Kermit Gosnell was just the beginning — gruesome abortion doctors operate with impunity around the country
October 22, 2018 | Published first in Washington Examiner
by Maureen Ferguson
One of the top 10 movie openings last weekend has been met with a media blackout. The film is a gripping courtroom drama reminiscent of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” — only this is a true story, and the special victims are the hundreds, if not thousands, of late-term babies that real life Dr. Kermit Gosnell delivered alive and killed in his filthy abortion clinic in Philadelphia.
The movie, “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” is meticulously documented and based on actual court transcripts and the grand jury’s report. Mercifully, the screenwriters masterfully convey this grisly tale without actually showing any graphic or gory visuals. The movie closes with dialogue between the detective, played by Dean Cain, and a young reporter that seems to be a sharp challenge from the filmmakers to the media: Don’t ignore this story (and others like it) due to bias on abortion politics.
A similar bias allowed Gosnell to operate with impunity for 30 years with virtually no inspections from the state health department. The grand jury report described Gosnell as a “butcher of women” stating that he “didn’t just kill babies. He was also a deadly threat to mothers.” Two women died at his hands, and countless others were gravely maimed, yet numerous complaints fell on deaf ears. These horrors were eventually discovered only by accident, when the clinic was raided by the FBI and the DEA in a bust of Gosnell’s illegal prescription drug ring. The agents were shocked to find little babies’ bodies “ scattered throughout, in cabinets, in the basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags…. It was a baby charnel house.” Were it not for this, Gosnell would still be “serving” women and snipping babies’ spines at his “Women’s Medical Society” in West Philadelphia.
Tragically, there are other Gosnell-type abortionists operating today with impunity. Much of what Gosnell did illegally is being done legally in other states that do not have Pennsylvania’s 24-week abortion limit. Abortion doctors in Maryland and New Mexico openly advertise late second- and even third-trimester abortions online, and this ugly truth is mostly, inexplicably, ignored by the media.
One such late-term abortion specialist is the notorious LeRoy Carhart. Unlike Gosnell, Carhart was smart enough to evade scrutiny by moving his clinic from Nebraska to Maryland, which has no meaningful limits on third-trimester abortions. Carhart was caught on tape explaining that he injects a poison, Digoxin, into the baby’s heart prior to inducing labor, so that the baby won’t be born alive. He waits a few days before the induction, so that the baby’s body softens, he explained, like “ meat in a crock-pot” and can be more easily delivered. As long as the baby is killed inside the womb, it’s a legal abortion. Gosnell learned that it’s considered murder to do the exact same thing just inches away on the other side of the birth canal.
Carhart shut down his clinic in Germantown, Md., after a woman who was 33-weeks pregnant died after an abortion at his clinic. He reopened a new clinic a few months later in Bethesda, Md., where there have been reports of two different medical waste companies quitting after seeing what they were hired to haul away. In the investigation of Gosnell, he explained that the pile-up of small bodies at his clinic was due to a dispute with his medical waste company. One wonders if there is a similar pile-up in Carhart’s third-trimester clinic and if anyone at the Maryland Department of Health cares to inspect.
In New Mexico, there have been reports of gross negligence, uterine rupture, and the death of a 23-year-old woman in 2017 at Southwestern Women’s Options run by Curtis Boyd. He advertises abortions both before and after 32 weeks of pregnancy. A congressional panel referred Boyd’s clinic for criminal investigation in 2016, but it remains to be seen if that will be ignored.
In Texas, the same congressional panel issued a criminal referral regarding allegations by three former employees at the Aaron Women’s Clinic that abortion doctor Douglas Karpen routinely kills babies accidentally born alive in attempted abortions. These eyewitnesses described various grisly methods and apparently documented their accusations with photographs.
It was a photograph of “Baby Boy A” taken by an employee in Gosnell’s clinic that led to his conviction on murder charges. (The movie-goer is spared actually seeing the photograph in the dramatic courtroom scene – one has to go to the website to view it.) But while the jury could not ignore the humanity of this baby boy, whom Gosnell jokingly said was so big that “he could walk me to the bus stop,” the media did. And the media continue to ignore the humanity of these children by refusing to cover Gosnell-like stories or even to review this well-made top-10 movie.
Maureen Ferguson is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a senior policy adviser for The Catholic Association.
Copyright 2018 Washington Examiner. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
