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What Christians Should Know (And Do) About the Gosnell Case

This post will be gruesome and depressing.  Not because I am making it more gruesome or more depressing but because the case just is that evil.

I’ve lost sleep reading about the Grand Jury report. I’m crying. It’s probably the most evil thing I’ve read or seen.

Why am I writing about this?

The Gosnell case has been ignored by the national media (both liberal and conservative) except for the first day of the trial so the stuff you might read here could be for the first time (unless you’re a follower of Breitbart which has been following the story).  I’m not a reporter. I’m a guy who has tried to follow the local news story and has worked through the Grand Jury Report. So can you.

What is this about?

This is a case about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women.  Gosnell regularly delivered live babies in the third trimester of pregnancy then proceeded to murder the newborn babies by cutting their spinal cords with scissors. He also managed to kill adult women. What’s worse is that people found out what was going on in the place but no one stopped it.

The previous paragraph is almost copy-pasted from the overview section in the Grand Jury Report.

What happened?

Gosnell ran an abortion clinic since 1979 (40 years) that used dirty instruments and filthy practices to ensure that the most money could be made in the name of women’s health. Not only did several women die at his hands, he also made sure to sure to lie to patients about the age of their babies to ensure that they would go through with the abortion. Tthey would put these women into labor, deliver the babies and then—when he would arrive (or if he was running late)—they’d take scissors and cut the spinal cords of the babies. Afterwards they would throw the bodies in the fridge or the basement waiting for trash day—unless it was a really big baby in which case Gosnell would destroy any evidence. That’s not to say that Gosnell didn’t keep a token: he sometimes collected the feet of babies in jars and there are photos that prove it (pg 73).

The police had gotten report of illegal prescription drug sales at the clinic so they raided the place (pg 9). There they discovered confused patients and the gruesome conditions. When they were finally able to come back with warrants to seize everything, loads of paperwork had gone missing.

Who is To Blame?

The staff is to blame. They worked under Gosnell and continued to do what they knew was wrong. The place had cats that would roam around and defecate wherever they wanted to. Instruments were dirty. Equipment broken. But that’s just filth. The evil was perpetrated on how they treated babies. Since Gosnell wouldn’t arrive to deal with his murdering until eight or nine p.m, women would give birth to live babies and they’d have to wait. The babies would be left there, either dropped on the chair or in the toilet, until either Gosnell arrived or some staffer would do the deed that they’d see Gosnell do all the time: taking scissors and cutting the spinal cord at the base of the infant’s neck. A procedure that Gosnell named “snipping”.

“A lot of times this happened when [Gosnell] wasn’t there. If . . . a baby was about to come out, I would take the woman to the bathroom, they would sit on the toilet and basically the baby would fall out and it would be in the toilet and I would be rubbing her back and trying to calm her down for two, three, four hours until Dr. Gosnell comes. She would not move.” Lewis Testimony, pg 30

Don’t be confused. The staff was equally as murderous as Gosnell. He allegedly taught them how to be butchers. One of the staff, Lydna Williams, would cut the necks of babies when Gosnell wasn’t there. A women delivered a baby (Gosnell and the staff would call this “precipitation” instead of giving birth) who was moving and breathing for twenty minutes. She played with the baby pulling at his arms.  After she was done she slit his neck. (pg 104)

Or Adrienne Moton who pulled the baby out of the toilet, who was moving around like he was swimming and then cut his neck.

“… would cut the back of the neck and insert a curette, which is a plastic tubing … that is used to do a suction. You would insert it in the back of the neck of the baby, so that the brain would come out. (pg 113)

Gosnell is to blame. Undeniably. The man wanted to make money so he would lie. 40,000 abortions a year, many of them listed at 24.5 weeks of gestation—which the staff admitted to fudging since the babies were much older. Hell, they even fudged the sonogram by aiming it the way Gosnell taught them so that the babies looked smaller. Gosnell once joked that one of the babies he murdered was big enough to walk him to the bus station. The murdering of really big babies he saved for Sundays where only he and his wife would perform the “service”. Then they’d take the records home and destroy them.

“By state law we were only allowed to go up to 24 weeks in a procedure. And a lot of times we would have females  that were past 24 and a half weeks. So we manipulate the measurement of the ultrasound, so that indeed that we would try to get the patient to be at the 24-week mark. So we could still perform the procedure even though we were past 24 weeks.” (pg 80-81)

By giving so much space to the staff above you would think that it was in their hands. But no, this alleged murderer taught them how to do this. This monster had ran experiments on women years before and continued to keep his license. This monster would do his procedures and save severed feet in jars under the label of “teaching”.

He would slap women who changed their minds. He would sedate them heavily to ensure the procedure would go through. He’d give painful medication to induce labor then he’d practice his technique of slitting necks, snipping the spinal cord, and sucking out the brains.

The community is to blame. They would often recommend Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society. It was only in 2009 when first-trimester abortions started to show a dip since, said Latosha Lewis who worked in the practice, the “local referral agencices would not recommend his clinic to women seeking abortions.” Representatives of Philadelphia community organizations confirmed the testimony and yet the clinic remained open until 2011: 2 more years of butchering. They were no longer local abortions. Now people were coming in from out of state:Deleware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina (pg 27). And of course, Gosnell’s late-term murders increased.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Health is to blame. They allowed Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society to open in 1979 (Roe v. Wade was 1973) and they didn’t review the place again until 1989. There were a mess of violations but Gosnell said he’d fix them. In 1992 and 1993 there were the violations again and still he didn’t fix them. Heck, in 1996 he was fined in two states (PA and New York pg 53) for employing unlicensed personnel. But that wouldn’t matter. In 1993, the inspections stopped.

“Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all.” The Department of Health only acted after the raid for illegal prescription selling (pg 10).

Pennsylvania’s Department of State is also to blame. They could also have stopped Gosnell. They had evidence of a dirty facility; under-supervised sedation; underage abortion patients. They even assigned an investigator. The person didn’t follow up on reports, visit the facilities or anything. The Department stamped it “incomplete” and dismissed the complaints as unconfirmed.

Even after the death of a 22 year old patient, with a lawsuit against Gosnell that was settled for almost a million bucks, the department did nothing. It’s just an inherent risk of an abortion.

The National Abortion Federation is to blame. They sent an evaluator who noted significant life-threatening irregularities (mind you, the place had been majorly cleaned for days so they didn’t see it in its horrendous filth) and did nothing but deny admittance to the NAF. This, said the Evaluator, indicated how bad the clinic was.

Usually, if a clinic is able to fix deficiencies and come into compliance with the standards, NAF will admit them. Gosnell’s clinic, however, was deemed beyond redemption. (pg 95).

And yet, with all that, she didn’t report him to the authorities. That was 2010.

The Law of the Land is to blame. We currently have a policy in place with an arbitrary date: abortions are legal in the United States often up to 24 weeks of gestation because some lawyers have arbitrarily decided that a baby isn’t human at that point, or at the very least she can’t survive on her own at that point. They’re wrong on both counts. The baby is a human at that stage of development (just like I’m a human at this stage of development) and we’ve seen babies born at 20 weeks and there are tons of people that can’t survive on their own and we still see them as human.

But the Supreme Court, in an act of legislation against the law of many individual states, decided to get pro-active and all abortions as a conceivable option. Now I’m sure that what will happen is that some politician will glom onto the story and note the evil and then quickly say this isn’t an abortion issue but a human rights issue—he will be turning the eye from the point.

Gosnell didn’t perform his evil in some back alley as the pro-choice crowd keeps writing stories about. He performed it right in the public eye. He did it for forty years.  He started only a few scant years after Roe v. Wade. And because its abortion—and we must ensure that we have a right to slaughter our own—the community, the state, and the national federation played softball.

Some might think that the problem is the Law on the opposite end: that we need to allow late term abortions but regulate it. Have clean conditions. Ensure that the women’s health is protected. Make sure the doctors are licensed. Don’t add further restrictions, just regulate those procedures as well.

Let me say that this doesn’t change the murder: you have simply white-washed it so that it looks better to the eye.

What’s the Bottom Line?

It’s our fault too.  I seriously don’t understand how some of us Christians can stand on the side of supporting and applauding abortions.I have seen the arguments and they are ridiculous.

Some of these Christians might quickly tell me that what Gosnell was allegedly doing wasn’t abortions but illegal infanticide and I’d shoot back that the only difference is that abortions are legal and sanitized. Gosnell sucked brains out of babies that were born; others make sure to crush skulls and suck brains out before the baby leaves the womb.

And some of us Christians stand up and applaud those who openly support this outright evil. How dare we.

And then there’s the other group of us who refuse to say anything at all in the name of the Gospel. We can’t deal with the problem, some of us say, without addressing the main concern of the heart—in so doing you allow the evil to propagate in the name of righteousness. You refuse to vote, you refuse to speak, and evil continues on without being called for what it is.

Let me tell you, that for sinners to repent of evil they must know what evil is: and embracing a culture of murdering innocents without even a modicum of due process is an abject evil. When Christians spoke up against the Nazi Holocaust they did a right thing; some of us on the other hand think that the best course of action is to stay silent and pray.

Pray and act. Speak out. This. Is. Wrong.

And of course there will be another group that is upset that I didn’t cite Scripture but focused on the gruesome details. At this point I just want to unveil the horrid and ugly face of evil and see how many of us blink. I’ll argue in other forms elsewhere but here, look at evil.

Blink, Christians. Pray. Speak out. Vote accordingly. Expose evil with light. Preach the Gospel, surely, but part of that is saying “This. is. wrong.”

We in the US have killed over 50 million humans since Roe v. Wade. Countries, like China, who also practice abortion but might not have the regulations we have has reported over 330 million abortions. Staggering.

Blink people.

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