The difference, of course, is that patients usually choose the “Do not resuscitate” order for themselves.  In this Washington DC abortion clinic, a doctor advises an undercover reporter for Live Action that the survival of a “fetus” born alive during an abortion depends on “how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point,” and then goes on to explain that he doesn’t do anything to determine how he would even proceed to determine a course of treatment.  The magic of the abortion DNR takes him off the hook:

“Hopefully we’ll get this pregnancy out intact, but it doesn’t always happen that way,” Washington, D.C. abortion doctor Cesare Santangelo tells an undercover Live Action investigator who is 24 weeks pregnant.  “I try and sever the umbilical cord first, and we wait for that to stop pulsing, and this way the fetus is expired first.”

When asked by the undercover investigator what would happen if the baby were to survive the abortion, Doctor Santangelo responds:

“Technically – you know, legally we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive.  But, you know, it probably wouldn’t.  It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point.  Let’s say you went into labor, the membranes ruptured, and you delivered before we got to the termination part of the procedure here, you know?  Then we would do things – we would – we would not help it.  We wouldn’t intubate.  It would be, you know, uh, a person, a terminal person in the hospital, let’s say, that had cancer, you know?  You wouldn’t do any extra procedures to help that person survive.  Like ‘do not resuscitate’ orders.  We would do the same things here.”

If you’re wondering how this is any different from Kermit Gosnell’s practice in Philadelphia, well, you’re not the only one.  The Washington Post’s Melinda Henneberger wonders where the outrage has been for the abortionists who have either remained silent or offered rhetorical support for such practices:

But where’s the coverage of extreme views at the other end of the spectrum? Of, for instance, the jaw-dropping testimony of Planned Parenthood official Alisa LaPolt Snow?When asked by a Florida lawmaker what kind of medical care the organization thinks a child who somehow survives a late-term abortion should get, Snow suggested that even then, the child’s fate is a woman’s right to choose.

That’s how our president voted as an Illinois state senator, too, even after his stated concerns about the “born alive” bill were addressed. Though there is a lot of room for disagreement on when life does begin, most of us think viability is a pretty clear, bright line.

I’ll pause briefly here to disagree with one assumption here.  Scientifically, there is no doubt when individual life begins — it begins at conception, when the human zygote has its own DNA separate from that of the mother or father and begins to experience mitosis. The only controversies on this point are political and philosophical.

More from Henneberger:

Not Planned Parenthood, though, which hasn’t disavowed anything Snow said. And not the Bronx counselor caught on tape, who warns the woman sitting in front of her that no matter what happens, she mustn’t go to the hospital, where if she were to give birth to a live child, that baby might be given medical care.

While in campaign mode, Obama purported to respect diverse views on the abortion issue. But I detected no such sensitivity in his Friday remarks at Planned Parenthood, where he spoke of “those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.  And they’ve been involved in an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women’s health.”

Abortion, he means, though that word wasn’t in his talk.

Of course not, even though abortions are Planned Parenthood’s core business.  Obama couldn’t even bring up the name Kermit Gosnell, not even to distinguish what he did in his charnel house in Philadelphia from what Planned Parenthood and its competitors in the abortion industry do across the country.  And the reason why is that there really isn’t that much difference — which is why the media wanted to ignore the Gosnell trial for as long as they could.