On the Gosnell House of Horrors Case

and paltry news coverage. Get Religion comments.  Warning: read on only if you have a strong stomach. Excerpts follow.

...Gosnell ran an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. Karnamaya Mongar, an immigrant from Nepal, died at his hands. That’s one of the murder charges. The rest are for some of the babies he delivered before cutting their spinal cord. The grand jury report is sickening. It tells of a shop of horrors — infant body parts stashed everywhere in the clinic (including the employee lunch refrigerator), unsterilized instruments, flea-ridden cats defecating throughout the facility. Again, a grand jury report this horrific would normally be bigger news.

In it we learn that Gosnell violated most regulations governing abortion. He performed abortions on minors without parental consent. He performed abortions past 24 weeks, sometimes very far past 24 weeks. He fudged the required ultrasounds. He skipped the required consultations. And the regulatory mechanisms in place in Pennsylvania did nothing to stop this. He was investigated a few times and written up for code violations, but nothing happened. A whistleblower went to the Board of Medicine to report Gosnell and nothing happened. One of his victims died of sepsis. He settled for almost a million dollars. The insurance company sent the information to Pennsylvania but nothing happened. There’s reference to other women dying, lawsuits, etc. State health workers inspected the site, took samples, but nothing happened. In the mid-1990s, pro-choice Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, ended regular inspections of abortion clinics, ensuring nothing would happen to Gosnell’s clinic.

One doctor personally complained to the Pennsylvania Department of Health about the spread of venereal disease from the clinic. That doctor used to refer underage girls to him for abortions. Even after that doctor became the head of the city’s health department two years ago, nothing happened. Nearby hospitals that kept treating Gosnell’s victims never did anything to turn him in, even though they knew abortions were taking place weeks after the 24-week cutoff. When the National Abortion Federation rejected Gosnell’s application shortly after the death of Mongar, the evaluator failed to report the clinic (“the worst she had ever inspected”) to anyone in authority. The Grand Jury report concludes:

Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.

What I’ve shared thus far is only through page 18 of a 281-page report.
The story was blogged about a lot last Wednesday. But on Thursday morning, none of the three broadcast networks mentioned it in their broadcasts. The articles I read were very succinct, particularly considering how many barbaric details are included in the grand jury report...

And why do these things happen? To find out, read The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind or Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader's Eye-Opening Journey across the Life Line.  Nathanson's book explains the dynamics of the abortion industry that attract the unskilled and/or unscrupulous, while Johnson describes the self-justifying nature of the industry which would preclude real enforcement of safeguards against abortionists.