By Dave Andrusko
Kermit Gosnell gets escorted to a van leaving the Criminal Justice Center after being convicted.
The headline from a newspaper story, frequently referenced but (I suspect) rarely read was “DOCTOR FROM HELL . . . OR GODSEND?” Written by David Gambacorta, this profile of abortionist Kermit Gosnell ran in the March 11, 2010, edition of the Philadelphia Daily News.
I refer to because it is one piece in a much larger puzzle: why would Gosnell abort (according to the Grand Jury) hundreds of viable babies and then kill them by plowing surgical scissors into their necks and severing their spinal cords? (He was convicted of murdering three, but the Grand Jury concluded the numbers were in the hundreds. He could be prosecuted for only three murders because he destroyed any records for the others.)
And how could he live with himself?
First, the why. One former employee, Kareema Cross,
“testified that when she first started working at the clinic, in 2005, Gosnell slit the neck of every baby. But he subsequently told the workers that the law changed so that he could not do that anymore. (The law, in fact, never allowed him to cut necks of viable babies after they were fully expelled.) Cross said that Gosnell then tried a few times to use a new procedure: He tried to inject a drug called digoxin into the fetus’s heart while it was in the womb. This was supposed to cause fetal demise in utero. But because Gosnell was not skillful enough to successfully administer digoxin, late-term babies continued to be born alive, and he continued to kill them by slitting their necks.”
Given his overall incompetence, (he was the subject of multiple malpractice suits), if Gosnell was going to continue to make the enormous amounts of money he raked in performing “late” abortions (the prosecution said Gosnell made $10,00 to $15,000 a day), he would slit these babies’ necks.
How did Gosnell live with himself? A real answer would require a team of clinical psychologists. But the interview he gave Gambacorta gives you clues.
Gambacorta separates Gosnell’s years as a general practitioner from his decades as an abortionist. Of the former, he can’t write enough good things about Gosnell. The only thing missing from the Dr. Good Guy portrait is Gosnell accepting eggs in lieu of dollars for his services.
Gosnell began performing abortions in 1970. His comments about those early days are staggering, in light of the assembly-line procedures that characterized his Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia.
“’I found the experience very difficult,’ Gosnell said. ‘You were under time constraints to perform the procedures so that the patients could get transportation back to wherever they were from.’ ‘’There was very little opportunity to assure that this was the best decision for the patient.’”
Interviewed after Gosnell agreed to a sentence of three lifetimes, one juror put it this way to ABC News: “Most of us felt it came down to a greed factor,” said Joseph Carroll. “The services … it was like a machine. They came in, he gave them a service, and bam, the women were gone.”
To his credit, in his search to answer the question, “Which of the two caricatures is the real Kermit Gosnell: the doctor who was running a clinic with bloodstained floors where women suffered unthinkable complications from abortions, or the caring physician who was a godsend to a poor, underserved population?,” Gambacorta spends a lot of time talking about all that went horribly wrong, apparently beginning in the 1980s. (Gosnell opened his West Philadelphia abortion clinic in 1978.)
“Abortion procedures, Gosnell said, made up about 30 percent to 40 percent of his workload,” Gambacorta wrote. That may have been the case early on but it certainly wasn’t the case over time. You don’t make millions treating the common cold.
Not surprisingly, Gosnell and the truth rarely were on the same page in this interview. He explained the [in]famous case where the National Abortion Federation would not admit him as a member of NAF this way:
“’They didn’t raise any concerns about cleanliness,’ Gosnell said. ‘The only issues were administrative. There was no clinical, technical or hygienic criticism at all.’”
Of course, this was not within hailing distance of what actually took place. The NAF investigator found his abortion clinic “beyond redemption” and said no. But in the Philadelphia Daily News story, Vicki Saporta, NAF President, was hardly the model of candor.
She said only that the clinic “didn’t meet the federation’s standards.” Specifically, “There were 19 areas where [the clinic] was in noncompliance with our guidelines. It was quite extensive,” Saporta told the Daily News. That NAF told no one about what the investigator found was conveniently omitted from the story.
And on and on. Gambacorta writes that Gosnell was
“clearly irked by claims that his clinic was ‘deplorable’ or had ‘bloodstained floors,’ as state investigators had said. ‘If you’re looking for a hospital setting, it’s very different. It’s designed to be comfortable for our patients,’ Gosnell said, as he showed this reporter iPhone photos taken inside his clinic, which appeared bright and clean.”
Here’s what authorities found when they raided Gosnell’s abortion clinic in 2010, according to the Grand Jury:
“The search team waited outside until Gosnell finally arrived at the clinic, at about 8:30 p.m. When the team members entered the clinic, they were appalled, describing it to the Grand Jury as ‘filthy,’ ‘deplorable,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘very unsanitary, very outdated, horrendous,’ and ‘by far, the worst’ that these experienced investigators had ever encountered. There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets.
“All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff – long before Gosnell arrived at the clinic – and staff members could not accurately state what medications or dosages they had administered to the waiting patients. Many of the medications in inventory were past their expiration dates.
“Investigators found the clinic grossly unsuitable as a surgical facility. The two surgical procedure rooms were filthy and unsanitary – Agent Dougherty described them as resembling ‘a bad gas station restroom.’ Instruments were not sterile. Equipment was rusty and outdated. Oxygen equipment was covered with dust, and had not been inspected. The same corroded suction tubing used for abortions was the only tubing available for oral airways if assistance for breathing was needed. There was no functioning resuscitation or even monitoring equipment, except for a single blood pressure cuff in the recovery room.”
But Gosnell’s ability to lie—or delude himself, take your pick—was never more evident than in the last two paragraphs.
“But he was clearly bothered by the Frankenstein-like portrait that much of the public has of him because of recent news stories. ‘No one is perfect. Everyone tries to be perfect. I aspire to perfection, certainly for my patients,’ he said, as his eyes drifted and voice trailed off.
“Finally, he settled on a thought. ‘I feel in the long term I will be vindicated.’”