January 21, 2011

West Philly Horror

This is one of the most horrifying things I've heard of in quite some time:

The grand jury called it "a baby charnel house."

For more than 30 years, Kermit Gosnell ran an abortion clinic in West Philadelphia that was the "go-to" place for women wanting illegal late-term abortions or for people seeking no-questions-asked prescription drugs, according to a grand jury... Gosnell performed thousands of abortions at his Women's Medical Society at 38th Street and Lancaster Avenue, even though he was a family practitioner never certified as an obstetrician or gynecologist. Gosnell was rarely present in the clinic, allowing his unlicensed, untrained staff to administer drugs and perform procedures.

* Gosnell routinely induced labor in patients in their second and third trimesters rather than perform risky late-term abortions. That sometimes resulted in live births. He and his staffers killed the babies by stabbing their necks with scissors to sever their spinal cords and sometimes suctioning their skulls, too. About a baby writhing as he cut its neck, Gosnell joked to a staffer: "That's what you call a chicken with its head cut off."

I think everyone on either side of the abortion debate would agree that this is totally abominable and everyone involved should go to jail for a very, very long time. This guy operated without regard to the law, medical ethics, or the safety of his patients. I'm just wondering how it took them so long to catch the guy.

Posted by Stephen Silver at January 21, 2011 03:16 PM
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