By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Although it may seem hard to believe that an abortionist like Philadelphia’s Kermit Gosnell was free to wreak medical havoc for decades, a Phoenix physician told The Wanderer that Gosnell’s impunity had a certain perverse logic to it, as illustrated in the recently released “house of horrors” movie Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer.
It shows officialdom scared of challenging an abortionist and brushing aside complaints from people he victimized.
Speaking generally, James Asher, D.O., said by e-mail, “If there are complaints, then the medical board gets involved along with whomever else might have an interest. I would guess medical boards are quite fearful of media coverage if they get involved with an abortion clinic — feminism, women’s rights, etc.”
Indeed, the movie, reflecting the public record, shows a Pennsylvania government worker testifying in court that there were “instructions, directly from Gov. Ridge’s office, not to inspect” Gosnell’s clinic.
Tom Ridge was a pro-abortion Pennsylvania Republican politician whose views fortunately didn’t prevail throughout the GOP.
Asher, board-certified in family medicine, worked in a variety of settings, both rural and metropolitan, including primary care, emergency departments, prison, military, and the Indian Health Service.
Although retired from that practice, Asher’s activities include involvement with a medical program for low-income people, a crisis-pregnancy center, the Catholic Medical Association of Phoenix, and teaching catechism to fourth graders at his parish.
He recalled that in the push to legalize permissive abortion in the U.S. a half-century ago, pro-abortionists used “fake hullabaloo and made-up statistics over women suffering and dying at the hands of ‘back alley’ abortionists.”
But, he added, when Gosnell showed that his “back alley” clinic continued to thrive alongside legalization, abortion defenders went to great lengths “to protect even a person like Gosnell. Hard to imagine even the most egregious ‘back alley’ abortionist having such an unsanitary, nasty place of business — even they know about soap and water.”
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court way back in 1973 having attempted to make permissive abortion “respectable,” people still treat it as undesirable.
Abortionists “are not sued because to do so would be to make public who had the abortion,” Asher said. “No one wants their name — or the name of their wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter, friend — in the paper as having had an abortion. For the same reason, no one ever dies of complications of an abortion — there almost certainly will be something else on the records including the death certificate.
“Any kind of attack on an abortionist is an attack on women’s rights, and no one — especially the media — wants to do that,” he added. “And, of course, people such as prosecuting attorneys — as shown in the movie — are very sensitive about what the media will say about them. Abortionists are not compassionate people, they are monsters.”
Asher mentioned the movie’s character of “Dr. North,” an abortionist brought to the stand to testify about correct abortion procedures.
“Even that very nicely dressed/made-up lady ob-gyn who testified that she had done 30,000 abortions — presented as so clean and clinical — but 30,000 lives? Indeed. Doctors who make their living as abortionists are regarded as pariahs by much of the medical profession,” Asher said. “They are not highly regarded by anyone including patients, staff, or colleagues.
“For these and other reasons easily inferred, they tend to be miserable people (which made Gosnell’s apparent comfort level with himself and his world all the more curious, perhaps even diabolical),” he said. “They often treat patients, with whom they have no real doctor-patient relationship, badly, and often tend to show their contempt for them and for all women.”
The Dr. North character testified that she didn’t have any cases where babies had survived abortion. But, questioned about that possibility by Gosnell’s defense attorney, she said such a survivor would be given “comfort care,” a euphemism for being set aside to die.
When Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator, Asher recalled, he voted to deny medical care to abortion survivors. “Which brings to mind an objection that some might have: surely it was kinder of Gosnell to snip a spinal cord than merely let the baby die slowly and painfully of natural causes,” Asher said. “Well, killing is killing, as is allowing to die when lifesaving means could be employed.”
Asher also recalled the warning by recently canonized Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae about the sexual revolution starting to exert its ill effects.
Calling on that Pope’s words, Asher said, “Who expected such enthusiastic cooperation from women in their own abolition of the reverence due them, their own physical and emotional equilibrium, and their being made mere instruments for the satisfaction of men’s desires, no longer considering themselves as partners due care and affection?”
Bringing the Gosnell movie to the public was a years-long effort because powerful pro-abortionists didn’t want anyone — themselves or others — having to confront the horrors wrought through massive permissive abortion, in order that the horrors can continue.
An item posted August 15 at the trade journal Hollywood Reporter said: “Gosnell, in fact, indicts not only the doctor but also government officials, the legal system and the media for ignoring what the filmmakers say was a pretty sensational trial in 2013. The trailer shows an empty press gallery based on a photo at the time where about a dozen ‘reserved media’ signs stretch across courtroom benches where no one was sitting.”
The film was in a limited number of theaters for only a week after its October 12 national opening before it began to be pulled from some of them, despite its good financial showing.
Noting this censorship, blogger Matt Walsh posted at The Daily Wire site on October 22 under the headline, “Why the Left Is Terrified of Gosnell.”
Walsh pointed out that Gosnell’s job was any abortionist’s job. “Sure, he kept the corpses in buckets and jars rather than throwing them in a dumpster out back like any self-respecting abortion (sic) would. But so what? Abortionists kill infants. That’s their job. Every abortionist does it. . . .
“A moment’s thought about the Gosnell case is all it takes to send a rational person down this rabbit hole,” Walsh continued. “So, the Left is determined that you do not give it a moment’s thought. And each leftist individually is determined not to give it a moment’s thought themselves.
“The pro-abortion position requires an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance,” he said. “Every day becomes a minefield which must be deftly navigated. One wrong move and your whole ludicrous political and moral philosophy will be blown to smithereens.”
And commentator John Waters posted at the First Things site on September 21: “Gosnell confronts the lie of gestation limits and the sleight-of-hand that allows people who call themselves liberal to cheer the mass slaughter of the innocents. It throws down a gauntlet to the world, challenging the most unconscionable ‘medical’ phenomenon of our age on the fault line of its limitless institutionalized hypocrisy.
“Frame by frame it tears apart everything America has told itself and the world about abortion. This movie about a case that was ‘not about abortion’ turns that case into a trial of the crime that abortion is, and the duplicity and avoidance that is essential to keep it happening,” Waters said.
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