A demon has been revealed in twenty-first-century Philadelphia, and the three broadcast networks have been enforcing a policy of silence about the discovery.  So have most major newspapers.

One reason may be that the trial of late-term abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell for multiple counts of murder is about an African-American killing mainly African-American babies -- and so the common sense among liberals, or, as a friend of mine would say, the "coven-sense," is that such a story disparages that community.  This is something newspapers are loath to do.  In much the same manner that they cannot dwell upon the causes of hand gun violence in inner city black communities.  Or perhaps they view these killings as prophylactic: one cure for out-of-wedlock births.

But perhaps an even more telling reason for ignoring the Gosnell story is that among the terrible details is revealed the fact that many, many babies being aborted late-term survive the process -- not just a tiny few, as pro-abortionists keep insisting.  And so these innocent little souls have to be murdered.

In Dr. Gosnell's clinic, typically by cutting their heads off.  In one instance, a child arrived on the table with its eyes and jaw torn off by Gosnell's forceps.  While this helpless, sinless, creature lay writhing on the table, screaming, Dr. Gosnell gestured impatiently at an assistant -- do something about that.

How many children were so murdered?  I believe that Gosnell's charged with seven counts, but testimony indicates there may have been a hundred -- maybe more, maybe a lot more.  And so the liberal press, ever supportive of a woman's right to "choose," just can't have that known.

Then, too, let us remember that in the Illinois state legislature Barack Obama consistently voted against allowing these children any protection.  That governors, like Cuomo in New York, have consistently opposed any restrictions on the practice of late-term abortions.  That an official of Planned Parenthood recently suggested that the right to kill children extends well beyond birth.  Why not?  If it's right to kill them when they're minutes old and screaming, why not kill them when they're six months old or a year?

It's all apiece with the liberal culture of death.  In Holland, reports exist that older people refuse hospitalization out of fear that a doctor will kill them.  In England, the National Health Service is placing helpless elderly on what is euphemistically called the "Pathway" and refusing them medication, food, and water.  Under ObamaCare, we will have much the same, with what Sarah Palin called "Death Panels" deciding who lives and who dies.  It's just that some people, in the liberal view, deserve to be killed.  Or put on the "Pathway."

How can you kill a child?  I cannot fathom it.  At one time I was very opposed to one class of children -- grandchildren.  I wasn't old enough to be a grandfather.  I still didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up.  So my wife had to literally drag me along, sulky, morose, and bitter, to the hospital to see my first grandchild.

But when I walked into that room and my beaming daughter put her tiny baby in my arms, all that vanished, and I was in love all over again.  Together with our own newborns again from thirty years in the past.  Indeed, I was transported.  This, I confirmed in that instant, is what this world is all about.  And I just can't shake the feeling that if someone from outside just held one of those children for a moment before Gosnell had him or her killed, that person, rich or poor, black or white, conservative, Christian, Jewish, agnostic, or not, would fight to the death to save them.  But because they weren't held and loved, because they never got the chance to transport that someone, they died screaming.  And the fact that they did is so very sad -- not just for them, but for us.

On the other end of life's spectrum, we have a guy I'll call "Buddy."  I met him while enrolled in a cardiac rehab program at a local hospital.  It is a wonderful place to go.  Staffed by RNs and containing some special versions of the machines you see in gyms, the staff reviews your medical records and works out a program of rigorous exercise to restore cardiac health.  They're very pleasant, but you don't argue with them; they're the experts, and you're the patient, who, left to your own devices, let yourself get out of shape.

I usually work out next to Buddy.  Buddy is precisely the same age I am but was struck with MS ten or so years ago.  Today he's twisted up like a pretzel, can walk only with a walker or two canes, and weighs almost nothing.  One day after we became friendly, I watched him struggle to lift a free weight to his shoulder.  It wasn't an easy go; he had the trembles in a big way, and his eyes were just about starting out of his head. 

But I have a talent -- often regretted, I should add -- of saying what comes to mind.  "Buddy," I asked "what do you expect to get out of this program?"

He turned that emaciated head on that twisted spine and grinned up at me.  "Rich, I expect to get back to one cane.  And won't that be something?"  Then he laughed and laughed.

I wanted to cry, but I laughed along.  How wonderful was that spirit?  That's what this world is about, too.  Spirit and the precious life that gives rise to it.  And much like that first meeting with my granddaughter, I was transported -- went home feeling ten feet high -- after listening to Buddy laugh at his affliction.  Life, as Christ told us in the Sermon on the Mount, was good.  Your father wouldn't give you anything that wasn't -- would he?

But what would that spirit, that good life, count for with a "Pathway" in England, or how would a Death Panel in the United States view Buddy's twisted body and inability to get around on his own?  The answer darkens one's soul, and all I can be certain of is that if we are to be men in this life, we have to defend that spirit, those lives.  Those to be born, the elderly, the infirm and ill.  Everybody.

Shakespeare said it:

Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known.

Finally, it is wise to recall that long before the death camps, the Nazis began murdering homosexuals, and then every retarded child whose parents they could convince to bring in for "treatment."  Nazis, shall we say, didn't hatch their "final solution" overnight; they worked up to the idea of Auschwitz by gradually acclimatizing selected Germans to the idea of killing whole classes of people by killing only certain types of people first.

All in the name of a greater good, of course.

And I'm afraid that that's exactly what's happening here with our babies and our old.  We're working up to Auschwitz -- and, like the Nazis who engineered it, to an eternity in hell.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD.  The father of six children he lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York.  He blogs at richardfminiterblog.com.