Highlights Concerning the Kermit Gosnell Trial:
LifeNews has compiled a list of the ten most horrific revelations to emerge from the trial — many of which have gone unreported.
Warning: The eye-witness testimony below is nauseatingly graphic and deeply upsetting:
1) A young woman who worked at Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic as a teenager testified that she saw a baby’s chest move even after the gruesome snipping procedure Gosnell used to end the baby’s life. “The chest was moving,” she testified. The baby was so large that another worker even took a cellphone picture of it. Prosecution experts, based on the picture, say the baby was well past 24 weeks, the legal limit for abortion in Pennsylvania.
2) Another former employee described how she heard a baby scream during a live-birth abortion. “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” he testified, telling a judge and Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas jury that the body of the child was about 18 to 24 inches long and was one of the largest babies she had seen delivered during abortion procedures at Gosnell’s clinic.
3) Stephen Massof, who does not have a medical license, described how he jabbed medical scissors into the backs of babies’ necks to kill them. He assisted Gosnell in “snipping” the spinal cords of babies, calling it, “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.”
4) According to a news report, Massof told the jury that women were often given drugs to speed up delivery of the baby so the abortion/infanticide could take place: He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.”
5) One day after a former employee described how she heard a baby scream during a live-birth abortion, another worker at the Kermit Gosnell “House of Horrors’ abortion clinic testified that she saw a baby “jump” when she snipped her neck in an abortion. “It jumped, the arm,” she said, showing the jury by raising her arm.
6) Another Gosnell clinic worker testified that she took photos of one particularly large baby, referred to by prosecutors as “Baby A,” with her cell phone that was estimated to be about 30-weeks gestation. Baby A had been delivered alive into a toilet where she cut the baby’s throat.
7) Baby A was described as being so large that his feet and arms hung out over the sides of the shoebox they put him in. Gosnell actually joked about the baby’s size saying, “This baby is big enough to walk me to the bus stop.”
8) Prosecutors have cited the dozens of jars of severed baby feet as an example of Gosnell’s idiosyncratic and illegal practice of providing abortions for cash to poor women pregnant longer than the 24-week cutoff for legal abortions in Pennsylvania. In her opening statement to the Common Pleas Court jury, Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore mused that the jars of feet were some kind of bizarre “trophy” Gosnell kept.
9) Gosnell’s sister-in-law testified that it was it was part of her cleaning duties to dispose of the large bottle on the suction machine that would fill with blood and fetal remains. She would pour the blood and baby parts into the sink and grind them up using the garbage disposal.
10) It was revealed that on the night patient Karnamaya Mongar died the emergency exit was found to be locked and down a hallway crammed full of broken office furniture and other debris. Workers could not find the key as emergency personnel sought a way to get their Code Blue patient out of the facility and into an ambulance.
During the Nazi holocaust, Josef Mengele used concentration camp prisoners, including young children, as test subjects for a catalog of demented medical experiments. Documents uncovered by Allied forces revealed that, before they were killed, Mengele’s victims were subjected to pain on a scale that can only be described as unimaginable.
After the war, Mengele became known as the “The Angel of Death” and international prosecutors wanted to put him on trial. But he had fled Germany and could not be found. Then, in 1985, a body was exhumed from a South American grave that DNA evidence confirmed to be his. After eluding capture for 34 years, Josef Mengele had died at the age of 68 having never been tried for his crimes. But in a Philadelphia courtroom, we are being given a glimpse of what Mengele’s trial might have looked like. It is the criminal prosecution of abortionist, Kermit Gosnell.
At this point, the State has presented its case, the defense has rested without calling any witnesses and we await the verdict.
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The list goes on and on and is certainly too long for this article. For those who are interested in the complete story, the full grand jury report is available online.
The answer to why these atrocities would occur is not hard to find. First, while the pro-life movement claims that abortion takes the life of a living human being, nobody on earth knows that better than the people who work at abortion clinics. The lofty rhetoric of “choice” may insulate those who work in the political and public relations arena, but the day-to-day reality for those who provide those “choices” is to deal with the corpses and parts of corpses they pull out of their customers’ bodies. It is an environment that inevitably destroys the humanity of those who choose to live in it. In fact, look up the definition of “psychopath” and you will see a textbook description of the kind of person who is mentally capable of performing abortions.
Second, the nature of abortion is no different than the nature of pornography and prostitution. All three are sleazy and corrupt businesses that only attract sleazy and corrupt operators. Moreover, that does not change whether they are legal or illegal. In recent years, even abortion defenders have begun grudgingly admitting that one of their biggest failures has been their inability to “mainstream” abortion within the legitimate medical community. They may not like acknowledging it, but these industry insiders have come to see that, like pornography and prostitution, the stigma of abortion is permanently hard-wired into the act itself.
In the final analysis, these are the two reasons why we have seen these abortion clinic horror stories in the past and why we will see more of them in the future. Simply put, it is the nature of the beast.
During Gosnell’s trial, it became clear that organizations like Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, and others within the pro-choice community, were fully aware of what he was doing. But they kept quiet because this was a rock they did not want the public looking under. What they knew, and wanted to keep hidden, was that everything being done at this abortion clinic was within the standard operating procedures for every other abortion clinic in the country. So they, and their lapdogs in the media, started whistling past the graveyard.
Now it’s in the hands of the jury and, given the testimony and evidence piled up against Gosnell, it seems incomprehensible that this monster could escape conviction. But, I’m not so sure. After all, the judge has already dismissed some of the charges against him on the basis that the state failed to prove that the babies were born alive. In short, the judge’s opinion was that these tortured and mangled children were simply the product of everyday, run-of-the-mill, late-term abortions. In addition, Gosnell’s defense team has routinely argued that very point when trying to counter the testimony of prosecution witnesses. To paraphrase their position: these babies were taken to this abortion clinic to be killed and they were killed … so what’s the problem?
As a long-time anti-abortion activist, I have to say that the judge and defense team locked-in on the core issue of this trial. What they are saying is that, if Gosnell decapitated these babies while they were still inside their mothers’ abdomens – rather than a few feet away on a stainless steel table – then nothing illegal occurred. To put it another way, the mere fact that these children were butchered is irrelevant as long as they were butchered in the appropriate location. The tragedy is, under existing abortion law that is a viable position. It also defines the abyss of moral bankruptcy that our legal system – and our nation as a whole – fell into on the day that Roe vs. Wade was handed down.
Today, legalized abortion is like a chicken bone that’s stuck in the throat of the American people. The abortion lobby will never be able to make them swallow it, and the pro-life movement will never let them just ignore it. And every once in a while, something comes along to remind them of those two realities.
At this moment in history, that “something” is the Gosnell trial. It is forcing the intellectually honest members of our society to ask themselves why they can be so horrified by what this guy did to these babies outside the womb, but so accepting of the fact that the same things are done to babies inside the womb every day in abortion clinics all over the country. Either the American people are legitimately blind to the hypocrisy and irrationality of that, or they have made a conscious decision to look the other way. If it is the latter, they have no right to be outraged when the Kermit Gosnells of this world come along and rub their noses in it.
In the coming days, we will learn the outcome of this trial. But whether Gosnell is tossed onto death row, set free, or something in between, the far bigger picture is what this trial says about our country. The late Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, once stated that America would be judged on how it treats those at the dawn of life, those in the twilight of life and those in the shadows of life. If he was right, then the ultimate verdict of this trial will not be rendered by the 12 men and women who made up the jury. Instead, it will be revealed in the way the public responds to what they’ve been shown. Make no mistake; regardless of anything that happened or didn’t happen in that courtroom, the real defendant was the American people.
By the way, it is interesting to note how Josef Mengele made his living during the 34 years he was hiding from justice. He was an abortionist.
http://www.markcrutcherblog.com
I’m scratching my head, however, as I try to comprehend why this particular case is drawing so much emotion and vehemence from the public.
There are two reasons why I’m confused:
1. This is not the first case involving illegal abortions, murder, or the death of a pregnant woman. Life Dynamics keeps an updated log of women who’ve died or been murdered as a result of botched legal abortions or related complications. The log is named “The Blackmun Wall” after the U.S. Supreme Court justice who wrote the Roe v. Wade decision back in 1973, Harry Blackmun. During the 40 years since then, more than 340 women have died as a result of an abortion.
Here is just one example from the Life Dynamics site (panel #29 of The Blackmun Wall):
Diana Lopez
On the morning of February 28, 2002, this 25-year-old woman went to her local Los Angeles Planned Parenthood clinic to have an 18-week abortion. Immediately following the D&E procedure, she began bleeding very heavily. She was taken by ambulance to USC Women’s and Children’s Hospital where an emergency hysterectomy was performed to stop the hemorrhaging that was caused by a tear in her cervix. Unfortunately, their efforts were unsuccessful. Diana was pronounced dead exactly three hours after her abortion began at the Kingston Avenue clinic. She is survived by a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old. (Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, Autopsy Report # 2002-01721)
So while the Gosnell case is certainly gruesome and grotesque, similar events have occurred more than eight times per year, on average, for the past 40 years.
Please don’t misunderstand me. The death of Karnamaya Mongar (the 41-year-old woman who perished while getting an abortion at Gosnell’s clinic in 2009) is a terrible tragedy. However, this certainly isn’t the first time a woman has died from a botched abortion. Why haven’t Americans been this outraged by the plight of the previous 340+ women who’ve died? How about the court-documented cases of women being raped in abortion clinics?
I’m not claiming that every abortion clinic in America is responsible for the death of a mother. However, these sad events in Philly are nothing new. Why is America starting to pay attention now?
2. The reports I’ve seen continue to talk about the killing of babies who weren’t successfully aborted and were therefore born alive. The descriptions of these deaths are unspeakable. But do we really think the murder of seven newborn babies is somehow more morally repugnant than if they’d been aborted five minutes earlier while they were still inside their mothers’ wombs? How about a month before birth? Six months? Eight months?
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We are outraged to learn that Gosnell allegedly cut the spinal cords of newborns to end their lives. Yet one could argue that this method was more merciful than burning a child alive, crushing her to death in the womb, or dismembering her limb from limb.
If we are to be consistent in our condemnation of the events that took place in Philly, then we cannot pick and choose when we’ll be horrified.
I certainly hope the case in Pennsylvania effectively stirs the American people to call abortion into question. Alas, I fear we’ll focus only on the poor dead mother and the seven babies who were born alive and then murdered. Yet Americans should be just as appalled by the hundreds of unknown mothers who’ve lost their lives to abortion. Our nation as a whole should shake in fury at the diabolical methods that are used every day to abort a child.
Indeed, the “House of Horrors” has legally existed for 40 years. And it’s called the womb.
http://onlineforlife.org/why-are-we-so-horrified-by-kermit-gosnell/
We don’t need to ask what was going on at Gosnell’s clinic, because the answerer is obvious. This was Nazi-scale mass murder, done for profit and, quite possibly, for ethnic cleansing. One of the pro-abortion crowd’s most carefully held secrets is that the American abortion industry targets blacks. Planned Parenthood founder was a racist who viewed abortion as a way to destroy the black population. Gosnell’s clinic was in a primarily African-American neighborhood and the women who sought his services were black. Gosnell, a black man who charged poor black and immigrant women up to $1,600 for an abortion, was willing to engage in racial cleansing for profit.
Most Americans agree that there are certain limited circumstances in which abortion can be justified. What the media hides from them — and this is the reason that the media has blacked-out the Gosnell trial — is that the American abortion industry kills babies (especially minority babies) with the same grim efficiency and absence of emotion seen in Nazis, Soviets, North Koreans, or any other totalitarian regime. Kermit Gosnell’s slaughterhouse house ripped aside the gauzy “a woman’s right to choose” narrative and showed us the inside of the gas chamber. — Bookworm, Mr.Conservative
Gosnell, 69, operated a clinic called the Women’s Medical Society in a low-income neighborhood in West Philadelphia, until the clinic was closed early in 2010. Authorities raided the place last February, after it was fingered as a source of illegal oxycontin prescriptions. There, they stumbled across the appalling conditions at the abortion clinic, which sparked a full investigation. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
Semiconscious, moaning women sat in dirty recliners and on bloodstained blankets. The air reeked of urine from the flea-infested cats permitted to roam the clinic. There was blood on the floor and cat feces on the stairs. One investigator likened the scene to “a bad gas-station restroom.
Gosnell did not perform “late term abortions” (no veneer of clinical justification here today) He induced labor in heavily tranquilized women and then killed their children as they were born. He called this practice “ensuring fetal demise.” He did not anesthetize women properly, but gave them uncontrolled doses of drugs such as Demerol administered by non-medical staff in preset amounts determined by how out of it they wanted the woman to be. The more a woman complained, the more they dosed her until they accidentally killed a woman. Cats ran free and defecated where they liked. The exam table and the recovery room were stained with blood, the halls were too narrow to get emergency patients out on a gurney, the emergency exit was permanently locked with a chain and padlock, and by all accounts the facility reeked. Perhaps the most bizarre and ghoulish of all were the random body parts and collections of the products of his unspeakable acts that he kept and displayed under the pretense that the genetic material may one day be necessary for paternity tests (insane!). This included jars with pairs of feet that he severed from the babies he killed. Gosnell acts like a character from Criminal Minds keeping trophies of his victims and it is hard to imagine that he is not a clinically disturbed individual.
http://lti-blog.blogspot.com/2011/01/it-is-all-about-abortion-jay.html
“One of her duties, Williams said, was to retrieve fetuses women would sometimes spontaneously abort in the waiting room after getting large doses of drugs to dilate the cervix.” – From a story in Wednesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, “Gosnell aide describes abortions as ‘routine procedure,’” by Joseph A. Slobodzian.
It’s does not exactly constitute a deluge but there has been a trickle of information coming out thanks to a few cracks in the media wall which has served to keep the public in the dark about the murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. The latest two examples were columns by Dan Gainor at Fox News and Kirsten Powers in USA Today.
Both columns hone in on the absence of network coverage of Gosnell while at the same time the networks could not spend enough time and resources on a basketball scandal which, while repulsive, is hardly in the same ball park as the alleged murder of viable unborn babies and the death of a 41-year-old woman caused by way too much pain medication.
Both develop the idea that if you combine the newsworthiness of the trial; the sensational charges against Gosnell—that he delivered seven viable unborn babies alive and then murdered them by slicing their spinal cords; and the media’s habitual fascination with murder trials, then Gosnell’s trial should be (in Powers’ words) “on every news show and front page.”
The media has been virtually silent about “Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure,” Powers writes indignantly. The testimony of former Gosnell employees about “what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart.”
That statement ought to give us reason to pause. Sure, the pro-abortion, let’s-keep-abortion’s-ugliness-hidden bias is a major reason for the near blackout. But there’s more to it than that.
If the New York Times and the Washington Post and ABC/NBC/CBS (and many of the cable networks as well) covered the Gosnell the way they do so many bizarre murder cases, the result would not just be that the public would learn that abortion is legal but neither safe nor rare ; or that the abortion industry attracts the worst kind of people; or that killing thousands of babies coarsens the soul.
To give the Gosnell trial the coverage it deserves would—or at least could—force a one-on-one confrontation with their consciences.
Their self-understanding is that of progressive/liberals with a preferable option for the underdog and the powerless.
Who could be more powerless than children prematurely expelled and then brutally murdered? And what about the women Gosnell aborted who were, according to the Grand Jury report, typically poor women of color often drugged into a stupored compliance. And that doesn’t even address what was behind Gosnell hiring women with histories of drug and mental health issues, paying them paltry sums and not uncommonly under the table.
And if they covered the murder trial, they would come face to face with the final indignity for the women who delivered viable babies. According to the Grand Jury report
“Very often, the patient delivered without Gosnell being present. Lewis testified that one or two babies fell out of patients each night. They dropped out on lounge chairs, on the floor, and often in the toilet. If the doctor was not there, it was not unusual for no one to tend to the mother or the baby.”
Which “side” was Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Gosnell? Well, there’s no mystery about where Gosnell could have gotten the idea that his youngest victims weren’t human, or entitled to any protection under the law. There aren’t just two sides, though, but a whole continuum of points of view, from those who see several cells as a legal person to those who insist that even a baby who could walk Kermit Gosnell to the bus stop is only a person if his mom says so.
Gosnell himself seemed confused, when he was charged with so many counts of murder, as to how that could be. Because even at that point, he didn’t appear to see the children he’s accused of beheading as people.
Planned Parenthood’s Snow was similarly obtuse, either willfully or out of habit, in testifying against a Florida bill that would have required medical care for babies who survive abortions. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion,” she was asked, “what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”
Her answer was a familiar one: “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family and the physician.”
Though it pains me to say so, that’s the same stand Barack Obama effectively took when he voted against a similar Illinois bill — even after the addition of a “neutrality clause” spelling out that the bill would have no bearing on the legal status of the (you say fetus, I say unborn child) at any point prior to delivery, and thus could not be used to outlaw abortion.
Recently, MSNBC host Melissa Harris mocked those who see a fertilized egg as a fully human person: “I get,” she said, “that that’s a particular kind of faith claim that’s not associated with science.”
But I wish she and those who agree with her also got this: To insist that a baby born at 30 weeks, as one of Gosnell’s victims was, only qualifies as a person if his mom decides to keep him is also “a particular kind of faith claim that’s not associated with science.”
The blackout from the media is shameful but not surprising …but the silence from the president is deafening.
So why is President Obama silent on the issue? One only need look carefully into President Obama’s legislative history to find the answer.
Three times during Obama’s tenure as an Illinois state senator, a package of Born Alive bills was introduced on the senate floor. Each time, then state senator Obama voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, siding against protecting babies who survived an abortion.
The same senator who voted “present” countless times to avoid taking a stand on contentious issues, was more than eager to cast a vote denying care to victims of botched abortions.
While Americans cringe at Abortionist Gosnell’s treatment of viable babies who survive an abortion – snipping their spinal cords with a pair of unsterile medical scissors – we only need to look at the President’s past voting record on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act to understand his position.
These same seven babies who survived Gosnell’s late-term abortion procedure would just further “burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform the abortion,” according to President Obama’s argument against the Born Alive Protection Act of 2002.
In other words, if a baby survives an abortion, the death plan marked out for this child should be carried out regardless of the child’s viability.
If Obama wasn’t moved by the testimonies of nurses revealing how the born-alive infants were often discarded in a soiled utility room where they were left to die, why would we expect him to react differently to Gosnell’s post-abortion infanticide? After all, one could certainly make the case that Gosnell’s brutal yet quick killing technique is far less ruthless than leaving a frail newborn to die a slow anguished death – which is precisely what Obama voted for as state senator.
And that’s why we have yet to hear from President Obama regarding Gosnell’s victims. His years in the Illinois state legislature were invested in arguing against the protection of babies who survive botched abortions, labeling them as a “burden” to both mother and attending abortionist.
Were he to speak out on behalf of the babies murdered in Gosnell’s clinic, Obama would be contradicting his repeated votes against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act and betraying his unholy alliance with pro-abortion extremists who advocate for abortion on demand at all stages.
Any statement from Obama would only expose the hidden truth that as state senator he in essence voted for the death of Gosnell’s victims… different instruments and different means…but the same result.
http://theblacksphere.net/2013/04/abortionist-kermit-gosnell-and-obamas-silence/
Now, it is true that what Gosnell did is technically illegal in America. Despite the efforts of Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood, abortion doctors are not supposed to kill babies outside their mothers. However, there is absolutely nothing illegal or unusual about decapitating babies or cutting off their hands and feet. Furthermore, while the nurses and doctors cannot usually hear them screaming, there is nothing unusual about babies writhing and struggling during these procedures.
Consider this testimony by abortion doctor Martin Haskell concerning a dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion, the typical late-term procedure:
Let’s just say…we left the leg in the uterus just to dismember it. Well, we’d probably have to dismember it at several different levels because we don’t have firm control over it, so we would attack the lower part of the lower extremity first, remove, you know, possibly a foot, then the lower leg at the knee and then finally we get to the hip. And typically when the abortion procedure is started we typically know that the fetus is still alive because either we can feel it move as we’re making our initial grasps or if we’re using some ultrasound visualization when we actually see a heartbeat as we’re starting the procedure. It’s not unusual at the start of D&E procedures that a limb is acquired first…prior to anything having been done that would have caused the fetal demise.
In his medical textbook Abortion Practice, abortion doctor Warren Hern further describes this procedure:
The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks because the fetal tissues become much more cohesive and difficult to dismember. This problem is accentuated by the fact that the fetal pelvis may be as much as 5cm in width. The calvaria [head] is no longer the principal problem; it can be collapsed. Other structures, such as the pelvis, present more difficulty…A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus.
Dr. Haskell also emphasized the difficulty of this procedure during an interview in Cincinnati Medicine:
D&E’s, the procedure typically used for later abortions, have always been somewhat problematic because of the toughness and development of the fetal tissues.…I just kept doing D&E’s because that was what I was comfortable with, up until 24 weeks. But they were very tough. Sometimes it was a 45-minute operation.
Is this really better than what Gosnell did? How is an agonizing, 45-minute-long dismemberment better than a quick snip?
If you really believe that late-term abortion is a victory for women, and if you really believe that laws which ban late-term abortions are a violation of reproductive rights, then you should like Dr. Gosnell. Maybe his clinic was a little too dirty, but aside from these janitorial concerns, he was a hero for freedom and choice.
http://liveactionnews.org/whats-so-bad-about-kermit-gosnell/
On April 12, the Washington Post published an editorial by Jordan Sekulow and Matthew Clark on the Gosnell trial. The editorial brings to light the schizophrenic mindset that allows many Americans to be horrified by Gosnell’s actions but perfectly okay with abortion in general. Sekulow and Clark write:
The details emerging from this trial are too graphic for us to even put into words, yet our society allows this same unspeakable torture of another human being to occur just so long as the baby is still inside the womb.
Americans should be left to ponder – and ponder long and hard – over how we can find Gosnell’s actions in snipping the spinal cords of babies “unspeakable torture,” the “ugliest possibilities,” and downright “sick,” while we consider abortion a simple matter of a “woman’s right.” Come again? Are Americans even aware of what abortion really is? Do we know exactly how babies are killed inside the womb?
If it’s torture outside, how can it be any different inside?
How can one procedure be any more or less horrible than the other? This is a question Americans must face and answer.
As Sekulow and Clark succinctly put it:
But the question remains: How can killing a newborn infant be illegal and shocking to the collective conscience, yet ending that same life moments, days or weeks before be perfectly legal and socially acceptable as long as the baby is still in the womb? There is no logical answer.
Aside from how a baby receives food and oxygen, what changes occur to make the baby human out of the womb but something other than human the second before? Does the baby’s brain magically begin activity; does his or her heartbeat suddenly begin; does the baby abruptly begin moving on his or her own after birth? No, of course not. A baby possesses all of these qualities of life in utero.
http://liveactionnews.org/torture-inflicted-by-gosnell-a-perfect-picture-of-abortion-in-america/
Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion-business in America, knows this full well—which is why their public talking points are built on euphemisms like “women’s health” and “reproductive rights” instead of on “abortion.” Despite hitching themselves to one of the most grisly practices known to man, Planned Parenthood has maintained a modicum of respectability by masterfully keeping abortion out of the spotlight—while quietly performing close to 1,000 abortions every day. As things stand right now, almost 30% of all the abortions in America take place at Planned Parenthood, and they increase their market share every year.
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If the abortion industry in Pennsylvania had been better regulated, it would have been discovered that though Gosnell was a licensed physician, he was not a board-certified obstetrician or gynecologist. If the abortion industry in Pennsylvania had been better regulated, it would have been discovered that Gosnell was employing unlicensed and unqualified personnel to carry out abortions. If the abortion industry in Pennsylvania had been better regulated, it would have been discovered that Gosnell was falsifying the ages of the babies being aborted. If the abortion industry in Pennsylvania had been better regulated, it would have been discovered that Gosnell was storing fetal body parts all over his facility.
Seth Williams, the DA who oversaw the 2010 raid on Gosnell’s clinic states, “My grasp of the English language doesn’t really allow me to fully describe how horrific this clinic was — rotting bodies, fetal remains, the smell of urine throughout, blood-stained.” This is the context in which Planned Parenthood argues that the abortion industry is being unfairly targeted and unfairly regulated. And herein lies the problem. Despite their tweet of condemnation, Planned Parenthood fights for the right to do virtually everything Gosnell is accused of.
Their recent opposition to Florida’s born-alive bill indicates their belief that abortionists should be allowed to “finish the job,” if the baby should be accidentally born alive. And though they finally reneged on their opposition to the bill amidst a public outcry, they couched their reversal under the claim that babies are never born alive anyway. The argument made by Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania, and affirmed by the entire organization through last week’s tweet, indicates that Planned Parenthood believes abortionists should be allowed to work independently of government intervention. While claiming to “condemn any physician or health-care provider who [does] not follow the law,” they do everything they can to remove any law that might actually regulate abortion in a meaningful way. And isn’t it telling that Planned Parenthood doesn’t condemn Kermit Gosnell for murdering a baby? They condemn him for breaking the law. If the law protected infanticide, it’s doubtful that Planned Parenthood would even raise a fuss.
“The MSM [mainstream media] has barely covered a story that could plausibly be named ‘The Trial of the Century’. And that demands explanation. So I’ll tell you why I haven’t covered it,” writes Megan McArdle at the Daily Beast.
“To start, it makes me ill. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read the grand jury inquiry. I am someone who cringes when I hear a description of a sprained ankle,” McArdle continues. “But I understand why my readers suspect me, and other pro-choice mainstream journalists, of being selective–of not wanting to cover the story because it showcased the ugliest possibilities of abortion rights. The truth is that most of us tend to be less interested in sick-making stories–if the sick-making was done by ‘our side.’ “
McArdle claims that Gosnell’s actions were not caused by legal abortion but admits that legal abortion created the condition for it to take place. “Gosnell was able to harm so many women and babies because he operated in the open,” she writes.
She also highlights the “disturbing implications” Gosnell’s case has for late-term abortions. “It suggests that sometimes, those fetuses are delivered alive,” she writes. “Worse, it hints at what we might be doing inside the womb to ensure that the other ones aren’t.” – Patrick B. Craine, LifeSiteNews
Thanks to conservative new media, the Kermit Gosnell trial is finally part of the national dialog. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), contrasted the abortionist’s trial to another ongoing narrative that the media covers obsessively: gun control. “If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject of presidential hand-wringing,” said Smith, a member of the House pro-life caucus. …
“Will the decades-long major national news media cover-up of the brutality—and violence—of abortion methods ever end?” asked Smith. “Will Americans ever be told the horrifying details as to how—and how often—abortionists dismember, decapitate, and chemically poison innocent babies?”
Smith went on to ask, “Murdering newborns in the abortion clinic, it seems to me, is indistinguishable from any other child predator wielding a knife or a gun. Why isn’t that child seen as a patient in need of medical care, warmth, nutrition and dare I say—love?” – Dr. Susan Berry, Breibart
Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure. Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations?
It’s not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page. The revolting revelations of Gosnell’s former staff, who have been testifying to what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart. …
Stephen Massof, a former Gosnell worker, “described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” One former worker, Adrienne Moton, testified that Gosnell taught her his “snipping” technique to use on infants born alive.
Massof, who, like other witnesses, has himself pleaded guilty to serious crimes, testified “It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” Here is the headline the Associated Press put on a story about his testimony that he saw 100 babies born and then snipped: “Staffer describes chaos at PA abortion clinic.”
“Chaos” isn’t really the story here. Butchering babies that were already born and were older than the state’s 24-week limit for abortions is the story. There is a reason the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called this procedure infanticide.
Planned Parenthood recently claimed that the possibility of infants surviving late-term abortions was “highly unusual.” The Gosnell case suggests otherwise. – Kirsten Powers, USA TODAY
Of course, to describe newborn children in their boundless possibilities and wonder would be to acknowledge, foremost, their humanity. That is why, instead, abortion enthusiasts must grope for words when circumstances force them to speak publicly about their gruesome business.
“That fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it,” Mr. Obama once stammered. This was back when, as a state senator, he was unnerved by the natural resistance of babies to the unnatural insistence of their mothers — of the culture — that they just disappear. If you’ve ever watched a hit man testify, you’ve heard the same stammer: the faint glimmer of a long-forgotten but stubbornly indelible line between right and wrong. …
Better to shove the evidence into a dark closet. That’s what they did in Chicago. There, despite the best efforts of “physicians” (they of the “do no harm” oath), many “however way you want to describe its” were “not just coming out limp and dead,” as Obama haltingly put it. The abortionists’ answer was to stick the helpless survivors in a utility closet where they could die, out of sight and out of mind. Obama, in the pitiless logic of legalized abortion, labored to preserve this oft-practiced but never discussed form of infanticide against the Illinois legislature’s proposed “Born Alive” ban. (See senate transcript, April 4, 2002, beginning at page 29.)
A decade later in Philadelphia, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” So said Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnell’s fellow butchers, as he described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the “Women’s Medical Society” on Lancaster Avenue. There, scores of babies — perhaps hundreds of them — were willfully mutilated after being born alive.
Standard fare was the “snip.”
“Snip” is a terse, antiseptic word. Like “choice,” it is tailored to those rare, discomfiting occasions when the intentional killing of a “however way you want to describe it” must be spoken of rather than silently done. It is an effort, as much mentally as verbally, to evade the monstrousness we abide in the United States, where nearly 60 million children — a population roughly equal to that of France or the United Kingdom — have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s 1973 fatwa in Roe v. Wade. – Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review Institute
“The abortionist’s crime isn’t therefore the fact that he killed these babies, but that he was too unskilled to kill them in the “right” way. Kill the baby one instant, and it is “reproductive healthcare.” Kill the baby the next instant, and it is capital murder. This is the outrageous contradiction created by legalized abortion. … But under the harsh light of Gosnell’s alleged crimes suddenly the lines between abortion and murder, and between fetuses without any rights and babies with rights are appearing a little blurry…perhaps even arbitrary. Indeed, what is emerging thanks to Gosnell’s crimes is the absurdity of drawing any distinct lines in law between these things. A baby inside and outside his mother’s womb is one and the same. All that has changed is the position of the baby. And an abortion and a murder are exactly the same act: killing the baby. All that is different is the placement of the baby. …
Faced with this disturbing truth, society can choose one of two paths: to do the hard thing and acknowledge that we have been wrong for the past forty years, and that the unborn child is a part of the human family and possesses the right to life; or we can, as has happened in the Netherlands with legalized infant euthanasia, throw it all to the devil and protect our beloved “right” to abortion by extending it even beyond birth. The former way leads to health and sanity. The latter leads to Auschwitz. Choose wisely.” – John Jalsevac of LifeSiteNews
Catering to women who were so pregnant they couldn’t get abortions anywhere else, Gosnell’s clinic became a “huge moneymaker” by charging $3,000 for a late-term abortions, according to a scathing, 281-page grand jury report that lays out the allegations against him.
The grand jury estimated Gosnell took in at least $1.8 million a year, mostly in cash, using figures provided by Women’s Medical Society staff.
That amount doesn’t include the money Gosnell allegedly took in from his “side business” writing illegal prescriptions. One law enforcement agent said Gosnell was one of Pennsylvania’s top three prescribers of the addictive painkiller Oxycontin.
Gosnell likely got to keep most of that money, especially since one of his key staff members was a 15-year-old high school student he allegedly paid $8.50 an hour.
Another unlicensed doctor who worked at the clinic says he was paid $300 a week.
While his workers remained poor, Gosnell allegedly made millions. Prosecutors say he cut every corner he could — reusing disposable medical supplies again and failing to employ trained staff. Gosnell went for a jog or a swim during the day while women were laboring in his clinic, one worker told prosecutors.
On the surface, it might have seemed like Gosnell was “giving back” to the poor West Philly neighborhood where his clinic was located. Gosnell grew up in that neighborhood. He was also African-American and served a number of African-American clients.
But Gosnell’s business was not about his patients’ health, prosecutors allege. It seems he was running his gruesome operation in the heart of a poor neighborhood purely for profit. – Erin Fuchs, Business Insider
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