PHILADELPHIA—I didn’t know that babies right out of the womb don’t like bright lights. I should have guessed it, I suppose, being as they have swum for nine months in the opaqueness of a mother’s watery womb.

I wouldn’t think they like loud noises either, come to think of it, since for nearly a year the blare of radios and screech of trains and human altercations came to them muffled through the layerings of a mother’s skin and fluids.

Twelve members of a jury had to weigh two versions of reality as the capital murder trial of Kermit Gosnell drew to a close. On April 30 the jury began deliberations to decide whether Gosnell had been a heartless killer or—as defense attorney Jack McMahon insisted—the victim of “the most extraordinary hype and exaggeration in the history of the justice system.”

As I say goodbye to the Kermit Gosnell murder trial and take my life back, I would like to disentangle the layers of challenges I saw running concurrently throughout the weeks of my voluntary sequester at Philadelphia’s Criminal Justice Center. 

PHILADELPHIA—The messy state of homicide law reflects the messy state of legal and moral reasoning in our times. “Patricide” means the killing of one’s father, with no differentiation for age. But “infanticide” does not neatly correspond in the killing of an infant without age distinctions. If it did, both “-cides” would seem to invite the same degree of punishment.

WASHINGTON—Abortionist Cesare Santangelo’s Washington Surgi-Clinic sits amid the sprawling campus of George Washington University, a few blocks away from the White House. Easy access to 25,000 college students—a demographic more likely to experience unplanned pregnancies—is no doubt good for business.

Addressing a meeting of Planned Parenthood last Friday, President Obama accused pro-lifers of wanting to “turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.”