Gosnell Updates
The Associated Press reports on developments in the case of Kermit Gosnell, the infamous abortion doctor arrested in January of 2011 and charged with eight counts of murder. According to the AP:
City prosecutors say the deaths [of a patient and seven babies] were no accident but the result of dangerous medical practices that went on for decades at his filthy Women’s Medical Center.“The uncharged conduct is relevant and should be admitted. It shows that breaking the law was standard operating procedure,” Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore wrote in a recent motion.One former employee told a grand jury that she was expected to perform anesthesia on patients after just 15 minutes of training from Gosnell. Before long, she couldn’t sleep at night.“She knew that if she made even a small error, ‘I can kill this lady, and I’m not jail material,'” Pescatore wrote in the motion, quoting from the woman’s grand jury testimony. “One night in 2002, when she found herself alone with 15 patients, she refused Gosnell’s directives to medicate them. She made an excuse, went to her car, and drove away, never to return.”
Nine other clinic workers have been charged, and several have plead guilty to third degree murder for their roles in performing late term abortions. If Gosnell is convicted, he will face the death penalty.
There have been many calls for further restrictions on abortion, much revulsion expressed at post-viability abortions, much blame cast on prochoicers for supposedly doing nothing to stop him. But it has not been pointed out often enough that what Dr. Gosnell was doing was illegal in Pennsylvania. It is not legal to perform abortions after twenty-four weeks. It is not legal to slit the necks of born-alive fetuses at any age, much less at thirty weeks or even more. It is not legal for untrained, unlicensed employees to perform medical procedures.
Now prochoicers are being blamed for this rogue operator. The grand jury report suggests that Tom Ridge, Republican governor from 1995 to 2001, discontinued inspections because prochoicers claimed they were too burdensome. The ones I talked to were skeptical. “We never lobbied against inspection,” Carol Tracy of the Women’s Law Project, which represents clinics in Pennsylvania, told me by phone. She pointed out that under Ridge’s Democratic predecessor, Bob Casey, who was famously opposed to legal abortion, Gosnell’s clinic was inspected three times, and each time serious problems were found. Nothing was done. Perhaps it’s relevant that Gosnell’s patients were poor, many of them immigrants—like 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar from Nepal, with whose murder Gosnell has been charged—who may not even have known that safe and legal abortion is available here.
The above comment is typical pro-abortion 'Good is Evil and Evil is Good' doublespeak and doublethink.
Who's fault is the Gosnell Horror? Certainly not Gosnell himself, or the clinic workers who witnessed the atrocities day in and day out, or the state officials who looked the other way.
It must be the pro-lifers fault. If only woman had access to 'safe' abortion, this would never have happened!
Or better yet, it must have been the baby's fault for having the audacity to be conceived in the first place.
For anyone who doesn't have background on the case, the Grand Jury document can be found at:
http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/PDFs/GrandJuryWomensMedical.pdf
Beware, graphic photos of full term, murdered children are shown in the document.
Also, the first commentator's claim that pro-abortion groups do not lobby against regulations and inspections is a joke. Of course they will say that they don't lobby against regulations.
Pro-abortion groups nationwide have lobbied hard and have been mostly successful in preventing regulation, licensing and inspection.
Hair and nail salons are subject to more rigorous inspection than abortion mills.