Remembering Kermit Gosnell, Who Snipped Babies’ Necks in Live Birth Abortions

It is only fitting that Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney should be the first to tell the world that Kermit Gosnell is dead. They send out a notice this morning that “according to prison and law enforcement sources, Gosnell died two weeks ago but his death has gone unreported until now. His cause of death is unknown.”

No two people did more to educate the American people than this husband and wife team. In addition to authoring a book—“Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer”—they also produced and directed a movie—“Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer”—among other outstanding work.

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Who can forget that there was essentially a media blackout for much of his 2013 trial. None of that “democracy dies in darkness” nonsense when bringing to light Gosnell’s “House of Horrors” risked revealing the real face of abortion.

It was a stain on my profession that, as much as they try to ignore it, can never be washed away. Wasn’t it Lady Macbeth, who famously says. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”?

“Convicted serial killer Kermit Gosnell left a path of destruction in Pennsylvania which shook the Commonwealth to its core,” said Maria V. Gallagher, executive director of the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, the Keystone State affiliate of National Right to Life. “Tragically, public officials allowed his House of Horrors abortion facility to operate for years without being inspected. As the grand jury stated, hair and nail salons received greater scrutiny than Gosnell’s catastrophic abortion center.”

“We continue to grieve the loss of the babies and women who fell victim to Gosnell’s violent crime spree. And we hold out hope that the lessons learned from Gosnell’s reign of terror will not be forgotten,” Gallagher added.

I basically serialized the contents of the 281-page Grand Jury report. How else could readers grasp the magnitude of his evil?

In unsparing language, the Special Grand Jury scathingly criticized the Pennsylvania Department of Health and then Gov. Tom Ridge for their “benign neglect” of a man who for over 30 years killed thousands of late-term babies. Among their numbers were hundreds of huge unborn babies whom he deliberately and with malice aforethought aborted in a manner that they were born alive and then severed their spinal cords.

(He callously called this “snipping” which he taught his hapless staff to do in his absence.)

For a variety of procedural reasons (plus he was fiendishly clever; he destroyed almost all records), Gosnell was convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of “only” three babies.

He was also convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Karnamaya Mongar. Gosnell’s unlicensed and untrained staff administered dose after doses of sedative and painkilling drugs over several hours to keep her sedated before she went into cardiac arrest.

She “died from infection and sepsis two days after Gosnell perforated her uterus and cervix during an abortion procedure,” according to the Grand Jury report.

Gosnell also evaded the consequences for the death of another woman. According to the report, “On October 9, 2002, the Professional Underwriters Liability Insurance Company reported to the State Board of Medicine that it had paid a $400,000 settlement to the family of Semika Shaw, the 22-year-old mother of two who died following an abortion procedure at Gosnell’s clinic in March 2000.”

In a press release announcing Gosnell’s death, Ann McElhinney “expressed how unsettling it was, meeting Gosnell and researching his crimes.”

“It was tough but it was a very, very important piece of journalism. Meeting Gosnell was one of the few times in my journalism career that I felt I was face to face with evil.

Gosnell is gone, but we should take time to think of the thousands of innocent babies who were his victims. They lived for a short period of time but must not be forgotten. They achieved some measure of justice with Gosnell’s prosecution and incarceration.

I think in particular of Baby Boy A, who was so big that even Gosnell’s workers were shocked by the barbarity of his killing and took a photo of him after he was murdered. He shook their hardened hearts. Baby Boy A lived for about an hour before he was killed. The picture of him curled up in a tupperware container helped seal Gosnell’s fate and ensured he’d never kill again. That heartbreaking picture has also meant that I’m not the only one who will never forget Baby Boy A.

I could go forever. His cruelty is unfathomable. But here is one other resource that I found extraordinarily helpful: “Kermit Gosnell’s Babies” that appeared in “Philadelphia” magazine and was written by Steve Volk.

As you read the piece, clearly some of these babies had moved, to the point where it made some employees quit and aggravated the many, many psychological and emotional problems these poorly educated women already suffered from. For example,

“The arm just jumped. Didn’t it? The leg jerked. Isn’t that baby…breathing? And sometimes, one of his assistants asked: Is that baby alive?

“No, [Gosnell] assured them. That wasn’t a real movement.” …

“Another time, [Ashley] Williams called her co-workers over to see a baby that lay on a counter in the clinic.

“Watch this,” she said.

She reached down to tug on the baby’s arm. The baby drew its arm back.”

Gosnell, Volk concluded, ever-so-even-handedly, “found his own sense of equilibrium somewhere beyond the law, good sense and decency, making choices we find unfathomable, till the police came.”

But authorities had more trouble “processing” Gosnell’s bizarre behavior, especially the night of the raid on his “Women’s Medical Society.” Unbelievably, the first thing he asked was if he could feed his turtles. Later

“Gosnell tended to one patient, a woman pushing out a stillborn fetus; he returned, still calm, and asked if the agents minded if he ate his dinner. He sat down, pulled a plate of salmon teriyaki from a paper sack, and started to eat with his torn and bloody surgical gloves still covering his hands.”

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 frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.

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