If you are the usual run-of-the-mill pro-abortion apologist, you are counting on media indifference, a cloud of smoke, and time to dull the impact of the sensational murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. After all, if the trial is very much under-covered and the edge is take off by fobbing the blame off on pro-lifers [!], then given enough time, it will “all go away”—or so they hope.
There are a couple of problems with that optimistic assessment. For starters, there are so many incredibly violent to the point of nausea statement from the Grand Jury’s report that a considerable number of people will hear references to at least one or two.
“58 horrific details from the Kermit Gosnell trial that you do not want to read,” a commentary written by Charlie Spiering for the Washington Examiner, brings many of them from the Grand Jury report, media accounts, and trial testimony together in one place (https://washingtonexaminer.com/58-horrific-details-from-the-gosnell-trial-that-you-do-not-want-to-read/article/2527524). It is very, very much worth sharing.
“But,” you say, “once you’ve heard the worst part–snipping spines of babies delivered alive—enough times, won’t the sense of indignation invariably wear off?”
A fair question. At some level “snipping” sounds almost quick and probably painless, right? Bam, the kid’s dead. That’s where we need to make sure the full brutality of this grotesquely violent, soul-numbing practice is exposed.
The Grand Jury report tells us
“The clinic’s employees used the term ‘snip’ to describe the severing of the spinal cord, but this is misleading. Our neonatal expert testified that, because of the bony vertebrae surrounding the spinal cord, it would actually take a bit of pressure to cut all the way through the spinal cord and the bone – even at 23 or 24 weeks gestation. At 29 weeks, on babies such as Baby Boy A, the expert said, ‘it would be really hard.’ The baby, we were told, would feel ‘tremendous pain.’”
In another place in the report, we read
“When we asked our medical experts if there could be any legitimate, medical purpose behind Gosnell’s practice, one said: ‘it would be the same as putting a pillow over the baby’s face, that the intention would be to kill the baby.’ Another likened the practice of severing babies’ spinal cords to pithing frogs in biology class.”
Like smothering babies…like pithing frogs in your high school biology class—THOSE are images you can never, EVER forget.
But there is another facet of Gosnell’s macabre abortion practice that we’ve reported on several times which is now being talked about again. Something that almost defies belief.
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal wrote the following under the headline “Back-Alley Abortion Never Ended :The Kermit Gosnell murder trial challenges a traditional defense of Roe v. Wade.”
“Deep in the 281-page report that accompanied the 2011 indictments of Gosnell and his staff, the Philadelphia grand jury recounted an example from the city’s history.
“It was called the Mother’s Day Massacre—the brainchild of Harvey Karman, an eccentric California man without medical training who had served 2½ years in prison for performing illegal abortions in the 1950s. Karman teamed with a young Philadelphia doctor who offered to perform abortions on 15 impoverished women, each between four and six months pregnant, who were bused to the Philadelphia clinic from Chicago on Mother’s Day 1972.
“What the women didn’t know was that they were guinea pigs for a device Karman had invented, which he called the ‘super coil.’ He had tested it only on wartime rape victims in Bangladesh, where he had traveled under the sponsorship of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
“Complication rates were high, and little wonder. A colleague of Karman’s Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption as ‘basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. . . . They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, . . . the gel would melt and these . . . things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus.’
“As in Bangladesh, the Philadelphia experiment was a failure. Nine of the 15 women suffered serious complications. One needed a hysterectomy.
“The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried out the Mother’s Day Massacre would go out of business. His name was Kermit Gosnell.”
Gosnell’s “colleague” was Randy Hutchins. You can read what he told the Grand Jury at “Abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s ‘Mother’s Day Massacre.’”
Gosnell, according to Hutchins, inserted the super coils into the women’s uteruses. The event was filmed and later shown on a New York City educational television program. The [Philadelphia] Inquirer reported the results of this human experimentation as follows:
“The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health subsequently did an investigation that detailed serious complications suffered by nine of the 15 women, including one who needed a hysterectomy.
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“The complications included a punctured uterus, hemorrhage, infections, and retained fetal remains. The CDC researchers recommended strict controls on any future testing of the device. . .”
And all of this doesn’t even get to the horrific circumstances these women found themselves in. “There was blood on the floor,” the Grand Jury reported. “A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets. All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff.”
Not to mention the bottles of severed fetal arms and legs Gosnell kept… or the baby who screamed after being aborted alive… or “spread[ing] venereal disease among [the aborted women] with infected instruments”…. and on and on and on.
All this will “go away”—will count for little–only if we allow what we know to be the truth to be suffocated in indifference and silence.
I know I won’t allow that to happen, and I know you won’t, either.
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. He writes NRL News Today — an online column on pro-life issues.
