Silence is Deafening: Major Media AWOL on Grisly Abortion Trial

Court-sketch-Baby-A-Gosnell-trialDr. Kermit Gosnell, who ran a multi-million dollar abortion business in West Philadelphia, is on trial in Philadelphia charged with eight counts of murder.  One third-degree murder charge is related to the botched abortion death of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, who died at Gosnell’s abortion clinic after a failed abortion.  The remaining seven counts of first-degree murder involve infants born alive during illegal late-term abortions and killed with scissors.

Horrific testimony in the trial over the last couple of weeks has revealed tales of the abortionist and his workers at Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society clinic allegedly snipping fetuses’ spines with scissors to “ensure fetal demise,” jars of terminated babies’ feet that Gosnell allegedly kept at the clinic, and a baby “screeching … like a little alien” during a so-called live-birth abortion procedure allegedly performed at the clinic.

Delivering one of the most memorable and bone-chilling lines of the trial, ex-clinic employee Stephen Massof said, “It would rain fetuses.”

While he’s only charged with killing seven live babies, prosecutors believe Gosnell killed hundreds of infants and destroyed related records, according to a graphic 281-page grand jury report.  Gosnell — who wasn’t licensed to practice obstetrics and gynecology — illegally peddled pain killers during the day and murdered babies at night, according to the report.

“(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,” asserted the grand jury.

The report exposes how state officials did relatively little to inspect abortion centers, how the abortion industry covered up the Gosnell situation, and how women were injured by abortions performed at the shoddy abortion clinic with little regard for their health or welfare.  His clinic hadn’t been inspected since 1993 – that’s when Philadelphia officials stopped inspecting abortion facilities so women wouldn’t face extra barriers when getting abortions.  According to the report [emphasis added]:

The Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions.

The report relates the story of one woman who was left lying in place for hours after Gosnell tore her cervix and colon while trying, unsuccessfully, to extract the baby.  Relatives who came to pick her up were refused entry into the building; they had to threaten to call the police. They eventually found her inside, bleeding and incoherent, and transported her to the hospital, where doctors had to remove almost half a foot of her intestines.

On another occasion, Gosnell simply sent a patient home, after keeping her mother waiting for hours, without telling either of them that she still had fetal parts inside her.  Gosnell insisted she was fine, even after signs of serious infection set in over the next several days.  By the time her mother got her to the emergency room, she was unconscious and near death.

A nineteen-year-old girl was held for several hours after Gosnell punctured her uterus.  As a result of the delay, she fell into shock from blood loss, and had to undergo a hysterectomy.

One patient went into convulsions during an abortion, fell off the procedure table, and hit her head on the floor.  Gosnell wouldn’t call an ambulance and wouldn’t let the woman’s companion leave the building so that he could call an ambulance.

Gosnell allegedly trained his employees to cut the necks of the babies he aborted to sever their spinal cords, both Ashley Baldwin and Lynda Williams, former employees, testified.

One day, Williams testified, a woman expelled a baby into the toilet and she saw the baby’s arm moving. Williams said she took a pair of scissors and snipped the spine as Gosnell showed her. I did it once and I didn’t do it again because it gave me the creeps,” Williams said.  Questioned by Gosnell’s lawyer Jack McMahon, Williams testified that Gosnell had reassured her that the movement she saw was “involuntary movement, a last breath” and that abortion drugs had already doomed the fetus.  Although expert witnesses testified there was no medical reason for Gosnell to cut the spines of aborted fetuses, Williams said Gosnell told her it was to “ensure fetal demise.”

And this is just a snapshot of the heartbreaking stories that the trial has brought to light.

For his part, Gosnell doesn’t seem too broken up about his dubbed “house of horrors.” He apparently used to joke about the large size of some the infants he aborted and in one case, according to what a co-worker told the grand jury, said, “This baby is big enough to walk around with me or walk me to the bus stop.”

Despite this overwhelming preponderance of damning evidence, Gosnell’s attorney McMahon has told the jurors, “This is a targeted, elitist and racist prosecution of a doctor who’s done nothing but give [back] to the poor and the people of West Philadelphia.”

Really?

If there was any iota of truth to that nonsensical assertion, one would think the media would be jumping all over this story.  After all, the media herald themselves as the champions of the minorities, the poor, the downtrodden, not to mention women.  So why the silence?  Gosnell was arrested on January 19, 2011, and his trial started Monday, March 18, 2013, so they had ample time to get the facts out there and get reporters to the scene.  But they have steadfastly remained silent (and thus complicit), and the silence has become deafening.

The old adage in the news industry used to be, “If it bleeds, it leads.”  Now, it doesn’t even get coverage.  (Just look at Benghazi.)

Brent Bozell’s media watchdog site NewsBusters.org has been covering this lack of attention in some depth, and it reported Tuesday that not one second was spent covering the Gosnell trial, but by comparison, the major three networks dedicated a total of 41 minutes and 26 seconds of airtime to 36 stories on the scandal surrounding disgraced Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice.

The decision by major news networks to effectively “black out” the Gosnell abortion trial led a coalition of 20 conservative leaders to join with Media Research Center founder and NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell last week to demand that “the broadcast networks stop censoring coverage of the trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell and the testimony of the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates in favor of murdering children who survive botched abortions.”

The call by the conservative leaders for the networks to stop ignoring the story went on to point out that as of Tuesday, ABC, CBS, and NBC had not mentioned Gosnell since he was arrested in January 2011, that even the arrest was only covered by CBS, whereas all three networks have covered new abortion-restricting laws in North Dakota and Arkansas.

Why not cover that Pennsylvania has a Safe Haven law that allows parents to relinquish newborns up to 28 days old at any hospital in the state of Pennsylvania without the fear of criminal prosecution as long as the baby has not been harmed?  Just a thought.

Cheryl Sullenger’s article gives credence to the idea that Gosnell’s “house of horrors” is fast becoming the rule, not the exception.  Despite rationale that Roe v. Wade would make abortions “safe, legal, and rare,” LifeDynamics.com compiled a list of 347 women killed by legal abortions since 1973, and countless others have been traumatically and unalterably affected in nonfatal ways.

One popular saying goes, “Kill a pregnant woman, it’s called double murder.  Have an abortion, it’s called pro-choice.  It doesn’t make sense.”

No, it doesn’t.

One of the true crusaders for women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said it best: “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”

Lord, have mercy on us.

Written by Elizabeth Hermesch

Ann-Marie Murrell

Ann-Marie Murrell is one of the creators of PolitiChicks and co-owns the site with Morgan Brittany. Ann-Marie is co-author of two bestselling books, “What Women (Really) Want” and "PolitiChicks: A Clarion Call to Political Activism". She has appeared on dozens of television shows including Fox & Friends, CNN, Hannity, the Dr. Phil Show, Huckabee, Lou Dobbs, C-SPAN, One America News, Stuart Varney & Company, Newsmax, MSNBC, and more. In addition to PolitiChicks, Ann-Marie has written for multiple other news sites. You can find Ann-Marie Murrell on Facebook and Twitter: @PolitichickAM E-mail: thepolitichicks@gmail.com

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