As most probably know, that fellow on the left is Kermit Gosnell, M.D., a Philadelphia baby-killer - and occasional mother-killer - who is standing trial on eight counts of murder: for seven viable newborns and one full grown woman. The woman was 41 year old Karnamaya Mongar, a four foot-eleven inch immigrant from Bhutan who spoke no English and died from a sedative overdose administered by Gosnell's unlicensed and "untrained" employees.
Robyn Reid was a pregnant 15 year old taken to the clinic by her grandmother. For some reason she changed her mind about the abortion - she was going to "sneak out of the clinic," which indicates to me she was there by coercion - and when she told Dr. Gosnell "no," he
"...ended up taking my clothes off, hitting me, my legs were tied to the stirrups," Reid said.
The 87-pound teen struggled with the man for 30 minutes, fighting him alone in the room, she said.
Gosnell's chilling defense of his alleged behavior haunts Reid. She said that he repeatedly told her, "This is the same care that I would give to my own daughter."
"I was fully dressed. He actually managed to get all of my clothes off and tie me down to the medical bed," she said. "I just remember my very last thought ... looking up at the light and thinking, 'Don't fall asleep.'"
There are other horror stories, like that of Noelle Gaither, 38 and five months pregnant.
Since it was Gaither's first and only abortion, she didn't know what to expect.And I'd like to ask her what she was doing there in the first place, but never mind. Then there was Steven Masoff, an unlicensed doctor who
Following the abortion, Gaither said that she was in excruciating pain.
"When I finally went back to work I could barely sit down at the stool," Gaither said. "The pain started to get worse."
Gaither returned to Gosnell. He did an ultrasound and told her that he had left fetal remains in her, Gaither said.
Without any anesthesia, Gaither said that Gosnell sucked the fetal remains out of her.
"I was just laying on the table and crying and I just asked the Lord to get me through it," Gaither said.
told the grand jury that he used scissors to snip the spines of more than 100 babies born alive. He worked for Gosnell for a few hundred dollars a week. He pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in the deaths of two babies allegedly stabbed by Gosnell while Massof assisted with the abortions.Gosnell was also a collector of sorts. Police found fetal body parts in jars just sitting around and others "in the staff refrigerator." The furniture and blankets in the rooms in which 'patients' were 'treated' were blood-stained, and there was, according to the police, a pervasive odor of animal feces and urine.
Gosnell - lest you think him pure evil - had a sense of humor. He charged more for bigger "fetuses," and joked during one procedure that "the baby was so big it could walk to the bus stop."
You can read the remainder of the catalogue of horrors at the linked sites. Meanwhile, I'm wondering: What will abortion supporters say about this case? Will they be outraged only by the abuse he inflicted on the women, one of whom died from it? After all, the women went there of their own free will (excepting coerced adolescents). They wanted their babies killed; Dr. Gosnell killed them. What's the problem? Oh, his methods were gruesome and unsanitary. Well, suppose the place had been sanitary, and that instead of killing them savagely, he had killed them softly. That is, rather than sticking scissors into the back of their necks, suppose he had administered a lethal sedative? Would everything then have been okey-dokey?
Well, we do have a federal law banning partial birth abortion (although it's not clear to me that that's what Gosnell was performing), but a well-informed reader has told me that we don't really have any enforcement mechanism in place for it; and we also have a federal ban on killing infants born alive, that is, one who survives the initial attempt at abortion, but I don't know how that is to be enforced either. Assuming that that is what Gosnell was doing, this is the more puzzling of the two scenarios. Gosnell is in fact being charged under a Pennsylvania law that forbids abortion after 24 weeks. On what grounds I'm not sure (I haven't read the Pennsylvania statute). It cannot be based on the contention that a 25 week old fetus is a constitutionally protected person. But let's assume that the federal law (which refers to the born-alive infant as a "child" or an "individual") supports the Pennsylvania law on this matter of according babies who survive abortion the status of personhood. Shouldn't the abortion supporter be arguing that this new status is entirely arbitrary, since if the child were still in the womb his death would be satisfactory from a legal perspective, as long as the woman's will were completely free in the matter? I'm having trouble seeing how the Pennsylvania law can be squared with Roe, if the doctor at issue declares the procedure necessary to the "life or health of the mother." If he makes this claim, what difference does it make whether the baby is in or out of the womb?
We need some leadership here, some guidance. Michelle Obama once referred to partial birth abortion as "a legitimate medical procedure." Her husband, while yet an Illinois state senator, fought mightily against a proposed born-alive-infant-protection act in that state's legislature. I think a very loud and heated pressure campaign ought to be directed at the president to speak out on this issue, on this particular case, I mean, the Gosnell case. The pressure ought to come mostly from his own supporters in the Congress, in the sycophantic press, from Planned Parenthood, and from members of his own family, urging him to stand up and reaffirm a woman's sacred right to have her baby killed by defending Dr. Gosnell's good service in protecting that right. If he wants to complain first about the unsanitary conditions, the physical coercion of young girls, and the negligent homicide of Miss Mongar, fine. But most pressing is the question of whether he approves of Dr. Gosnell's killing babies who survive the abortion. Until I hear otherwise, I will assume he does, because that was his position back in Illinois: it didn't matter to him then whether the child was in or out of the womb. Does it now?
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Comments:
11 Responses to Safe, Legal, and Rare – the Gosnell Case
Thomas D (alias dylan) says:
March 6, 2013 at 1:46 pm (Edit)
Bill — by your leave, may I link to this article on Facebook?
William Luse says:
March 6, 2013 at 9:42 pm (Edit)
You don’t have to ask, Dylan. You can link any time you want.
Lydia says:
March 10, 2013 at 1:03 am (Edit)
Just a quick clarification. If I was the “informed reader,” I believe the law we were discussing without an enforcement mechanism was not the federal PBA ban but the BAIPA or born-alive infants protection act.
There are federal penalties written into the law for the PBA ban, but not (or so I understand) for the BAIPA.
However, none of that prevents plain old state laws against homicide from being used against doctors like Gosnell who actively kill fully born infants. In fact, it looks like that is how he is being charged.
I wonder why he isn’t being charged for various things like assault and battery and false imprisonment on the testimony of Robyn Reid.
William Luse says:
March 10, 2013 at 10:00 am (Edit)
“I believe the law we were discussing…”
You are correct.
“none of that prevents plain old state laws against homicide from being used against doctors like Gosnell who actively kill fully born infants.”
That’s the part that puzzles me a bit. I know he can be charged because of the federal law. Without that federal law, I don’t see how he could be, since a 25 week old is not immune to harm under Roe. In other words, a Pennsylvania homicide law logically should not, under Roe, protect an infant who survives an abortion, if merely seconds earlier, he was fair game in the womb. (There is something in Roe about the point of “viability,” but even then the kid’s not safe.) Yes, of course, I want him prosecuted, I’m just having trouble following the legal logic. And of course the post’s main concern is with how abortion defenders would react to this case. I haven’t really seen much from them, although admittedly I have not been scouring the news.
As to the other charges you mention, I really don’t know. Maybe they’re going with what’s easiest to prove. He could get life for the current charges, and one of the women quoted in the main post (if I recall correctly) hopes he gets the death penalty.
Lydia says:
March 10, 2013 at 6:32 pm (Edit)
Actually, murder is usually charged at the state level.
What’s confusing you is that you are being logical, while the law is just being legal. The two can definitely come apart, and they do so in abortion law. I suppose *in a sense* we should be glad for the inconsistency, because if it weren’t there, I’m very much afraid that it would be consistent in precisely the wrong direction, permitting infanticide after birth as well as abortion.
Roe never guaranteed a dead baby. My recollection is that there was a court case where someone tried to argue that Roe did declare a right to a dead baby (I haven’t looked up the case lately) and the argument was rejected. Roe is strictly about abortion, and abortion, by definition, takes place only while at least some portion of the child is within the mother’s body. The argumentation of Roe had all this stuff about the woman’s rights to her body, and none of that applies once the baby is separated from her body.
So even though Roe expressed all this skepticism about when life begins, blah, blah, and even in the third trimester required that states permit abortion by way of a health exception, that never struck down laws protecting infants that have already been born alive from _active_ murder.
The situation the BAIPA (and probably-more-effective state versions thereof) was trying to address, but found no effective way of addressing. was deliberately inducing labor at a point where the child was too young to breathe unassisted and then leaving the child to die. What makes that extremely hard to legislate against is that it’s a passive form of killing. The labor induction itself is a form of abortion and can’t be outlawed because of Roe. The refusal to render assistance after the baby is born is the “parent’s choice not to give medical treatment,” which is supposed to be guaranteed by general laws on parental rights that would apply in legitimate cases where a parent would decide on extraordinary measures and so forth. Put those two together and it becomes nigh-impossible to legislate against passive murder of the unborn by labor induction followed by neglect for a few hours. (The most promising approach I’ve heard of was in the Illinois law which Barry Obama helped to strike down. It created a civil cause of action *by the parents* against the doctors. One would think, “How would that help? The parents are the ones ordering this to be done.” But doctors are so lawsuit-shy that they might well have been spooked by it, especially if some mother freaked out and suffered “emotional trauma” after such a labor induction and seeing her baby.)
_However_, all of this says _nothing_ about active infanticide of the sort Gosnell engaged in, which can be prosecuted in an absolutely straightforward fashion because it is a direct bodily assault on a fully born child. If you can get the evidence that somebody is inducing labor, delivering life, breathing babies, and cutting their spinal cords, that’s prosecutable as murder with no legal implications from Roe at all. Because Roe never addressed post-birth infanticide, only abortion. Sure, logically one can say that if the child of that age isn’t a person with a right to life, as Roe implies, he should also not be protected outside of the womb either, but that logical implication isn’t actually the legal implication of Roe. For which small blessings, I suppose, we can be grateful.
Now, there are district attorneys that _think_ that and hence have refused to prosecute in situations like Gosnell’s. I know of one in Florida where the baby was alive and was suffocated in a zipper bag for bio-waste, and the DA refused to prosecute on the grounds that the baby was not “viable,” which was legally incorrect. Active infanticide has nothing to do with viability. If the baby was “viable” enough to be alive and moving and breathing and somebody actively killed the baby, it’s prosecutable as murder. But the prosecutor had been poisoned by Roe’s thinking and exercised “prosecutorial discretion” accordingly.
Fortunately, this one in Pennsylvania didn’t.
William Luse says:
March 10, 2013 at 8:29 pm (Edit)
“My recollection is that there was a court case where someone tried to argue that Roe did declare a right to a dead baby…”
The earliest I remember was the Edelman case in New York, in which the doc delivered a live baby via hysterotomy and then killed it. He was prosecuted but, as I recall, the punishment was negligible, suspended sentence or something, and did nothing in the long run to slow the journey toward partial birth abortion.
William Luse says:
March 10, 2013 at 8:59 pm (Edit)
My mistake. His name was Edelin. After two failed saline attempts, he performed a hysterotomy, but apparently killed the baby *before* extracting it from the uterus. From a couple of sources:
When Edelin’s case came to trial in January, Flanagan [the prosecutor] argued that although the abortion was legal, the death of the fetus was not; that the abortion was completed the moment the fetus was separated from the wall of the womb, and that at that moment a baby was born “with all the rights that you have under the Constitution of the United States.”
Defense Attorney Homans called this reasoning “metaphysical.” He argued that the entire operation, including the death of the fetus, was protected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision legalizing most abortions. In any event, he said, the fetus never was born and never legally became a person.
from http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95sep/abortion/myda.htm
And:
Nearly two years later the Massachusetts Supreme Court overturned Dr. Edelin’s lower-court conviction by ruling that a doctor commits manslaughter only if he ends the life of a fetus that is definitely alive outside of a woman’s body. In April 1979, four years after his trial, Dr. Edelin was named chairman of the obstetrics and gynecology department at Boston University’s School of Medicine.
from http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3468302825.html
Sounds to me like Dr. Gosnell should have used his scissors while the kid was still in the womb.
Lydia says:
March 10, 2013 at 10:23 pm (Edit)
“Sounds to me like Dr. Gosnell should have used his scissors while the kid was still in the womb.”
Or at least partially still in the womb. Legally, yes, at least prior to the PBA act. That’s what partial-birth abortion is. It just has fewer medical complications for the woman than the more (from the woman’s perspective) drastic measure of performing a partial C-section and killing the baby before lifting it out of the womb.
I hope I’m not breaking some commandment by saying I hope there’s a hot place in hell for Dr. Edelin when he’s done reaping his earthly rewards.
William Luse says:
March 11, 2013 at 2:43 am (Edit)
I have it on good authority that there is.
Terry says:
March 13, 2013 at 1:17 pm (Edit)
This breaks my heart. And what of the unlicensed doctor who snipped spines for a few hundred bucks a week? My hair stood on end at that statement. Talk about your 30 pieces of silver…..
Our whole sick, sad society, that could in ANY way condone ANY of this. I weep for my grandchildren and the world we are leaving them.
William Luse says:
March 13, 2013 at 10:03 pm (Edit)
I know, Terry. Just remember that all those little ones are waiting in heaven, and that maybe your grandchildren will change this world.
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