So by now I’m sure you’ve hear of Dr. Gosnell and his house of horrors.

The other night I spent a few hours reading through the grand jury report about the case.  To put it midly, it is horrifying.  Dr. Gosnell has been running this sorry excuse for a medical center for approximately 30 years.  What really surprises me is that he was busted for drugs – not for murdering Karnamaya Mongar in 2009, not for running an abortion clinic so terrible that local agencies stopped referring clients to him, but for being the third largest oxycotin distributer in the state.

We all know that America doesn’t care about poor people and immigrants, but really?

And while I’m sure pro-lifers are going to jump all over this, the issue really is not abortion.  Late term abortion is illegal.  But what Dr. Gosnell was doing wasn’t abortion, it was murder.  In late term abortions, the fetus never gets a chance to breath.  It is killed before it fully exits its mother’s body.  But not at The Women’s Medical Society.  The grand jury reports numerous live births, in some cases the infants were alive for up to twenty minutes before Dr. Gosnell and his staff murdered them.  And the murders were barbaric – snipping spinal cords with scissors?  There are better ways, hell we put down stray animals more humanely than that.

Initially I was confused how mothers could sit by and watch that. Surely you don’t need that much education to understand how Dr. Gosnell was performing these abortions was incorrect.  But then I read about how his untrained staff administered the anestesia and tried to keep the women knocked out during the births so that they would be still and quiet.  Apparently the running practice was to get the women in during the day, induce labor and have them sit around the office all day until the doctor came in at night to finish the job.  By the time the doctor came, some women had already given birth.

The whole thing is a nightmare.  I’m sad for the women who had no other options but to go to this doctor.  He overcharged them, hid his numerous mistakes (like leaving pieces of aborted fetuses inside the women’s bodies and puncturing internal organs) and kept them from getting any real medical help when they were in trouble (in the grand jury report there are at least 2 instances), and he murdered two women.  I would have thought one woman dying in his clinic would have been enough for a thorough review of the clinic, but no.  Apparently some people had reported the clinic to [], but no one followed up.

While I would like to imagine the Dr. Gosnell is the only doctor who preys on poor women, I know he is not.  I’m scared for other doctors that continue to fly under the radar.  While I can appreciate a doctor breaking the law to help someone in need, I cannot appreciate what Dr. Gosnell did.  I know that the new health care bill does not include provisions to immigrants, but hopefully low-income women can get assistance they need in a sanitary, safe  and caring environment.

peace,
e.