Unless you have been on a summer vacation worthy of the French, you will have heard that executives from Planned Parenthood, an organization funded partially with your tax dollars, were secretly caught on camera since April negotiating the sale of specific fetal tissue parts and intact aborted babies to research labs. These videos have been gradually released over the past few days and show the brutishness of a truly macabre business.
With each new release, I think back to the little shop of horrors operated by Dr. Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia. Gosnell was tried and convicted in 2013 on murder charges for killing women and babies through botched abortions.
If you fail to remember Gosnell, you have good reason. His trial was given little notice by our national press. Their lack of attention was so pronounced that The Atlantic ran a story about the lack of news coverage of Gosnell’s trial.
At the time of his conviction, abortion advocates quickly declared that Gosnell was not representative of abortion providers and that he should be punished. He was pushed off of the abortion bus then thrown under it.
Abortion defenders had good reason to be nervous. A Pennsylvania grand jury indictment described in detail the awfulness of Gosnell’s clinic. When Pennsylvania state authorities raided his clinic in 2010, they expected to find him trafficking illegal prescription drugs. Instead, they found much worse.
The investigators walked into a clinic that smelled of cat urine. The clinic floor was slippery from blood and cat feces. Semi-conscious women waited for procedures in blood soaked recliners. Basic medical and life-saving equipment was outdated, rusty or missing. The staff was untrained and unlicensed. As horrible as this sounds, the worse was yet to come.
Gosnell had stored fetal tissue remains in milk jugs, orange juice cartons and cat food containers. For some still unexplained reason, he had 30 jars containing just the feet of aborted babies. Medical experts testified that Gosnell’s habit of removing the feet was “bizarre and off the wall.” Gosnell claimed that he was keeping them for future paternity questions. The report can be found online but be warned. The gruesome photos and descriptions contained therein make for hard reading.
The report then details the crimes that led to his murder conviction. They found “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.” He was sentenced to life in prison.
After his conviction, I drafted a letter to the Legislative Audit Council requesting them to determine if DHEC was regulating abortion clinics in South Carolina according to state law. Several House members from Greenville County added their names to the letter.
Before requesting the audit, I researched DHEC regulations to determine the exact inspections or reports that are required, then cited each regulation in the letter to make certain that the audit was thorough. The audit results were issued last May – almost two years after my request.
Thankfully, the auditors did not find the deplorable clinic conditions as revealed in the Gosnell case but there are problems. The audit summary lists missed inspections, lack of accurate reporting and failure to provide a way for patients to complain of bad treatment. The comment about our lack of utilizing ultrasounds to their full extent to prevent abortions is most disturbing. The auditors report can be found at www.lac.sc.gov.
The lack of DHEC oversight of South Carolina abortion clinics condemns the mother and unborn child to a shadowy world of potentially unsafe and painful procedures. You can be assured that those of us who requested this audit will take the steps necessary to correct DHEC’s failures in this matter.
Abortion advocates claimed that Gosnell’s practices were extreme and not representative of typical abortion clinics. I suspect that they are correct about one point.
Given the apparent profits available to Planned Parenthood from brokering baby parts, their suppliers would never keep such valuable merchandise in old milk jugs and cat food containers. Since one video captured a Planned Parenthood executive joking about buying a Lamborghini sports car, I suspect their specimens were kept in pristine condition.
Beyond protecting their wares, these abortionists are just buttoned-down versions of Gosnell. They harvest their product one illegal and murderous snip at a time while parsing out the remains to the highest bidder. Their corporate boardroom has replaced the back alley as the preferred place for abortionists to hide the true nature of their tax-subsidized crimes.