Gosnell's crimes not uncommon: Column

• Countless times%2C Gosnell used his tools to cut through a baby%27s spinal cord inside its mother%27s body.
• Gosnell%27s crime was that he killed his victims a few inches further from the womb%2C than our law allows.
• Unfortunately%2C Gosnell was not unique%2C and his victims were not alone.

The facts that emerged from the Kermit Gosnell murder trial are unspeakably gruesome. Witnesses said the abortionist took fetuses born alive and killed them by slicing through their spinal cords with a pair of scissors. On Monday, jurors found him guilty of murder. Now we're left to ask: How could this happen?

One possible answer is that Gosnell might be particularly depraved. On his own, he came up with the idea that murdering a fetus near the moment of birth was morally permissible, at least if the mother asked him to do it. That's comforting. It lets us console ourselves with the thought that such brutality is a fluke and not likely to be repeated.

But that's probably not the right answer. While murder rates for almost every group in society have plummeted in recent decades, there's one group where murder rates have doubled, according to CDC and National Center for Health Statistics data — babies less than a year old.

Product of culture

That's why a much less comfortable answer is probably closer to the truth: Gosnell's actions are readily explainable by a culture that embraces, and in some quarters celebrates, abortion as a constitutional right. Gosnell made his living by performing legal abortions, many of them late in the pregnancy. Is it really all that surprising that he might not have seen a significant moral difference in performing the abortion a few inches inside the birth canal rather than somewhere outside?

The law can be a potent moral teacher, which is a good thing. Laws against slavery and discrimination have helped reduce prejudice. Laws requiring accommodations for people with disabilities have helped them gain visibility and greater acceptance in society. Many people on both sides of the gay marriage debate argue their position in terms of the important teaching power of the law.

It would be naive to think that our abortion laws do not carry a similar teaching power. Our abortion system undeniably treats small, dependent human fetuses in the womb as only conditionally valued. They are to be loved, protected and welcomed if wanted by their mothers, but can be killed and discarded if unwanted.

To be sure, the law attempts to impose a line: Once a baby is born, he is a person to be protected, even if unwanted. But this line is in some sense arbitrary. It is odd to think that the exact same human being is a protected person in one place (outside the womb) but was essentially property moments earlier in another place (inside the womb).

Parental killers

It could be that the teaching power of abortion law is eroding more than the moral sense of doctors. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, infant homicide is shockingly common. Its most recent 2002 report suggests that the day a person is born is, by far, the most likely day for them to be killed.

Although more recent statistics concerning day-of-birth homicides are unavailable, a look at homicide rates during the first year of life suggests that infant homicides have become considerably more common since Roe v Wade constitutionalized the right to abortion. According to the Child Trends Databank using data from the CDC and the NCHS, children less than a year old are roughly twice as likely to be victims of homicide today as in 1970 (a few years before Roe). In 1970, there were 4.3 homicides for every 100,000 children under age one. The rate peaked at 9.2 in 2000 and was at 7.9 in 2010.

For babies killed just after birth, the CDC report suggests Gosnell-style abortions are not the big threat: Mothers are, most frequently adolescents with a history of mental illness. After the first week, the killers are most often male caretakers, often unrelated to the baby. Perhaps both groups learned the lessons of our abortion laws a bit too well.

Though this possibility does not excuse doctors or parents who kill a child, it does help explain how some would end up with the idea that doing so was permissible. And while it may be more comfortable to ignore the similarity between the fetuses Gosnell legally "aborted" and those he illegally "murdered," at least Planned Parenthood recognizes that there is little difference. This is presumably why Planned Parenthood opposes legislation protecting children born during failed abortions, out of fear that if those babies are protected, the similar babies we allow to be killed inside the womb might have to be protected, too.

A far better choice exists. As a society, we could agree that there really is little difference between killing a being inside and outside the womb. We should admit that our system of abortion law is dehumanizing. The better course is to protect even small voiceless human beings from more powerful people who would rather see them dead, whether that killing happens inside or outside the womb.

Mark L. Rienzi is an associate professor of constitutional law at Catholic University of America.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors.