MedicalMiscreants.com has a story from 2012:
For decades, the Pennsylvania State Board of Medicine ignored the nasty rumors they were hearing about a spine-chilling brick building located at the corner of 38th street and Lancaster, in West Philadelphia. No business in the entire state was more inappropriately named than this place – the Women’s Medical Society. And we now know that at least some members of the health department knew it.
Because the Women’s Medical Society had been in business for nearly 40 years, state health officials had more than enough time to shut the place down and save lives. For reasons that are readily found in court documents, they chose not to. Which meant that a medical monster named Doctor Kermit Gosnell was free to walk the halls, operating a true House of Horrors for fun and profit, at the expense of thousands of poor pregnant women, who – in most cases – believed they had no place else to go. Gosnell was – after all – a licensed doctor who had even grown up in their neighborhood. Everybody knew who he was. His clinic could be found on the internet, fully certified and legal. The ugly rumors couldn’t possibly be true, could they?
The Women’s Medical Society
Well, they were true, and proof was obvious to anybody who walked through the doors. The Women’s Medical Society reeked of animal waste, for starters, because numerous cats roamed the hallways, urinating, pooping, in the corners. Patients sat on office furniture and slumped beneath blankets streaked with blood. Used surgical items were stacked everywhere; hazardous waste was neither cleaned up nor disposed of; non-sterilized tools were reused, over and over again. Lifesaving medical equipment was broken. Emergency exits were padlocked shut.
And scattered throughout the entire building in cupboards, on shelves, in the basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags and plastic jugs, were the body parts of hundreds of aborted fetuses.
Doctor Kermit Gosnell’s House of Horrors. Sound like a Halloween movie?
The shadow people operating this dungeon involved no other physician than Gosnell himself, and he hired not a single trained nurse. Two of his employees had some medical training, but neither of them had graduated from any recognized program. They pretended to be doctors, and – like patients everywhere – these women had no way of knowing the truth. Not a single staff member had relevant training.
That didn’t stop them from making diagnoses, performing surgical procedures, administering drugs and writing prescriptions.
By now it should be obvious the real business of the Women’s Medical Society had nothing to do with health care – it had to do with making as much cash as possible. And the dollars flowed from two reliable sources: By day? The “clinic” was a prescription drug-pushing house. At night, when Gosnell arrived, it became an abortion mill. The clinic thrived because a constant stream of “patients” came through during business hours and, for cash on demand, left with prescriptions for narcotics. These drugs were then sold for profit on the streets. Gosnell never saw these “patients” because he didn’t work during the day. He provided blank, already-signed prescription pads. His unskilled, unauthorized staff did the rest. These assembly line prescriptions brought in millions.
But it was at night, when Gosnell arrived, that the cash truly accumulated, because that’s when America’s most prolific illegal abortion factory went into high gear.
As with drug-pushing, Gosnell’s approach to abortions was basic: high volume, low expenses – and perform atrocities no other doctor around would do. That’s what he called his competitive edge.
Like most states, Pennsylvania permits regulated abortion. Clinics must, for example, provide counseling about the nature of the procedure. Minors must have parental or court consent. All women must wait 24 hours from their first visit to the facility, in order to fully consider their decision. Gosnell’s compliance with such requirements was non-existent. His clinic catered to women who could not get abortions elsewhere. Generally, physicians do not perform second-trimester abortions, from approximately the 20th week of pregnancy. And late-term abortions after the 24th week are totally illegal. For Kermit Gosnell, they were an opportunity. Because the bigger the baby, the more he charged. (example, if you can stomach it)
Now, state law requires a measurement of fetal age, usually determined by an ultrasound. But ultrasound records would leave documentary proof that abortions at this clinic were illegal. So Gosnell did not allow professional sonographers to do the exams. His solution was to train the staff how to document fake measurements. How is this done? By tilting the ultrasound probe at an angle, one can make the photo look considerably smaller – and therefore legal to destroy – than it really is.
Of course, late-term abortions posed other challenges. Larger babies are hard to get out. Gosnell’s approach, whenever possible, was to force full labor by administering the extremely dangerous drug known as oxytocin. The women would check in during the day, pay cash, and take labor-inducing drugs. Gosnell wouldn’t appear until evening, often around 10:00 p.m., and only then deal with the women who were ready to deliver. By that time, nearly half had already given birth.
Their procedure was, in reality, patient labor without staff labor. The final obstacle was obvious: when you perform late-term “abortions” by inducing labor, you get babies. Living, breathing, squirming babies. By 24 weeks, most premature babies will survive if they receive appropriate medical care. But that was not what the Women’s Medical Society was about.
Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies they delivered each day: he killed them. Of course when teaching his staff how to end these little lives, he didn’t call it killing. He called it “ensuring fetal demise.”
And the way they ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. At the spooky brick building at 38th and Lancaster, they simply called it “snipping.”
And over the years, countless thousands of “snippings” occurred. Sometimes, if Gosnell was unavailable, the “snipping” was done by one of his fake doctors, or even by the office staff. Among the staff, it wasn’t murder at all.
And in the pluperfect Catch-22 world called medicine, very few criminal acts can be prosecuted, because a criminal doctor learns early on to not keep files.
Among the relatively few cases that could be specifically documented, one was Baby Boy A. His 17-year-old mother was almost 30 weeks pregnant – seven and a half months – when labor was induced. An employee estimated his birth weight as approaching six pounds. He was breathing and moving just fine when lab-coat lunatic Gosnell severed his spine with scissors and plopped the little body into a plastic box for disposal. According to staff testimony, the doctor joked that this baby was so big, “he could walk me to the bus stop.”
over-snipped baby (Warning: graphic)
Gosnell made little effort to hide his illegal abortion procedures. But there were some that even he was afraid to perform in front of others. These abortions were scheduled for Sundays, a day when the clinic was closed and the only person allowed to assist with these special cases was his wife. The files for these cases were destroyed by Gosnell before his trial started.
Now, Pennsylvania is not a third-world country. Their taxes fund more than a few oversight agencies, any one of which should have shut down medical maniac Kermit Gosnell long ago. But none of them did. The reality is, Gosnell was only caught by accident, when police raided his offices to seize evidence of his illegal drug operation. It was those early investigators who observed the disgusting conditions, the dazed patients, the discarded fetuses. Which is why the entire regulatory collapse is so inexcusable. It should have taken only one look.
The first line of defense was the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Their job is to audit hospitals and outpatient facilities, to ensure rules are followed and safe care provided. The department did not conduct site review until 1989, ten years after it opened. Numerous violations were documented, but Gosnell got a pass when he promised to fix them. Site reviews in 1992 & 1993 also noted violations, but again, no follow-up.
Complaints about Gosnell were endless. More than a few attorneys, representing women injured by Gosnell, contacted the department of health. A Children’s Hospital physician hand-delivered a complaint, advising the department that numerous patients he had referred for abortions came back from Gosnell with the same venereal disease. The medical examiner of Delaware County informed the state that Gosnell had performed an illegal abortion on a 14-year-old girl carrying a 30-week-old baby. And the department received official notice that a woman named Karnamaya Mongar had died at Gosnell’s hands.
Yet not one of these alarm bells – not even Mrs. Mongar’s death – prompted health authorities to visit the Women’s Medical Society. Only after the raid occurred, and the story hit the news, did the state choose to act. Suddenly an order was issued to close the clinic. And as this grand jury investigation widened, department officials “lawyered up,” hiring a high-priced law firm to represent them at taxpayer expense. Had they invested the same effort on inspection as they did on attorneys, none of this would have happened at all.
More articles:
- The Sentences can be found here for Gosnell’s employees.
- Kermit Gosnell Convicted of Snipping Babies Necks in Abortions, Claims He’ll Be Released
- 3801Lancaster.com
Videos:
Editorial Book Reviews:
Gosnell is the untold story of America’s most prolific serial killer. In 2013 Dr Kermit Gosnell was convicted of killing four people, including three babies, but is thought to have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands more in a 30-year killing spree.
ABC News correspondent Terry Moran described Gosnell as “America’s most prolific serial killer.” Gosnell is currently serving three life sentences (without the possibility of parole) for murdering babies and patients at his “House of Horrors” abortion clinic.
This book—now a major movie starring Dean Cain (Lois & Clarke)—reveals how the investigation that brought Gosnell to justice started as a routine drugs investigation and turned into a shocking unmasking of America’s biggest serial killer. It details how compliant politicians and bureaucrats allowed Dr. Gosnell to carry out his grisly trade because they didn’t want to be accused of “attacking abortion.” Gosnell also exposes the media coverup that saw reporters refusing to cover a story that shone an unwelcome spotlight on abortion in America in the 21st century.
Gosnell is an astounding piece of investigative journalism revealing a coverup among the medical political and media establishments that allowed a killer to go undetected for decades.
“Hollywood could not conjure up a villain more barbaric and cold-blooded than true-life serial killer Kermit Gosnell. Investigative journalists Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer take you face to face with Philadelphia’s baby butcher in this gripping exposé. But the story is especially chilling because he did not act alone. The true horror lies in Gosnell’s ghoulish gallery of enablers—feckless government bureaucrats, abortion radicals, and an AWOL media. McElhinney and McAleer are unflinching torchbearers of truth. This book is a public service.”
—Michelle Malkin, author of Culture of Corruption and Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild
“Gosnell reads like a literary Criminal Minds. This deftly-written, gripping, and graphic account of the arrest and grand jury investigation into Kermit Gosnell’s nightmarish house of horrors reveals the truth about the monster who murdered with no compunction and kept ghastly trophies of his victims. Gosnell thoroughly reports the facts the mainstream press largely ignored: that, for years, complaints about unsafe conditions and even fatal malpractice at Gosnell’s clinic were met with zero action, so concerned were the powers-that-be with protecting unfettered access to abortion. Gosnell indicts a system that, in the name of women’s “reproductive health,” failed to do anything to protect the women and born-alive infants who were slaughtered at 3801 Lancaster Avenue.”
—Maria McFadden Maffucci, editor, Human Life Review
“Ann and Phelim courageously tell the heart-wrenching, shocking story previously ignored, one that every American needs to read. With each page, abortionist Kermit Gosnell takes his place in American history as a monster whose victims were the most innocent and helpless among us.”
—Katie Pavlich, editor, Townhall.com
“In this historic book, Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer meticulously record the harrowing true-crime story of Kermit Gosnell’s barbaric abortion and infanticide business. Every American needs to read Gosnell, because the atrocities he committed, with the knowledge and support of public authorities, demand that we answer what we really believe about human dignity and the law’s equal protection for the most vulnerable.”
—David Daleiden, the undercover reporter behind the Center for Medical Progress videos that exposed Planned Parenthood’s baby parts business
“Warning: once you start reading this, you will not be able to put it down. It will grip you from the first page and not let you go. No matter what pre-judgments you may have when you begin, they will be challenged.”
—Connie Marshner, pro-life strategist and CEO of Connie Marshner & Associates
