Race, Gosnell, and Someone Else’s Children

Perhaps you’ve heard about the MSNBC promo—-part of its “Lean Forward” series—-in which Melissa Harris-Perry asserts that “we have to break through our, kind of, private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families.” Commenting on the promo in his e-mail newsletter the G-File , Jonah Goldberg makes a fascinating point: Where are all these “no such thing as someone else’s child” people in the Kermit Gosnell case?

The most remarkable thing no one has remarked upon, as far as I can tell, is the disconnect between the Melissa Harris-Perry view about socializing children and what I think we can call the Melissa Harris-Perry view about privatization of snipping the spines of babies. If we all own everyone else’s children, then Kermit Gosnell killed—-barbarically slaughtered, actually—-Harris-Perry’s babies. Why isn’t she angry about that?

Elsewhere on NRO, Peter Kirsanow demolishes the idea that the media blackout in the Gosnell case might be partly excused as a symptom of excessive racial sensitivity:

To this, most may be prompted to repeat Hillary Clinton’s infamous response, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” Scores of babies were allegedly slaughtered and women horribly brutalized. The race of the victims is, or should be, irrelevant.

One point Kirsanow doesn’t make, but could have: Some white people support abortion rights precisely because it disproportionately affects minorities. Ruth Bader Ginsburg  edged toward this view in an interview with the New York Times in 2009:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

“That we don’t want to have too many of.” Just a quick reminder, in case you’ve forgotten: Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a sitting justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Far from being an excuse, the race factor, if anything, makes the media all the more culpable.