A Philadelphia abortion provider who killed babies by cutting their spinal cords with scissors was found guilty of first-degree murder on Monday.

The conviction on three counts of first-degree murder means Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, could be sentenced to death
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Gosnell also was accused in the death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, who died of an anesthetic overdose during a second-trimester abortion at his West Philadelphia clinic. In that case, the jury found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

Gosnell, who is not a board-certified obstetrician or gynecologist, was also found guilty of 21 counts of abortion of the unborn, 24 weeks or older.
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 d-usa wrote:
I think PP statements are reasonable, NARALs I don't agree with.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
This guy... the three murders he was convicted of for the infants were live births followed by what a witness from his staff called... beheadings basically.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
The stupid bit on this case is pro-choice types who are really stupid are rallying up and defending him, one individual I saw was all "This should just be a malpractice case, typical neocon witch hunt."

I face palmed so hard I knocked myself out for a couple hours.

Safety is one of the most potent defenses of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that imposed a national policy of abortion on demand. Women had abortions even before it was legal to do so, the argument goes, but restrictive laws forced them to go to back-alley quacks. In this view, the story of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist on trial for the murders of one woman and seven infants, is a cautionary tale about illegal, not legal, abortion. The facts tell a different story.

Back-alley abortion was indisputably a problem before Roe. 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."

Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto on the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Photo: Getty Images
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.

The advent of "safe, legal abortion" didn't interfere with Gosnell's back-alley career. The grand jury's account suggests that other abortionists treated him less as an outlaw than as a niche player in the abortion market. He earned a bad reputation in Philadelphia but received referrals from across the Eastern Seaboard. Many of the women dispatched to him were "well beyond" 24 weeks pregnant, the legal limit in Pennsylvania.

"Gosnell was known as a doctor who would perform abortions at any stage, without regard for legal limits," the grand jury reported. "His patients came from several states, including Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, as well as from Pennsylvania cities outside the Philadelphia area, such as Allentown. He also had many late-term Philadelphia patients because most other local clinics would not perform procedures past 20 weeks." The woman Gosnell is accused of murdering with a drug overdose, 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, came from Virginia and was referred by a clinic either there or in the District of Columbia.

The grand jury did not name any of the clinics, hospitals or doctors who made referrals to Gosnell, except for a Delaware clinic where he also worked part-time. Its narrative suggests, however, that "legitimate" abortionists routinely availed themselves of Gosnell's services to help their patients evade legal and ethical limits on late-term abortion. This may be a fruitful subject for legislative investigation, either in Harrisburg or Washington.

According to the grand jury, Gosnell's method of "abortion" in these late-term cases was infanticide, plain and simple. He or an untrained staffer would induce labor, deliver the baby alive, and then perform the procedure they called by the chilling euphemism "snipping"—slashing the infant to death with scissors to the neck and spine. "Over the years, there were hundreds of 'snippings,' " the grand jury found. But bodies had been disposed of and files destroyed, so the evidence was sufficient to prosecute in only seven cases. One of those victims, a neonatologist testified, was a boy of "32 weeks, if not more, in gestational age." That is, his mother had been at least 7½ months pregnant.

Why were these horrors allowed to persist for decades? Even if the infanticides had been concealed, there were ample other irregularities in the clinic's operations, including filth, unsanitized instruments, unqualified staff and dangerously inappropriate use of drugs. When the clinic was finally raided in 2010, it was the result of a federal narcotics investigation.

Part of the reason for the regulatory failure was simple bureaucratic indifference or incompetence. Inspectors from the Pennsylvania Department of Health visited several times between 1979 and 1993, noted problems, and didn't bother following up. But after 1993, the inspectors never reappeared until the 2010 raid. The reason was political.

In 1994 Tom Ridge, a pro-abortion Republican, was elected governor, succeeding the antiabortion Democrat Bob Casey. According to the grand jury, Ridge administration officials "concluded that inspections would be 'putting a barrier up to women' seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased." The new policy did away with all regular inspections of abortion clinics. Mr. Ridge's lassitudinous approach was bipartisan, continued by his successor, Democrat Ed Rendell, who resumed the inspections only after the 2010 raid.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Gosnell and have already obtained guilty pleas from eight of his former staffers. The grand jury's report should also be seen as an indictment of America's post-Roe abortion industry. Its indifference—at best—to legal limits made possible the deaths of untold numbers of babies, lending credence to the argument that legal abortion is a slippery slope to infanticide.

Meanwhile, the claim that Roe v. Wade made America safe from back-alley abortion stands exposed as a cruel hoax, and a deadly one for women and children alike.

 d-usa wrote:
I'm pro-choice, and I think that people like him will be the standard if the pro-life crowd gets what they want.

But he is a killer, pure and simple. He didn't follow any of the laws, about anything. The truth really is that this is not a case about pro-abortion or anti-abortion, it's a man with zero morals violating every law he can.

 d-usa wrote:
I'm pro-choice, and I think that people like him will be the standard if the pro-life crowd gets what they want.

But he is a killer, pure and simple. He didn't follow any of the laws, about anything. The truth really is that this is not a case about pro-abortion or anti-abortion, it's a man with zero morals violating every law he can.

 Lone Cat wrote:
Abortion should be monitored by doctors, not priests nor politicians.

 d-usa wrote:
I'm pro-choice, and I think that people like him will be the standard if the pro-life crowd gets what they want.

But he is a killer, pure and simple. He didn't follow any of the laws, about anything. The truth really is that this is not a case about pro-abortion or anti-abortion, it's a man with zero morals violating every law he can.

He's convicted, when will the sentences be carried out? it is possible that he might be sentenced to death,

 azazel the cat wrote:
This man isn't a doctor; he's a serial killer with a clever setup. This case had nothing to do with pro-life or pro-choice.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:

 Lone Cat wrote:
Abortion should be monitored by doctors, not priests nor politicians.

 d-usa wrote:
I'm pro-choice, and I think that people like him will be the standard if the pro-life crowd gets what they want.

But he is a killer, pure and simple. He didn't follow any of the laws, about anything. The truth really is that this is not a case about pro-abortion or anti-abortion, it's a man with zero morals violating every law he can.

He's convicted, when will the sentences be carried out? it is possible that he might be sentenced to death,

He hasn't been sentenced yet, and yes with multiple counts of murder under his belt he might be sentenced to the death penalty. Not that it matters, any prison term for this guy's a death sentence given his age.

 azazel the cat wrote:
This man isn't a doctor; he's a serial killer with a clever setup. This case had nothing to do with pro-life or pro-choice.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
The stupid bit on this case is pro-choice types who are really stupid are rallying up and defending him, one individual I saw was all "This should just be a malpractice case, typical neocon witch hunt."

I face palmed so hard I knocked myself out for a couple hours.

 Frazzled wrote:
I doubt new legislation. After all he's going to jail no?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
In the Shipman case it led to a review of how GPs' death rates are evaluated.

Shipman was killing a lot of old ladies, so his practice had an elevated death rate -- i.e. life expectancy was lower than could have been expected.

The new rules are supposed to ensure that such discrepancies are spotted and investigated as early as possible.

It's not a new law. It was already illegal to kill old ladies, and that is why Shipman got prosecuted.

Shipman did not maintain a controlled drugs register, and claimed that he did not carry opioids. The routine inspection of general practice drug registers and storage facilities had lapsed, and there was no system in place to track the use or disposal of drugs after dispensing. Consequently, Shipman had little difficulty in illicitly obtaining sufficient diamorphine to kill over 200 people through prescription fraud and the appropriation of unused diamorphine from patients or their families.

Some people did make complaints against Shipman. To the best of my knowledge, these included an upheld complaint for failure to visit in 1992, and another in 1995 about incorrect treatment that was not pursued. In 1989, a case of negligence was settled by the payment of a six-figure sum. A complaint in 1985 also reached the General Medical Council (GMC). None triggered a detailed assessment of Shipman's clinical performance. Furthermore, the pattern of complaints was never identified. No single agency had responsibility for identifying and recording them all. The unconnected systems for dealing with complaints worked to protect Shipman from detection, rather than protect his patients from harm.

In addition to system failure, some systems that might have protected patients were non-existent. There was no system to monitor mortality rates, and no system for assessment of the standard of records or the recorded care given to deceased patients. Finally, there was no satisfactory system to provide adequate objective evidence about performance. Appraisal and revalidation were not in operation, clinical audit was voluntary and limited in focus, and only a restricted range of routine data were available—for example, prescribing and referral patterns.

The environment—or culture—was also deficient. The group practice in Hyde operated largely as six single-handed doctors working in the same partnership, and whilst this provided a highly personal service, the opportunities for informal peer review were restricted. When he moved to the single-handed practice, Shipman was even more protected from review by colleagues. It was virtually impossible for his employed team of nurses and clerical staff to recognize what was happening, let alone challenge him when patients died unexpectedly. Community nurses and health visitors also lacked the information and authority to challenge him. In the community, people who may have had concerns did not feel able to raise them: a taxi driver who noticed that many of his elderly clients who were Shipman's patients died unexpectedly, and a funeral director who noticed that many of Shipman's patients had been found dead, dressed, sitting in chairs, in the afternoon, could not at first believe there was a problem and later did not believe that anyone would listen. When given the opportunity to raise the alarm in 1994 in the case of a woman admitted after the inappropriate administration of diamorphine, hospital services did not raise concerns with the primary care trust (PTC) or the GMC.

There was, then, a failure of some systems, an absence of other potentially useful systems, and a culture that served to inhibit both suspicion in response to unusual events and the expression of concern if any suspicion did arise. In considering the underlying reasons for this combination of factors and what should be done in response, I will deal with issues at the level of the individual patient and doctor first, and then the level of the public and the medical profession in general.

 Frazzled wrote:
I doubt new legislation. After all he's going to jail no?