For one thing, Myers deserves some credit for his candor. Most abortion advocates, when discussing the Gosnell case, simply refuse to acknowledge that he is charged with murdering children after birth. Instead they stress (as Myers also did) his alleged crimes against women. One suspects that they share Myers’s insouciance about infanticide but are politically shrewd enough to be evasive about it.

Myers’s argument is also revealing of the deeper logic of America’s regime of abortion on demand. His key assertion is that in order for Gosnell to be held to account for murder, “the mothers of those infants would also have to be charged as collaborators.” As a matter of legal analysis this statement is demonstrably false, and was when Myers wrote it. None of the mothers were charged in the case.

But Myers didn’t really mean to make a legal argument. His point was that if Gosnell was guilty of murder, the mothers who contracted for his services were morally guilty. This logic is facially plausible, but in due course we shall refute it. What’s interesting about it, though, is the structure of the argument.

Myers rejects the predicate (Gosnell’s actions constituted murder) because it leads to a conclusion he considers unacceptable (that women seeking abortions were morally culpable). Another way of expressing this is to say that for Myers, the mothers’ innocence–the innocence of any woman seeking an abortion–is an a priori assumption. His objection to charging Gosnell with murder is a conclusion that follows from the premise that the women are, by definition, innocent.