While the legal plight of murderer Jodi Arias captured the fancy of tabloid America, the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been front and center for opponents of abortion though pro-life activists had to launch a virtual riot in order to compel media attention on the trial.

To call Gosnell a butcher would be unfair…to butchers. Butchers carve up the carcasses of dead animals. In contrast, Gosnell’s victims were very much alive when he applied his instruments of death upon them.

Gosnell was found guilty of first degree murder of three babies (not fetuses New York Times, but human beings), involuntary manslaughter of a patient who had received a “botched” abortion and on over two hundred counts that ranged from infanticide to failure to comply with the state’s informed consent law.

The trial has been described in the media as graphic, which is not surprising since abortion, no matter at what stage, is a violent procedure. As if there were a benign way to describe the termination of a living creature.

Even the most militant pro-abortion forces could not stomach standing next to the most prominent practitioner of their trade, scrambling to jump to the front of the mob of moral outrage in order to call it a parade for their cause and absurdly blaming abortion opponents for Gosnell’s house of horrors.

After the verdicts, CNN posted an online column penned by Ilyse Hogue, president of the radical pro-abortion organization NARAL, arguing that pro-life state legislatures have imposed regulations that have allegedly run abortion clinics out of business thus giving birth to places like Gosnell’s.

It should be noted that Gosnell’s clinic hadn’t been inspected since 1993, supposedly to afford greater access to abortion.

Whether Ms. Hogue likes it or not, Kermit Gosnell is the mascot of their cause of reproductive freedom at all costs and his blood stained facility and mutilated victims are silent yet damning witnesses of the barbarity of the practice. When someone becomes numb to destroying life within the womb, he’s not too far removed from being able to commit “post-birth abortions” (AKA murder). After all it’s just the difference of a few weeks of fetal development, right?

Hogue, who lamented in her column about the unpleasantness of having to wade in on the Gosnell story so soon into her leadership tenure, might have to prepare additional spin for another trial 430 miles west in Cleveland when Ariel Castro faces aggravated murder charges for terminating the pregnancies of one of the young women he kidnapped and raped.

Anytime someone is charged and convicted for infanticide, the position of pro-abortion advocates is undermined through the assertion that a life (as opposed to a clump of cells) was ended.

Most people probably don’t remember this from 2003 (and the media is not inclined to help them) that National Organization for Women official Mavra Stark opposed the decision to charge Scott Peterson with double homicide for the murders of his wife Laci Peterson and their unborn son Conner.

Scott Peterson might not have a conscience but he had a friend in NOW and it will be interesting to see how the pro-abortion camp publicly agonizes over whether to defend the “purity” of their position by trying to save Castro’s life arguing that the murder charges should be dismissed.

The only thing standing between Castro and the death penalty is the affirmation of abortion activists’ position, the preservation of his life being an acceptable Faustian bargain for NOW, NARAL and their ilk.

The inconvenient truth for abortion advocates is that the Gosnell trial has shined the light on what the final outcome of an abortion is: death.

The public for the first time in recent memory was exposed to the physical “byproduct” of abortion, the severed baby feet and infant bodies with snapped spines.

That the former were preserved in jars should be no more disturbing than the rest of the body being thrown out in a medical waste bin. There’s nothing magical about abortion no matter the stage as they all produce a corpse, just of different sizes and pieces.

Hopefully the crimes of Kermit Gosnell will not only lead to changes in the law to further protect human life at its earliest stages but more importantly changing people’s hearts on abortion.