Gosnell

 

Reflections on the anniversary of the beginning of Kermit Gosnell’s murder trial: what did we learn, what impact will it have?

By Dave Andrusko

Baby girl aborted alive by Kermit Gosnell

Two items came together today, bringing to mind abortionist Kermit Gosnell and his “House of Horrors.”
First, it was a year ago today that Gosnell went on trial for murder. (More about that below.)
Second, there is going to be a follow up to “3801 Lancaster,” a powerful documentary about which NRL News Today has posted on numerous occasions (see nrlc.cc/1lLTuqk, nrlc.cc/126z8lU, and nrlc.cc/XaAAhs, to name just three). The title refers to Gosnell’s West Philadelphia abortion clinic.
As I wrote a few weeks before Gosnell’s trial commenced

“In a mere 21 minutes and 11 seconds, the documentary explains in almost clinical detail the circumstances that will result in Gosnell going on trial next month charged with eight counts of murder: first degree murder in the cases of seven ‘late-term’ babies he is said to have deliberately aborted alive and then severed their spinal cords with surgical scissors; and third-degree murder in the case of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, who died from a drug overdose reportedly prescribed by Gosnell.”

(Eventually—for some understandable reasons and others that defy explanation—the number of babies Gosnell was charged with murdering was slashed. The jury agreed on one count of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Mrs. Mongar.)
The writer and director David Altrogge told TheBlaze.com that “3801 Lancaster, Part II” will come out on May 13 “no matter what” and that “The movie will be made available online free-of-charge for the general public.”
Allow me to take a few minutes to reflect back on the anniversary of the beginning of the trial. As we often observed, the trial had every ingredient to make it a natural for everyone from the Paparazzi to the New York Times.

Kermit Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack McMahon

Even Gosnell’s attorney, Jack McMahon was flamboyant. According to Tara Murtha of the Philadelphia Weekly (by no means a friend of ours)
“Some of McMahon’s better-known clients include Arturo Juarez, alleged leader of the Latin King gang and Rich Wise, one of the two men accused in the 1995 murder of Kimberly Ernst, known in the press as the Center City Jogger case. McMahon is a busy guy: on top of taking on the Gosnell case, he’s currently representing Gerald Ung, the former Temple Law student arrested in 2010 on suspicion of attempting to kill Ed DiDonato in an Old City shoot-out captured by Fox29 cameras.”
We won’t waste time rehashing the near media blackout that was par for the course until some of the Establishment press was shamed into covering bits and parts of the trial. After all, why would they give time and space to this trial?

Gosnell and his henchmen did not fit the media narrative. His Women’s Medical Society was an incredibly filthy pit where at least two women died and, according to the Grand Jury, Gosnell aborted hundreds of viable babies, who were born alive, and whose necks he then calmly slit. Their mothers were treated like cattle.

McMahon’s defense, which the New York Times featured in its opening (and rare) story about the trial, was to paint Gosnell as a man of the people, unjustly attacked by an overzealous prosecution. Jon Hurdle wrote

“His lawyer, Jack J. McMahon, described Dr. Gosnell as dedicated to treating the poor and accused prosecutors of racism — ‘a prosecutorial lynching’ of his client, who is black.

“’It’s an elitist, racist prosecution,’ Mr. McMahon said. ‘This black man is being taken because of who he is and where he works.’”

Never mind that almost all his “patients” were poor women of color off of whose assembly-line-like abortions he made millions. Anything to take the focus off what Gosnell was doing—and to whom.
What is Gosnell’s legacy? Short-term what happened to those babies and their mothers provided strong impetus for abortion clinic regulations. It is a sign of what goes on in all-too-many abortion clinics that pro-abortionists will go to the mattresses to stop inspections. That such were laws were passed—and more in the offing–is an important step forward.

Middle-term, Gosnell’s atrocities (under-covered as they were) helped to change the discussion. Light was cast on the Abortion Industry’s seedy underbelly.

In Gosnell’s case when officers raided the clinic, they found half-naked, drug-stupored women in various stages of delivery of huge babies, all of whom were (un)attended by untrained, unsupervised staff dispensing powerful drugs for which they had no medical training. It was straight out of Dante’s Inferno

Far from “safe, legal and rare” abortions, the Kermit Gosnells of this world help hammer home the lesson that abortion is dangerous, bordering on illegal when it hasn’t crossed over, and plentiful.
The long-term impact is sheer speculation, of course. Other abortion-related atrocities have been buried/forgotten in the past—dropped into the memory hole to which the Establishment Media loves to relegate them.

But there is an entire army of pro-lifers who are as at home with the Internet and social media as I am with a newspaper delivered to my doorstep every day. They (which includes the readers of NRL News Today and NRL News) simply will not be dissuaded from their pursuit of the truth, nor turned aside by the excuses for inhumanity we are inundated with.

Most of all, because you and I and pro-life legislators around the country are on the lookout, we will demonstrate that Gosnell was not an atypical “renegade” (the favorite term pro-abortionists use to distance themselves from Gosnell).
Over time, we will find there are more just like him—minus the lice and dead cats.

Source: NRLC News