As of Tuesday, 12 jurors had been selected for the murder trial of abortionists Kermit Gosnell. The search is still on for six alternates for a trial expected to last two months. The following is the latest installment of the Grand Jury report that set the stage for Gosnell’s indictment on seven counts of 1st degree murder for alleging aborting viable unborn babies alive and then killing them by “sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord”; and one count of 3rd degree murder in the death of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar. The following is excerpted from the Grand Jury report that led to Gosnell’s indictment. I hope you share its awful findings via your social networks.
NRL News Today runs these excerpts because no matter what we write about as the trial proceeds, it cannot do justice to the injustice and inhumanity Gosnell is accused of perpetrating on defenseless unborn babies and their often desperately poor mothers.
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Section III: Gosnell’s Illegal Practice
Gosnell’s “medical practice” was not set up to treat or help patients. His aim was not to give women control over their bodies and their lives. He was not serving his community. Gosnell ran a criminal enterprise, motivated by greed. Some 40,000 abortions are performed across the Commonwealth each year. [Gosnell employed] unlicensed, untrained workers in a facility that was grossly inadequate and unsanitary, his operation made a pretext of providing health care. In the absence of any regulatory oversight, Gosnell recklessly cut corners, allowed patients to choose their medication based on ability to pay, and provided abysmal care – all to maximize his profit.
We estimate that Gosnell took in as much as $10,000 to $15,000 a night, mostly in cash, for a few hours of work performing abortions. And this amount does not include the money he made as one of the top OxyContin prescribers in the state. The Women’s Medical Society [Gosnell’s abortion clinic] stands as a monument to an absolute disdain for the health and safety of women, and in many cases of babies who were born alive in this filthy clinic.
The deaths of women and of countless viable babies were a direct and foreseeable consequence of the reckless and illegal manner in which Gosnell operated his clinic
Employees at the Women’s Medical Society who testified before the Grand Jury were not surprised when a lethal overdose of drugs killed one of Gosnell’s patients in November 2009. They had seen many close calls and at least one other patient’s death caused by Gosnell’s careless and criminal practices. They knew that Gosnell chose unlicensed, untrained, and unsupervised workers to anesthetize his abortion patients, and that the drugs, in accordance with his office procedure, were administered in the doctor’s absence.
None of Gosnell’s employees were licensed or properly trained. Gosnell’s staff warned him that two of his employees, Lynda Williams and Sherry West, were not only unlicensed and unqualified, but sloppy and unconcerned as well. They presented an obvious danger to the clinic’s patients, whom they routinely over-medicated and failed to monitor. But while Williams and West were perhaps slightly more careless than other workers, their actions were consistent with the corner-cutting practice that Gosnell had operated for decades. Every aspect of that practice reflected an utter disregard for the health and safety of his patients, a cruel lack of respect for their dignity, and an arrogant belief that he could forever get away with the slovenly and careless treatment of the women who came to his clinic. The only thing Gosnell seemed to care about was the cash he raked in from his illegal operation.
The fact that the doctor staffed his facility with unlicensed and indifferent workers, and then let them practice medicine unsupervised, was only one factor that made his clinic such a dangerous place for its patients. Dirty facilities; unsanitary instruments; an absence of functioning monitoring and resuscitation equipment; the use of cheap, but dangerous, drugs; illegal procedures; and inadequate emergency access for when things inevitably went wrong, all put patients at grave risk – every day.
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When two of Gosnell’s staff members sought abortions, they knew better than to go to him. They went to other clinics, where they marveled that physicians actually counseled patients, the facilities appeared sanitary, and a doctor was in the room when they were medicated. Mrs. Mongar was just one of many patients victimized by Gosnell’s depravity.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in his Natioanl Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
