The Ugly Truth About Kermit Gosnell: He’s Not The Only One

Much has been written about the media’s unwillingness to make Kermit Gosnell and his appalling abortion practices front-page news. Or even back-page news, for that matter. He is on trial for the 2009 death of a mother of three and of four babies allegedly born alive; he was initially charged with the killing of seven babies.

Gosnell also faces roughly 250 lesser charges of racketeering, conspiracy and alleged violations under Pennsylvania law. The prosecution maintains that Gosnell routinely performed illegal third-term abortions.

Writing for the Washington Post, Jordan Sekulow and Matthew Clark wrote:

“The details emerging from this trial are too graphic for us to even put into words, yet our society allows this same unspeakable torture of another human being to occur just as long as the baby is still inside the womb. The Gosnell trial in conjunction with a Planned Parenthood lobbyist’s recent admission that the abortion giant has no issue with this life-ending practice is lifting the veil of secrecy from an industry long shrouded from public scrutiny.”

And the response from progressives has been equivocal -- to be put charitably.

In a blog post for the American Center for Law and Justice, Clark wrote of the comments by pro-choicers to the Washington Post article.

“In response, the overwhelming consensus of ‘pro-choice’ readers (aside from the irony of claiming the Washington Post now has a pro-life bias) was that Gosnell’s trial is about ‘medical malpractice,’ not abortion and murder. … One radical leftist summed it up this way,” Clark wrote. “‘The issue has nothing to do with abortion. It is malpractice as several comments have pointed out.’”

Responding to the Gosnell trial as a malpractice problem not only trivializes his decades of abusing low-income Philadelphia women, but it ignores the fact that Gosnell’s practice of killing live-born children is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as National Review Online’s Jillian Kay Melchior discovered. She found legal problems similar to those at Gosnell’s office at three Florida abortion clinics, in Miami, Hialeah, and Miramar. All had had several run-ins with the law under circumstances that mirrored the Gosnell case.

“Sycloria Williams was recovering from a botched abortion at her Pompano, Fla., home on July 21, 2006, when two homicide detectives knocked on her door," Melchior wrote. "They asked if she knew why they were there. ‘Yes,’ Williams said immediately. ‘Because the baby was born alive.’”

Later in the piece, Melchior added:

“After a 2004 tip proved accurate, two owners and two staff members were successfully prosecuted for unlicensed medical practice; and, although there was no conviction, it appears that Sycloria Williams’s baby was born alive and murdered at the Hiaeleah clinic in 2006. Furthermore, some of the clinics’ doctors have records best described as routine medical violence against women. Yet despite their fraught past, the three clinics remain fully operational today.”

Warnings about back-alley abortion butchery lay at the heart of pro-abortion activism before the 1973 Supreme Court decision that, in effect, declared open season on unborn American babies. Yet now front-office abortion butchery draws nothing more from the pro-abortion establishment and its journalistic enablers than dismissive silence or obfuscation.

Here’s why the establishment is so quiet about Gosnell. He and his blood-stained, woman-abusing ilk are the inevitable upshot of a culture that says even though an unborn child may be within days or even hours of a healthy live birth, it is permissible to kill that child. In the United States, an unborn child is, to borrow from the lexicon of one of Gosnell’s colleagues, Dr. LeRoy Carhart, “just meat in a Crock-Pot.” If things get sloppy or the “meat” still has a pulse after being taken out of her mother, you do what you’ve got to do. You finish the job. At worst, it’s malpractice. End of discussion.