Company We Keep

 

Planned Parenthood, the abortion industry, and Kermit Gosnell: What did they know, when did they know it, and what did they do?

 

By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. This first ran April 26, 2013.

“Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you. God bless America.”  – President Obama’s closing remark, speaking today in Washington, DC to Planned Parenthood.

President Obama and Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood

While the Abortion Industry—beginning with its leader, Planned Parenthood–is loathe to admit they’ve ever heard of Kermit Gosnell, President Obama gives no hint he might ever loosen his embrace of PPFA, which aborts over 333,000 babies a year.
Obama loves the leader of an industry that shoveled almost as much money into his re-election coffers as it did the bodies of dead babies into refuse containers.

To be sure Obama had defensible reasons not to appear at PPFA’s “Time to Care” Gala Thursday, instead delivering remarks Friday. Perhaps that’s why his laudatory praise for Planned Parenthood was, even by his standards, over the top.

And whether he spoke yesterday or today, Obama still was the first sitting President to address PPFA, a calculation Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post summarized in one word: “politics.”
(Within “politics” Eilperin manages to miss the millions and millions of dollars PPFA’s political arm poured into the Obama re-election effort. Instead she focuses on how well Obama polls on “reproductive rights, and women’s issues more generally.” We’ll come back to that in a second.)
“Politics” overcame what Eilperin implies would be (to outsiders) an understandable reluctance. After all this is “a time when states are adopting new restrictions on abortion and abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell is facing criminal charges for conduct at his Philadelphia clinic.”
So whether it’s Obama’s joined-at-the-hip relationship with PPFA (and kindred pro-abortion organizations) and/or gratitude for their contributions (which included demonizing Mitt Romney), Obama was there today in full rhetorical overdrive.

Of course, there is another possible explanation. Like almost the entire media, Obama probably believes Planned Parenthood won’t pay a price—any price– for the alleged murders perpetrated by Gosnell or the hideous conditions prosecutors (and a Grand Jury) say were standards fare in Gosnell’s West Philadelphia Women’s Medical Society. They insist their hands are clean, in a manner of speaking.
But are they?

Until today I had not seen an article that ran in the Philadelphia Daily News. Reporter Morgan Zalot wrote about Gloria Steinem who spoke last week “addressing a crowd of 500 spanning four generations at Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania’s annual Spring Gathering.”
In Zalot’s story we read this incredible admission from Dayle Steinberg, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania.
“Steinberg said that when Gosnell was in practice, women would sometimes come to Planned Parenthood for services after first visiting Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic, and would complain to staff about the conditions there.
“’We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health,’ Steinberg said as she sat with Steinem before Tuesday’s events.”
Understand that former Gosnell employees, both at the murder trial and when appearing before the Grand Jury, painted a nightmare scenario that if it came from mouths of pro-lifers would be scornfully dismissed as grotesque hyperbole. Note that Gosnell’s defense has more important items to defend (Gosnell against murder charges), so Jack McMahon simply said next to nothing about what the Grand Jury described in these words:

“The physical layout of the clinic, a confusing maze of narrow hallways and multiple twisting stairways, should have been an obvious bar to its use for surgical procedures. The three-story structure, created by joining two buildings, had no elevator. Access from procedure rooms to the outside by wheelchair or stretcher was impossible, as was evident the night Karnamaya Mongar died. According to former staff members, the facility had been substantially cleaned up by the time the Grand Jury visited it. Between late February 2010, when the practice was closed, and our tour of the clinic in August, significant efforts had been made to make the facility look and smell cleaner.”
“Despite such efforts, it remained a wretched, filthy space. The walls appeared to be urine-splattered. The procedure tables were old and one had a ripped plastic cover. Suction tubing, which was used for abortion procedures – and doubled as the only available suction source for resuscitation – was corroded. A large, dirty fish tank stood in the waiting room, filled with turtles and fish. The dirt-floored basement was stuffed with patient files, plants, junk, and boxes of un-disposed-of medical waste. The entire facility smelled foul.

“These were the conditions after the facility had been shut down and cleaned.”
More recently, as NRL News Today has reported, Planned Parenthood of Delaware has suspended surgical abortions following allegations of unsafe and unsanitary conditions and 911 calls. Two nurses who formerly worked there told Action News that they “quit to protect their own medical licenses, stunned by what they called a meat-market style of assembly-line abortions.”
And that doesn’t even get to the unbelievable comments made by Alisa LaPolt Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, to members of the Florida House of Representatives‘ Civil Justice subcommittee. What would PPFA want done with a baby who has survived a “botched abortion” and is struggling for life?

Unfazed by the question and untouched by the sentiments that 99.999% of the non-PPFA population would express, Snow coolly responded, “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.”

And don’t forget, PPFA was not alone in its hands-off approach to Gosnell. Gosnell asked the National Abortion Federation if he could join (soon after Mrs. Mongar died, allegedly from an overdose of Demerol administered by Gosnell’s untrained staff). NAF sent out an evaluator who deemed Gosnell’s clinic “beyond redemption.”

Guess what? Just like Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, NAF “did not report Gosnell to authorities.” I could go on, but the message is clear.
The Abortion Industry can’t get far enough away from Gosnell, which is why they are desperate not only to pretend (with rare exceptions) that they knew nothing, but also to try to shift blame pro-lifers!
As for President Obama, well you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps.

Source: NRLC News