She has to have facial reconstruction, and she’s lost hearing in one ear.”
All three women emerged from the ordeal with both physical and emotional scars. Amanda escaped with her life and her daughter Jocelyn; Gina with her life; and Michelle with her life, a disfigured face, and after five brutally administered abortions, most assuredly a broken heart.
The extent of Michelle Knight’s pain is hard to imagine, especially after learning that she helped deliver Jocelyn in an inflatable pool on Christmas Day in 2006. Allegedly Miss Knight gave the newborn CPR after being threatened by Castro with death herself if the baby girl died.
In the state of Ohio, fetal homicide is against the law, and “[a]ll of Ohio’s homicide and assault statutes prohibit actions which kill or injure another person’s unborn child at any stage of pregnancy,” which is what Ariel Castro did not once, but five times. Therefore, after the women’s rescue and Castro’s arrest, babies who would otherwise be viewed as non-viable entities, legal to dispose of under the law, are now positioned to become the driving force behind a possible death sentence for Ariel Castro for “aggravated murder.”
And while Ohio has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, Castro being prosecuted for aggravated murder is sure to send a message to the rest of Pro-Choice America that, according to the Ohio justice system, these five children had the right to life.
In other words, physical- and sexual-assault victim and grieving mother Michelle Knight’s five babies are about to assume identities similar to those whose images are now seared into the mind’s eye of the nation thanks to the horrific Kermit Gosnell trial.
As for Pro-Choice America, try as they might to stress that the right to choose overrides the right to life, two champions of their cause, Kermit Gosnell and Ariel Castro, have done a grave disservice to the abortion debate.
Why? Because both men unintentionally delivered a blow to a community that has struggled for 40 years to portray pre-born human beings as nothing more than lifeless clumps of tissue. Now, Castro’s daughter Jocelyn, a child of rape, has a face, and Kermit Gosnell’s victims, Babies A, B, C, D, E, F, and G all have names. Moreover, after Ariel Castro is formally indicted, the lives of five forcibly aborted babies will assume identities they would have otherwise been denied.
And then there’s the quandary the press is about to find itself in. Unlike with late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell, the media is in way too deep now to ignore Ariel Castro. The initial sensationalism of the story drew the pro-choice media in, thinking they were dealing exclusively with a sexual abuse/bondage/kidnapping case. Now it’s too late to back out, and the story has the potential to inspire a national debate about the inconsistency of a rationale that says murdering a fetus is wrong in some circumstances and perfectly acceptable in others.
So, kudos to Kermit Gosnell and Ariel Castro! Not for their despicable deeds, of course, but for doing the unthinkable so well that, without realizing it, both men have given voice to unborn children who otherwise would have never been heard.
