The Philadelphia House Of Horrors - Bradley
Mattes
More than 200 pages
describe the infanticide, drug violations,
illegal late-term abortions, racketeering and
other offenses of a Philadelphia abortionist.
The
grant jury report released just last week,
resulted in locking up Kermit Gosnell without
bail.
For decades, this
sleazy opportunist
murdered
beautiful, fully-formed babies – some born
alive, even crying and photographed – in his
dirty and decaying, yet legal back-alley
abortion mill.
And it
was no secret. Patients, family members and
even employees took numerous complaints to
officials. But the babies kept dying, the
mothers kept turning up in local emergency
rooms—even dead, and the abortion mill kept
operating.
The Gosnell investigation began almost by
accident. State officials conducted a raid in
February 2010, not prompted by the growing stack
of abortion-related complaints, but rather a
suspicion that Gosnell was selling pain
prescriptions for cold, hard cash. Once inside,
they found a far graver situation.
News reports only touch on what investigators
uncovered that day: dozens of dead babies, their
remains haphazardly stored in milk jugs, juice
cartons and piles of bags. Severed baby feet
displayed inside glass jars. Pools of blood on
the floor. Rusty instruments. The emergency exit
padlocked shut. A “sedation cocktail” chart
drawn by a teenage employee – the same teen left
alone to administer medication to women sitting
on toilets, their babies literally falling out
of them. Toilets that even the janitor refused
to unclog. Seeing the carnage was too
disgusting, he said.
We
now know that Gosnell’s patients increasingly
came for illegal late-term abortions. Doped up
and induced into labor, women well past 20 weeks
pregnant delivered living, breathing babies.
Gosnell ended their lives by plunging a pair of
scissors into their necks and severing their
spinal cords.
Gosnell’s house of horrors could and should have
been shut down years ago.
-
Had the State Health Department not let 15
years go by without inspecting abortion
facilities,
officials would have known unlicensed staff
members were medicating women solely based
on ability to pay. Gosnell’s own admissions
of conducting illegal late-term abortions
were blatantly recorded in patient files,
too. But the politics of a pro-abortion
governor put an end to inspections. Abortion
mills got a free pass.
-
Had the Department of State paid attention
to a steady stream of complaints,
Gosnell’s license would have been revoked
long ago. In fact, 10 years ago, a former
employee “laid out the whole scope of his operation.” Others came
forward, too. Family members physically
prevented from calling for help. Women with
perforated uteruses and bowels. A patient’s
death that Gosnell hushed with a nearly
million-dollar settlement. Oddly, the
department deemed none serious enough to
warrant further action.
-
Had the National Abortion Federation sounded
the alarm after personally visiting the site,
women they claimed to protect would not have
been lying on rusty stretchers, bodies
bleeding and broken. It was the worst
facility the NAF representative had ever
seen. NAF’s mission is “to ensure safe,
legal and acceptable abortion care.” Yet she
told no one.
-
Had the Philadelphia Department of Public
Health reported what its employees observed
and enforced its own regulations,
Gosnell’s filth and fraud might have stopped
sooner. The city knew aborted babies were
stored in the refrigerator alongside
employee lunches. They knew Gosnell had no
medical waste plan. They knew he defied
local health regulations.
But years
passed with no action.
-
Had a local hospital disclosed complications
suffered at Gosnell’s hands,
the word may have gotten out sooner.
Gosnell’s patients rushed to emergency rooms
with slashed intestines, some even
unconscious with fetal remains still inside.
Even though legally required, the hospital
that treated them failed to report all but
one of Gosnell’s butchery. They covered for
a colleague.
We’ll never know what might have been. We don’t
even know how many died or suffered inside the
Gosnell mill. But the grand jury investigation
recognizes the harshest truth: that these babies
had but a “few moments of life spent in
excruciating pain” in the hands of a sadistic
abortionist.
With photographs and
testimony from 58 witnesses, the full report is
almost too much to stomach. So many knew so much
and yet did nothing. Please don’t do the same.
Don’t let this story stay hidden any longer. Go to the link above
and read the summarized Overview at the
beginning of the Grand Jury Report.
Then share what
you know with others.
Blog, text,
email and post on twitter and Facebook.
Appalled by
Gosnell’s brutality, Americans have been
confronted with an important reality: killing
inside the womb is as grievous as killing
outside the womb. That’s a conversation we all
need to have.
Bradley Mattes
Executive Director
Life Issues Institute
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