HORROR IN PHILADELPHIA Updated
In West Philadelphia an abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell, has been arrested and held without bail for the murder of a 41 year old woman and seven live babies. The more information that comes out about this man and his squalid back alley abortion clinic, the more appalling it becomes. If you have the stomach for it, the full grand jury report is here.
Under his "care" (and I use the term very, very loosely), numerous patients suffered from perforated bowels, cervix and uterus. He was known to stitch up the problem and not mention it to the patient or their loved ones. The grand jury report is chilling (via lifenews.com):
One woman, for example, was left lying in place for hours after Gosnell tore her cervix and colon while trying, unsuccessfully, to extract the fetus. Relatives who came to pick her up were refused entry into the building; they had to threaten to call the police. They eventually found her inside, bleeding and incoherent, and transported her to the hospital, where doctors had to remove almost half a foot of her intestines.
On another occasion, Gosnell simply sent a patient home, after keeping her mother waiting for hours, without telling either of them that she still had fetal parts inside her. Gosnell insisted she was fine, even after signs of serious infection set in over the next several days. By the time her mother got her to the emergency room, she was unconscious and near death.
A nineteen-year-old girl was held for several hours after Gosnell punctured her uterus. As a result of the delay, she fell into shock from blood loss, and had to undergo a hysterectomy.
One patient went into convulsions during an abortion, fell off the procedure table, and hit her head on the floor. Gosnell wouldn’t call an ambulance, and wouldn’t let the woman’s companion leave the building so that he could call an ambulance.
He performed late term (6,7,8 months) abortions regularly (often telling first-time mothers they were only 24 weeks along), and when the baby survived as a live birth, he would kill it by severing it's spinal cord with a pair of scissors.
What is most horrifying of all is that there are few records, which means there is just no telling how many times he did this. The reason there are only seven counts of murdering live babies is because those are the only documented cases (via CBS Philly):
Gosnell is suspected of killing hundreds of living babies over the course of his 30-year practice. However, he is not charged because the records do not exist.
Among other complaints were his use of a 15 year old high school student to administer anesthesia. He used unsterilized equipment and performed the procedures in rooms that often had animals and even litter boxes in them. Eight members of his staff were also arrested, some of them for being unlicensed. Gosnell himself wasn't even certified as an OB/GYN.
His abortion mill truly was a house of horrors. There were bags and bottles containing aborted fetuses throughout the clinic, and there were jars of severed baby feet lining a shelf in his office.
Gosnell was in the business for thirty years, and it seemed to be a very lucrative living for him:
DA Williams said Gosnell made approximately $1.8 million in one year alone performing the procedures.
So why was he never shut down? According to reports, even with numerous complaints and 46 malpractice lawsuits against Gosnell, there had been no inspections of his facility since 1993. There are allegations that politics were the reason for the lack of oversight. The Pennsylvania Departments of Health and State provided no oversight whatsoever for reasons unknown, and so he was allowed to victimize a community of poor, minority women with impunity. It seems they came to the decision that it is better to have a butcher
This man should be thoroughly evaluated by a mental health professional. It's one thing to have a dirty facility (although probably not to the level that has been alleged), but it's a whole other thing to save severed feet in jars on a shelf. They're almost like...trophies.
The "doctor", his wife, and eight staff members have been arrested. No one from Health or State has even been reprimanded. Animal slaughterhouses have more oversight than this man's facility, and the methods are more humane than those undertaken by Gosnell.
To top it all off, this week marked the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It's hard to believe that in 38 years we have managed to go from dirty, back alley abortions to...this.
Of course certain factions on the left are using this as a rallying cry for federal funding of abortions, arguing that if it were allowed, Gosnell would never have been able to do what he did. In actuality, if the Departments of Health and State had done their job with regular inspections - heck, just investigated the multitude of complaints against him - he most likely would have been shut down years ago. Instead, no one checked it out, because abortion is a political hot button and no one wanted to deal with the possible repercussions of an investigation.
In this case, it wasn't just the lives of the children that meant nothing, but the lives of the mothers, as well. This man victimized a whole community, for decades, in the most debased, disgusting way imaginable, and it makes barely a blip on the national media scene.
God only knows how many women died or were permanently damaged from complications due to his botched abortions, and God only knows how many live babies were slaughtered at his and his staff's hands. That there has been very little media coverage of this outrage practically assures that it will happen again, in another city, with another doctor. It probably has already. With our bureaucrats too frightened of the political ramifications of dealing with abortion issues, the odds are good that another house of horrors will crop up somewhere.
According to CBS News, Gosnell is "confused" by the murder charges and the fact that he was refused bail. This man destroyed records and lied to patients about how far along they were so that he could perform illegal abortions, because he knew late term abortions were illegal in Pennsylvania. He routinely murdered viable babies that would have lived had they received medical care (and not had their spinal cords severed with scissors). He injured patients and never notified them or their caregivers of the injury. His actions go beyond mere negligence. He even went so far as to segregate white women who came for his services in cleaner rooms, because he thought they would be more likely to complain. He knew what he was doing. But don't be surprised if his "confusion" could well be the beginnings of a mental competency plea.
When he does go to trial, if he is found guilty and gets a death sentence, I humbly suggest that he die via his spinal cord being severed with a pair of scissors.
UPDATE: The Abbess has a great piece on how the media is not covering the Gosnell story, and makes quite a compelling argument for why they should. She also reminds them of another story that also deserved (and got) lots of media attention which helped to root out the evil.
In Pennsylvania, twenty-two abortion clinics have been investigated and fourteen have had issues - although nothing on par with Gosnell, thank God.
Delaware AG Beau Biden is investigating a clinic Gosnell worked at one day a week for a number of years. He would often start abortions in DE and send the patient up to his clinic in Philly to finish the job due to Delaware's abortion laws. He is also being investigated for defrauding the Delaware Pro-Choice Medical Fund by giving some of his PA patients DE addresses.
The Delaware clinic is owned by the same people who own a clinic in Louisiana that is so bad that a group of lawyers has threatened to sue the state Dept. of Health if they don't shut it down.
We seem to have forgotten that Roe v. Wade didn't just provide for legal abortions, it provided for safe legal abortions. It's bad enough we're killing the babies; do we really need to be maiming and killing the mothers, too? Read more...
