It must be one of those inversions of this age of the media that the issues raised by the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia have faded into the background, while the main attention has been drawn to the screening of this story by the liberal media. But even more curious has been screening that has taken place within the conservative media: Dr. Gosnell was involved in killing babies who had survived abortions, but somehow conservatives seem to have forgotten that they had helped to pass a federal law that forbade precisely that killing of a child who had survived an abortion, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002.

That bill was meant to mark the outer boundaries to the holding in Roe v. Wade: Whatever else a “right to abortion” entailed, it could not mean a right to kill the child who survived. In one notable case, a federal judge had opined that “the fetus in this case was not a person whose life state law could protect.” In other words, the right to abortion entailed the right to an “effective abortion” or a dead child. That was precisely what Congress sought to reject in that 2002 bill, seen as a “modest first step” in legislating on abortion.