Most press conferences are very serious affairs, with reporters seeking important information to distribute to the public about a wide variety of issues. That wasn't quite the case on Thursday, when John McCormack of the Weekly Standard magazine asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to explain the moral difference between Dr. Kermit Gosnell's murder of infants born alive and legalized late-term abortion.
Not only did the question anger the California Democrat, it also resulted in laughter from other reporters in the room.
The incident began when McCormack noted that members of the House Judiciary Committee passed Arizona Republican Trent Franks’ bill banning most abortions nationwide after 22 weeks.
They argue that there really isn't much of a moral difference between what someone like Dr. Gosnell did to infants born at 23, 24, 25 weeks into pregnancy, and what can happen at a clinic down the road in Maryland where a doctor says he'll perform an elective abortions 28 weeks into pregnancy.
Pelosi responded: “You're probably enjoying that question a lot. I can see you savoring it.”
At that point, several reporters laughed loudly at the response to a question intended to force the minority leader to draw a distinction between the death of babies born alive and using the same procedure on children who are viable even though they are still in the mother's womb.
Nevertheless, McCormack pressed Pelosi: “Could you answer the question?”
“What was done in Philadelphia was reprehensible, and everybody condemned it,” the Democrat replied. “For them to decide to disrespect the judgment a woman makes about her reproductive health is reprehensible.”
Pelosi's answer is troubling since what she used the same word, reprehensible, to describe not just the serial murder of infants by cutting their spinal cords but also the argument that all abortions should be illegal. While one might argue that such a position is extreme to say it is the moral equivalent of what Kermit Gosnell did is sickening.
Returning to McCormack, Pelosi criticized him for using “an extreme case” to make his point.
I'm not gonna have this discussion with you because you obviously have an agenda. You're not interested in having an answer.
That's an interesting comment when made by a liberal Democrat who has an agenda of her own, which is making abortion available to all women regardless of age or stage of pregnancy.
“I'm going to tell you something,” Pelosi continued. “As the mother of five children, my oldest child was six years old the day I brought my fifth child home from the hospital.
“As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when you talk about this,” she added. “I don't think it should have anything to do with politics, and that's where you're taking it, and I'm not gonna go there.”
The fact that she invoked her religious preference as a Catholic is usually a last-ditch effort to get out of trouble because her view on abortion clashes sharply with the beliefs of the Catholic church.
Pelosi's performance reminded Allahpundit at hotair.com of her statement a month ago, when she declared the Gosnell case “really disgusting” without stating what specifically disgusted her.
“The difference between what Gosnell did and what late-term abortionists idolized by the left do is a matter of about 10 minutes and 10 inches between the inside and outside of a womb,” Allahpundit noted. In many cases, Gosnell and his clinic were trying to perform an intrauterine abortion but were unsuccessful. Why make such an arbitrary distinction ?
Unfortunately, it seems that several members of the press don't realize the after-birth murders committed by Dr. Gosnell and the deaths caused by late-term abortions are no laughing matter.
