Recently in Texas, Samuel Little, 78, has been confessing to more than 90 murders spanning 35 years. Now serving three life sentences for the murders of three Los Angeles women in the 1980s, he has been giving police details that seem to validate his claim to have killed in at least 14 states. A Texas district attorney says “we anticipate that Samuel Little will be confirmed as one of the most prolific serial killers in American history,” and the New York Times observes, “How a serial murderer could go on killing for years, apparently without anyone noticing a pattern, seems perplexing.”

That Gosnell could have been a much more prolific killer than Little is not perplexing, for two reasons. People who should have known did not want to know because knowing would have forced them to answer questions about when in an infant’s gestation it is preposterous to deny that a baby is present. And given that most “