Dr. Gosnell and The Grand Jury Report

Jay Watts writes a powerful post concerning Dr. Gosnell in PA who recently was arrested and charged with murder for the house of horrors abortion clinic that he ran.  Jay's post runs through the Grand Jury Report and shows exactly how disturbing this man was but as equally disturbing is the amount of people who knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it.

Here is a telling quote from the Grand Jury Report:

Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.

The beginning of Jay's piece:

The incredible evil that Dr. Kermit Gosnell (that will be the last time in this post I put the title “Dr.” before his name) and his staff worked over the last several decades at The Women's Medical Society in West Philadelphia has now been exhaustively detailed in Grand Jury Report filed on the 14th of January. The report is full, and I do mean full at 261 pages plus appendices, of unconscionable acts described as every day occurrences.

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.

It might end with Gosnell's insanity except that he had a staff that worked with him and complied with all of this barbarity. These people did it all as well including dosing women with drugs they did not understand, helping to cover up the many life threatening and ultimately deadly mistakes Gosnell made, the horrifying practice of “snipping” the spinal cords of newborns, and the illegal trafficking of prescription drugs.

In fact, were it not for that last offense Gosnell might still be in business today. Why? Was he a mastermind that so cleverly covered up what was happening that state agencies could not make charges stick? Was he so brilliant as to build a web of deceit that took years for dedicated public servants to untangle? No, he was an evil and obvious mad man. The reason he got away with it, and perhaps the most horrifying fact of all, is because the people that should have stopped this all didn't care. Not even when several independent and respectable sources filed official complaints. Not even when an organization that supposedly operates to protect the rights of women to have safe abortions walked in the door, evaluated the practice, and determined it to be the worst abortion facility they had have ever seen. They all knew something bad was happening and all of them did nothing to stop it.

Read the rest.