A Book Review . . . How Gosnell Became Tightly Stitched Into The Social Fabric
By DEXTER DUGGAN
Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, Regnery Publishing, www.Regnery.com, Washington, D.C., ISBN 978-1-62157-455-2, 367 pages hardback, $27.99, 2017.
If unborn babies were affixed in the womb as strongly as Planned Parenthood is entrenched in the power structure, it’d be about impossible to abort the babies. But they’re innocent, soft, and small, while abortionist PP is hardened and humongous.
Denying hundreds of millions of dollars of annual taxpayer funding to a private organization with a monstrously destructive agenda shouldn’t be so difficult. But even two practicing Catholic speakers of the U.S. House, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, threw up their hands in surrender and helped shovel the wealth into PP’s bulging bank account.
Planned Parenthood is an aging leftover from progressives’ wild eugenicist dreams of enforced human betterment in the early 20th century that led to evil visitations like compelled sterilization in the U.S. and people being axed like herds of useless barnyard animals in Germany.
PP founder Margaret Sanger wrote, “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” She wrote that in Woman and the New Race. The year was 1920.
Also in 1920, medical and legal professionals in Germany proposed what they considered to be the beneficial destruction of unworthy human life. Breeding a new race was an attractive idea internationally.
Germans Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche wrote Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. Some German politicians set about applying the ideas forcefully to their society.
Back in the U.S., business tycoons like Dixie Cup Co. founder Hugh Moore and Procter and Gamble soap heir Clarence Gamble poured their beneficence into fashionable efforts to limit births, one way or another. Margaret Sanger could count on them.
These were among the U.S. social elitists whose influence survived the downfall of an ambitious European politician whose National Socialist German Workers’ Party had its “science-based” ideas about pruning untidy humanity back for its betterment, not with pruning shears but with suffocating “shower rooms.”
Not everyone who wanted to pave the road to the future with gravestones had to be an official of Planned Parenthood, though — indeed, PP omitted gravestones altogether for its anonymous victims. But the carnage visited upon humanity by well-meaning killers sawing limbs off family trees, or wielding scissors and scalpel, came from Hell and cried out to Heaven for redress.
By the 1960s, permissive abortion began gestating as a fashionable cause of U.S. upper crusters. The trendy U.S. Supreme Court brought it to fruition a little later, in 1973, viewing expansive abortion freedom as something that safely could be left in the eager hands of ambitious doctors. Like, you know, you always can confidently entrust your life savings to casino croupiers.
Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer’s recently released book from Regnery about Philadelphia mass-destruction specialist Kermit Gosnell focuses on this abortionist’s depraved, callous career that endured for decades, defying conscience and morality. The Supreme Court virtually gave Gosnell the whole store, but he wanted even more.
Using sterilized medical instruments? Having staff who had any idea what they were doing? Knowing anything about how much or what sort of pain-killer to administer? Using gauges and monitors that worked? In the eyes of greedy Gosnell, all these and more were useless impediments to his doing as many profitable abortions as possible.
But surely such incompetence produced some serious medical problems? To Gosnell’s glee, they didn’t matter to state authorities, who ignored them. This bold fellow also ran a major drug-peddling operation from his office, which explained why his daughter’s bedroom at home had nearly a quarter of a million dollars in cash stashed. Gosnell engaged in medical-insurance fraud, too.
If his frequent late-gestation abortions produced babies still alive, he killed them anyway. Snipping their spines apart was handily deadly. What’s a toilet for? What’s a garbage disposal for? Getting rid of bodies.
McElhinney and McAleer aren’t writing about 20th-century German history or a Planned Parenthood office, but certain incidents in Gosnell serve to remind why PP, the biggest abortionist in the U.S., seems to keep flexing muscle no matter how many ghastly scandals attach to it. Just like Gosnell’s work.
He even ate during abortions. The authors don’t suggest that Gosnell snacked on the babies’ bodies, but they raise the possibility he fed some of them to crabs at his New Jersey beach house.
After “Catholic” pro-abortion Republican Tom Ridge had been elected governor of Pennsylvania in 1994, the word went out not to impede access to abortion. Routine inspections of facilities simply stopped.
Just like, years later, the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2016 Hellerstedt opinion killed commonsense Texas abortuary regulations that had been enacted in response to the Gosnell scandal.
Pro-abortionists like to say that such regulations as certain architectural or building standards are just a form of harassment against abortuaries. But the book notes that paramedics couldn’t get dying Gosnell patient Karnamaya Mongar out of the building for 47 minutes because of the cluttered, confusing hallways and a locked emergency door.
After Gosnell’s “house of horrors” finally was exposed and prosecutors tried to develop their knowledge about what constituted standard, legal abortion practice, the authors write, many doctors declined to help:
“Medical professionals didn’t want to contribute to any official proceeding that might shine a negative light on abortion. The prosecutors were encountering the same reluctance to speak up and do the morally and ethically right thing that had allowed Gosnell to continue killing for years.”
Grand jurors investigating Gosnell heard testimony from an evaluator from the National Abortion Federation that she turned down Gosnell’s application for accreditation because it was the worst facility she’d ever seen — but she failed to report any of the horrors to anyone else.
And who was she, covering up probable criminal activity? The authors write that her name was withheld in the grand-jury report because, a source told them, the judge overseeing the proceedings “did not want the report to criticize the abortion establishment.”
The authors add later that this judge, who favored abortion, told them “she did not want the grand jury’s report to become fodder for anti-abortion activists. . . . ’It was a major concern to me, because Pennsylvania is very conservative and very conflicted about choice’.”
Toward the end of the book, the authors say the grand-jury judge, Renee Cardwell-Hughes, “labored to keep the probe from shining any light on the ugliness of ‘abortion rights.’ She was quite open about where she would allow the grand-jury investigation to go and where she would prevent it from going.”
A number of additional charges would have been difficult to bring against Gosnell at the subsequent trial because he and his staff simply falsified records, or he destroyed them. But, the authors write, there was an additional reason he didn’t face more counts — the powers that be didn’t want Philadelphia to look statistically like more of a murder capital.
Although prosecutors originally thought they might have enough evidence to charge him with up to 100 murders, “this plan provoked strenuous objections from the leadership of the Philadelphia police department and its political allies. . . .
“The plan to charge Gosnell with a large number of murders was quietly dropped,” they add.
He was convicted of murdering three babies who survived abortions, and of involuntary manslaughter of a mother who was overdosed.
The book’s authors also wrote the script for the new Gosnell movie.
McElhinney says in the book’s preface that she “never trusted or liked pro-life activists,” but the facts of the 2013 trial meant “everything changed” for her. “. . . I am not the same person I was.”
The authors later note that many involved with the trial altered their views when they had to look at abortion more closely rather than just hear slogans about “choice.” People hadn’t even been empaneled as trial jurors if they were pro-lifers.
“And it wasn’t just the jury that would re-examine their basic assumptions about abortion. Prosecutors, several journalists, and even Gosnell’s own lawyer experienced changes of heart and mind,” they write. “Not all of them ended up in the pro-life camp, by any means, but almost everyone emerged from the Gosnell trial more skeptical about abortion than when they started.”
Media Blackout
Chapter 10, “Media Malpractice,” notes that major media tried to avoid covering the horrifying Gosnell trial — just as they later were to attack and try to ignore the 2015 revelations by the Center for Medical Progress of abortionists selling baby-body parts.
“Since the Gosnell case, the evidence continues to pile up — there seems to be a media blackout on anything that makes abortion providers look bad,” they write. Well, it’s not as if that’s any different from the last half-century or so.
Imagine media hating to report that eating poison is bad for you — because, if warned, you’d eat less or no poison. Or refusing to report that drinking straight alcohol could kill you, because you might not drink it.
It just can’t seem to make sense that if something is so awful, major media want the evil to continue and increase by their covering up for it, decade after decade. That will be an interesting story they’ll have to tell when the Big Editor in the sky calls them into His office for an explanation.
I wouldn’t want to be a fly on that wall.
