SIMMONS: A doctor with a perverted view of life and death

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Since March 18, jurors in Philadelphia have been listening to gruesome testimony about what happened inside an abortion clinic.

The detailed testimony is gut-wrenching, whether you are taking them in while digesting a morning bowl of grits cooked in chicken broth or savoring every bite of a comfort dish prepared the way grandma did.

The people who worked there said the conditions of the clinic, the Women’s Medical Society, were filthy and abortions were sloppily carried out, and medical and health offices said the clinic contained the frozen remains of dozens and dozens of fetuses.

One health official who testified said there was “filthy” and “corroded” tubing in medical machines inside the clinic, broken equipment blocking doorways and patients who said they had received no counseling.

Moreover, patients were not connected to devices that measure vital signs.

First laid out for the jury by prosecutors and defense attorneys, some of the most startling facts and revelations include:

• The Pennsylvania Department of Health last inspected the clinic April 8, 1993, until February 2010, when law enforcement conducted a raid following the November 2009 death of a patient.

• A grand jury recommended that Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, be charged with 310 counts of violating abortion laws. He subsequently was charged with murder, infanticide and related abortion and health-care charges. Nine staffers are also on trial.

• Hundreds of babies were allegedly killed during late-term abortions by Dr. Gosnell.

• Defense Attorneys Jack McMahon and James Berardinelli, had Dr. Gosnell plead not guilty and called the trial a “prosecutorial lynching,” and cited an elitist and racist prosecution of a doctor who gives to the poor and helps the people of West Philadelphia.” (More on that later.)

Now, some of you — some of us — are old enough to recall tales from the pre-Roe v. Wade days, when women in general and poor gals in particular seeking abortions sought “back-alley” abortionists.

But consider this case, a case of a woman who simple intention was to undergo a safe and legal abortion.

In Novemeber 2009, a 41-year-old Nepalese woman who lived in Northern Virginia and was about 16 weeks pregnant, ended up at Dr. Gosnell’s clinic after being told by three abortion clinics — two in Virginia — one near her home in Woodbridge and one in Fredericksburg, and a third clinic in the District — that their own cutoff was 16 weeks.

Once at the West Philadelphia clinic, the woman died of cardiac arrest after Dr. Gosnell’s untrained staff gave her too much Demerol to anesthecize her.

There were other sickening affairs at the “house of horrors.”

According to the testimony of a young woman named Ashley Baldwin, Dr. Gosnell hired her when she was only 15, and she went from merely answering telephones to performing ultrasounds, administering intravenous medicine and assisting Dr. Gosnell in abortions.

In her testimony, she told of several babies breathing and moving following abortions, and of a late-term aborted baby “screeching” afterward.

She also testified that Dr. Gosnell joked that one baby was big enough “to walk me home.”There never has been any humorous aspects to abortion, whether you stand with the pro-lifers, pro-choicers or stand in the I-do-not-care dead zone.

For sure, Dr. Gosnell is a very, very perverted view of life and death, and he probably should have had his license yanked and his clinic closed a very time ago.

That he had a separate abortion rooms for white and blacks speaks to those pre-pre-Roe v. Wade days, when all manner of “accommodations” were separate but not equal and in Dr. Gosnell’s case because “that’s the way of the world,” as he put it, the facilities he used for white women were less squalid.

This guy is sick, really sick.

But he and his staff shouldn’t be the only ones being held accountable.

The state bureaucracy turned a blind eye, and if the state of Pennsylvania — including administration of Gov. Ed Rendell, who earlier served as mayor of Philadelphia — are allowed to get away with murder, then other states are going to find excuses — sequestration, budget cuts, etc. — to look the other way.

Fortunately, there is no statute of limitation on murder.

• Deborah Simmons can be reached at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.