Dr. Kermit Gosnell
According to Dr. Daniel Conway, a Philadelphia neonatologist, babies with a gestational age of 27 to 30 weeks have an 85 percent chance of survival, and a low risk of serious disabilities.
Some put the chance of survival up above 90% at 30 weeks.
30 weeks being 7 and a half months.
As it stands now, the law of land in Pennsylvania prohibits abortions after 24 weeks, a stage of pregnancy where survival is a 50/50 proposition.
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July 12th, 2008. Baby A is born in Philadelphia.
30 or so weeks old. A bit premature.
This was planned.
Labor was induced.
Digoxin most likely administered, improperly.
Digoxin being a drug used for late term abortions.
The boy was born weighing about 6 pounds.
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He was breathing and moving when Dr. Gosnell severed his spine and put the body in a plastic shoebox for disposal.
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And so goes some of the gruesome story of the doctor and the Women’s Medical Society he ran for some 30 years in west Philly.
It’s come to be known as a ‘House of Horrors’, and for good reason;
There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets.
For those unfamiliar, which would be understandable considering the media blackout, Dr. Kermit Gosnell is currently on trial for the first degree murder of 7 babies as well as the third degree murder of one adult.
The details of what Gosnell is on trial for should illustrate why it’s absurd the media hasn’t really mentioned this story.
But before getting further into the nitty gritty, note that I’ll be drawing heavily, but not entirely, from the grand jury report, which while extremely compelling (to me), is only the State’s side of the case.
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Abortion was quite a lucrative business for Dr. Gosnell, who made millions in his nearly 3 decades of work.
Of course, it’s easy to achieve large margins if you keep costs down by using untrained and unqualified medical staff to perform cash only abortions, and high schoolers, paid as little as $8.50/hr, to assist;
Gosnell set up his practice to rely entirely on the untrained actions of his unqualified employees. They administered drugs to induce labor, often causing rapid and painful dilation and contractions…Gosnell routinely relied on unlicensed and untrained staff to treat patients, conduct medical tests, and administer medications without supervision. Even more alarmingly, Gosnell instructed unlicensed workers to sedate patients with dangerous drugs in his absence….None of Gosnell’s employees were licensed or properly trained…Gosnell deliberately hired unqualified staff because he could pay them low wages…
Add to that the fact that Gosnell himself was not qualified to perform abortions since he’s not a obstetrician or gynecologist and you have a perfect recipe for the horror show that followed.
So, anyways, that all somewhat explains why there were semi-conscious women waiting about. What explains it further is that the good doctor allowed patients to pick how much anesthesia was doled out based on how much they could afford, regardless of necessity.
It’s not like he was going to be there to administer it anyways, unless you were wealthy or white.
Patients were given 4 options, with no variation; ‘Local’, ‘Heavy’, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Custom’.
Sedation chart drawn by employee Ashley Baldwin. From the Grand Jury Report.
Furthermore, ‘Gosnell told Ashley (a high school student at the time) and other employees that if they were not willing to administer medication and anesthetize patients, procedures that Pennsylvania law requires a medical license to perform, they could not work at the clinic.’
As a side note, it takes over a decade of schooling to become an anesthesiologist or around 7 years to become a certified nurse anesthesiologist. Hardly something someone without training, let alone a high schooler, should be handling.
That, however, is secondary to the fact that;
…All of the drugs listed on the chart, including those that put patients into a deep sleep and could be considered general anesthesia, were offered to patients undergoing first-trimester abortions – a procedure that usually takes only a few minutes and is relatively pain-free even without medication. Legitimate abortion clinics give no medication for these procedures, or small doses of a local anesthetic such as lidocaine to numb the immediate area – an entirely different medication from the clinic’s misnamed “local,” which includes a combination of narcotics given intravenously…
All of this information serves as more or less of a prelude to the truly ghastly procedures Gosnell and his staff used in their illegal late term abortion mill.
The doctor had somewhat of a trademark move for ending the lives of abortions that made it out of the womb alive. To ensure ‘fetal demise’ as he called it, he, or another faux doc, would simply take a pair of scissors, stab it in the back of a baby’s neck and cut its spine.
This wasn’t rare.
Though he’s only being charged with murdering 7 babies, Stephen Massof, an unlicensed employee who says his medical degree came from Granada, admitted to the Grand Jury that there were about 100 instances where he snipped the spine after seeing a breath or some sign of life.
Massof went further in his testimony during the trial, describing what he was doing as ”literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.’ 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.”
In regard to fetuses, the Grand Jury report notes testimony from an employee, ‘one or two babies fell out of patients each night. They dropped out on lounge chairs, on the floor, and often in the toilet.’
The fetuses would clog the pipes.
At least one baby born into a toilet was actually still alive and had its neck cut, according to employee Adrienne Moton’s testimony.
Another time, a baby was alive for 20 minutes before an assistant came and snipped it.
Not only was this a crime in itself, it also meant that he was regularly delivering babies who had a reasonable chance of survival…Pennsylvania law requires physicians to provide customary care for living babies outside the womb. Gosnell chose instead to slit their necks and store their bodies in various household containers, as if they were trash…
In case you’re wondering at this point, why didn’t the State step in? Why was there no inspection?
Politics.
Tom Ridge, a Republican oddly enough, did away with inspections of abortion clinics in 1993 because it was somehow putting up a barrier to getting an abortion.
So without inspection, all of that jazz continued unabated for nearly two decades until inspections started up again in 2010.
This alone is baffling.
The unintended consequence of cash only, uninspected, wild west abortion clinics are severe physical pain and injury to women, examples being (all very well detailed in the report);
- A torn cervix and colon requiring the removal of half a foot of intestines
- Serious infection from leaving parts of the baby inside the mother
- Punctured uterus requiring a hysterectomy
- Venereal disease
- The death of Karnamaya Mongar from a drug overdose (that’d be the aforementioned third degree murder Gosnell is charged with)
Turns out having a completely untrained staff comes with plenty of morbid side effects.
Another side effect of an untrained staff and zero oversight by anyone?
Lucrative prescription drug profits.
Gosnell would provide pre-signed prescription pads and allow unlicensed staff to presumably prescribe at will. This made Gosnell one of the top 3 prescribers of Oxycontin in the State according to the report, and helped rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
But wait, there’s more!
In addition to all this appalling, viscerally disgusting behavior, Gosnell had the macabre habit of saving parts of fetuses; the feet of aborted babies were found in specimen jars. As per the investigation, the search team discovered fetal remains haphazardly stored throughout the clinic – in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers according to their report.
Also, a 28 week old was found frozen in a water bottle.
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Given all of that, it’s curious there’s been nary a word spoken of this case on any of the networks. Barely a mention in any major newspaper.
What’s the deal?
As Kirsten Powers points out, ‘when Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, there was non-stop media hysteria.’
Casey Anthony got coverage for months, still does. Piers Morgan devoted time to the tweets of George Zimmerman’s brother. I could go on.
If there was ever a story to exploit for ratings, it’s this one, no? It’s chock full of headlines.
I’m flummoxed at the blackout. This should be frontpage news.
The coverage should surpass the annoyance level of the Arias trial tenfold.
This isn’t even really a left/right issue. It’s not even an abortion/anti-abortion issue. I for one am vehemently pro-choice but this is too far beyond the pale to be even remotely defensible on those grounds. Both sides of the pro-choice/pro-life coin can agree on that.
As it were though, there is actually already a word for those people who ‘ensure fetal demise’ of a newborn, it’s ‘murderer’.
More at NBC Philadelphia, Philly.com (x2), NY Daily News (x2), TruTV, The Blaze, USA Today (x2), International Business Times, The Atlantic and The Weekly Standard
See the entire truly horrific 260+ page Grand Jury Report here (warning: contains extremely graphic photos)