In what has been called a “watershed moment” for the life movement, the Kermit Gosnell murder trial has wrapped the attention of concerned pro-lifers and reluctant pro-aborts alike. Kermit Gosnell’s jury is currently out deliberating the multitude of evidence and testimony incriminating the abortionist on multiple murder charges, both of babies born alive after failed abortions, and women who died as a result of the physician’s negligence. Below are a few snapshots of the trial and what led up to it, testimonies of former Gosnell patients, and a glimpse into the mind of the deranged man who is Kermit Gosnell.
Seth Williams, Philadelphia District Attorney:
What [authorities executing a search warrant of the Gosnell facility] discovered… was blood-stained walls, blood-stained beds, and unclean sheets. They found jar after jar after jar filled with fetal remains, and specifically severed feet in jars. They found medical waste bags just strewn everywhere. What they learned was that he was running an abortion clinic, for the most part a late-term abortion clinic…
Dr. Gosnell even had a separate room in his clinic for the young white women that would come that was slightly less squalid than the rest of the clinic. When asked by his staff why this was, he said well that’s the way of the world. It would be more likely for those women to report what happened and what they saw at the clinic.
Makeda, Former Gosnell Patient:
So when I got pregnant again I went to the clinic and I asked them… “Is it OK that I get, you know, another abortion?” “Fine, fine”. They even like had this woman sit down and she told me that women in Brazil have at least twenty-one abortions, and she’s like, “They’re still able to conceive…” And, that was it for me. That was where I basically said, you know what, this has to be OK. It was the norm for me after she had coached me into believing that that was the norm. I would say the next fourteen years… within that time I had eight abortions. Eight. And I look back at it and it’s like God, what was I thinking? It just seemed like it was OK, it was so OK to go in there and get it done as long as you had the money.
Joseph Slobodzian, Philadelphia Inquirer:
The prosecutors contend that [Kermit Gosnell’s late-term abortion business] made him a millionaire.
Report of the Grand Jury on Kermit Gosnell:
This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.
According to the grand jury report in the case, clinic workers testified that babies often expelled from their mothers into the toilet and that, in at least one instance, the toilet was lifted from the floor to “get the fetuses out of the pipes.”
Davida Clarke, Former Gosnell Patient:
…I got pregnant, and someone told me about this clinic at 3801 Lancaster Avenue. I remember it like it was yesterday. There was a fish tank in the waiting area. Then you had a receptionist that just, like, all she wanted was your money immediately. They came in and they finally called my name, and I went upstairs. And I remember just walking through looking and seeing some women that looked half-dead in these bloody recliner chairs, and blood all over the floor. And I just kept going. I didn’t see him until I was hooked up with IVs and when they put the heart monitor around me, that’s when I decided I can’t do this. And he’s like “Oh, stop being a little baby,” and he’s pounding on my legs, “Stop being a little baby, stop being a little baby!” And now I’m outnumbered, cause all these women came in and I’m like tied to the bed. And the next thing I know, I’m out of it.
I woke up and I was sitting next to another girl. And at first when I woke up I didn’t know where I was. I just knew I was really groggy and I knew I wasn’t pregnant anymore. And I was crying and I kept saying “I want my baby I want my baby,” and they just were ignoring me.
Seth Williams, Philadelphia District Attorney:
Dr. Gosnell had a process that he referred to as “snipping.” Women would come, specific medicines would be given that would induce labor. They would then take scissors and place them at the base of the skull and snip or sever the spinal cords of those children that were born alive.
Ann Ponterio, Assistant District Attorney:
There was one baby that when it was born, one of the workers was playing with it for several minutes before the worker did exactly what Dr. Gosnell did. Snip the back of the neck. And when we use the word snip, it is a scissors taking the bony part of a vertebrae and cutting it. This is a very very painful thing. And some of these babies did not die immediately. And they describe these bodies as twitching and lifeless.
“We call [snipping the spinal cord] a transection, but it’s literally a beheading… [I] felt like a fireman in hell. I couldn’t put out all the fires… I would run around with scissors.”
Randy Hutchins, Former Gosnell staffer:
[T]here was a device that he and [Karman] were working on that was supposed to be plastic – basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. All right. They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, it would then – the gel would melt and these 97 things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus, and the fetus would be expelled.
Kermit Gosnell, in reference to the large size of one of the babies he aborted:
“This baby is going to walk me home!”
