Kermit Gosnell, if the charges against him are true, is the ultimate child abuser.

I cannot run from this.

It’s not an easy task to write about his case from the standpoint of an advocate for children who is also legally pro-choice. But to be in my position and not write about this case is, to me, an act of cowardice. I’m a former child abuse prosecutor and an advocate for the most defenseless among us. Abortion opponents would- and have- challenged me on how I cannot see a child in the womb as the most defenseless human being imaginable. My response, at least for now, is that I draw the line at the generally accepted notion of “viability” and accept it as sound public policy. Personally, I view every abortion as a tragedy. But I would never support (absent what I consider reasonable restrictions) a legal ban on the practice; among other things I lack the moral authority to block a woman from making basic reproductive decisions I’ll never have to face.

But if Gosnell delivered live human beings and then murdered them with scissors, all of this in a fetid, filthy and sometimes lethal atmosphere, he is evil incarnate. Of course, most on both sides of the abortion debate would readily agree with that statement. But they also see very different implications for what it means.

To many abortion opponents, Gosnell’s hellish work is simply the inevitable consequence of an abhorrent practice that devalues life and richly rewards the dealing out of death. To supporters of legal abortion, Gosnell was allowed to flourish exactly because of the increasingly truculent and organized attack on reproductive rights. Women have found ways to end pregnancy for millennia; legal restrictions against that effort only push it into the shadows where compassion and basic competence give way to recklessness, greed, and torture.

I can’t embrace fully the more extreme pro-choice view that the best way to avoid evil within the practice of abortion is to simply allow it to occur with few if any restrictions well into a second trimester. The combination of desperation and the shadows of illegality attracts horrors, yes. But as well, there’s the stubborn fact that, the later an abortion is contemplated, the more morality gets muddled as much as legality. There may be decent medical providers willing to perform such tasks for what they at least sincerely believe are the right reasons. But there will be others drawn to the practice for far worse ones.

Still, what I know of criminality and the nature of predatory people is what ultimately leads me to side, generally, with pro-choice elements on what allowed Gosnell to operate. The primarily religious based anti-abortion movement believes that the practice itself is inherently evil and that therefore associated horrors are inevitable. I do not; right or wrong, I part ways with the religious to the extent that they believe the basic practice of abortion, no matter how well-intentioned, well-orchestrated, or reasonably regulated, eventually produces the kind of callousness within many of its practitioners that leads to the charges Gosnell now faces.

What I believe is that the desperation of women denied other options is what attracts- not produces- men like Gosnell. This is how predators work. Despite the insistence that abortion invites the perversion of the soul, that’s not what I believe happens. Rather, in most cases and far more terrifyingly, I believe evil souls are usually perverted from the beginning, and then search for opportunities.

Gosnell is on trial for being, among other things, a perversion of a doctor who mislead, mistreated, maimed and killed mostly young women and babies. If the charges are true, he is probably every bit the monster he is feared to be. Not a reluctant practitioner of a dark art for the sake of women who had no where else to go, but simply a deeply evil creature who feasted on misery and murder, collecting its products in jars because it amused him.

If so, in my mind, he was not coarsened and “made” evil by what he practiced. He is more likely an opportunist with original intentions. He simply found the perfect environment in which to indulge them.

TRIGGER WARNING: GRAPHIC

I was troubled by one understandable and typically American response to the Newtown massacre, namely the mostly Christian-themed memorial depictions that flew around social media. Some showed 20 children running cheerfully into a brilliantly lit classroom that was really heaven, or suddenly and happily finding themselves with wings on fluffy clouds.

Doubtlessly, the images and cartoons were well-intended. But ultimately they also served to sanitize the event, and almost to perversely undermine, however unintentionally, the gravity of it. The children are fine, the images suggested. We can move on.

But we can’t. Because when we do, however innocently, it makes it even easier for a sufficient number of feckless cowards who call themselves United States Senators to deny their responsibilities to any entity other than the corporate gun lobby or a fading and paranoid subculture of conspiracy blinded crackpots.

So please, invite your senator, if he or she voted against the series of reasonable amendments that died today amid an atmosphere shame and idiocy, to imagine the reality of Sandy Hook from the scope of a military grade assault weapon wielded by the miserable insect behind it. Demand that they picture what Lanza saw. Because it wasn’t 20 children and 6 women softly fading into the light of eternity, however warm that light might have felt once they got there.

They were ripped apart by a round of ammunition weighing about a third of an ounce with a muzzle energy (basically impact potential) of around 2400 foot pounds. That much metal at 2200 feet per second tearing into a child with an average weight of 48 pounds doesn’t cause him or her to fade with a sleepy smile into bliss. I thankfully have not seen the Newtown crime scene photos, but I am no stranger to images of children killed by gunfire.

So I know that the little angels of Newtown more than likely lost limbs and entire sections of their bodies in smoky red glazes. I know their faces probably exploded, their skulls bursting like pomegranates thrown from high windows. And, as Lanza squeezed again and again- as he would have had to do- an untold number saw their classmates eviscerated in unblinking terror and disbelief before his one open eye found their tiny, frail body and tore it open like fallen fruit under a truck tire.

Please, don’t blink. And don’t let your senator blink either.  Because that is the reality of the long moments of hell experienced by the supposedly now winged seraphim who were once Connecticut school children. The reality is smoking fragments of a Batman sweatshirt soaked in blood. The reality is a Disney princess headband spattered with brain matter on a tiny, shattered classroom chair.

But it’s not the only reality. The other is that Adam Lanza was a miserable creature limited utterly by his options. Thanks to the senseless expiration of the Federal Assault Weapons ban in 2004 (around the time Lanza turned 12), his mother was allowed to purchase a military style weapon, kept in her comfortable, remarkably low-crime Connecticut home within reach of the thing that was her child. The idea that this pathetic creature could have committed 26 brutal murders with a knife or a baseball bat is the height of sophomoric stupidity; right up there with the idea that a black president is going to disarm the populace and impose socialism on a dwindling white majority.

And yet that suspicion, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the droner making the argument, is what appears to hold sway still in the upper legislative house of the most powerful nation on earth. That and the threat of gun lobby money ending precious political careers. But balanced against two score little angels now nestled in Jesus’ bosom, is that so intolerable?

A shooting survivor shouted “shame on you” from the gallery today as Vice President Biden announced the final tally on a background check compromise. I took gallery shouters to task for their “Second Amendment” outbursts in Hartford, and I should be consistent and criticize her.

But in Hartford the object of the shouts was a grieving father. In Washington, D.C. today, it was among the most powerful and privileged group of 100 in the world.

Let freedom ring.