Abortion horror in PA

Remove all ads!

Reader warning. Do not read if you are squeamish.

From Yahoo

Spoiler

PHILADELPHIA – A doctor who provided abortions for minorities, immigrants and poor women in a "house of horrors" clinic has been charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive and then killed with scissors, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, made millions of dollars over 30 years, performing as many illegal, late-term abortions as he could, prosecutors said. State regulators ignored complaints about him and failed to inspect his clinic since 1993, but no charges were warranted against them given time limits and existing law, District Attorney Seth Williams said. Nine of Gosnell's employees also were charged.

Gosnell "induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord," Williams said.

Patients were subjected to squalid and barbaric conditions at Gosnell's Women's Medical Society, where Gosnell performed dozens of abortions a day, prosecutors said. He mostly worked overnight hours after his untrained staff administered drugs to induce labor during the day, they said.

Early last year, authorities went to investigate drug-related complaints at the clinic and stumbled on what Williams called a "house of horrors."

Bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses "were scattered throughout the building," Williams said. "There were jars, lining shelves, with severed feet that he kept for no medical purpose."

The clinic was shut down and Gosnell's medical license was suspended after the raid.

Gosnell and four workers were charged with murder, while five others were charged with controlled drug violations and other crimes. None of the employees had any medical training, and one, a high school student, performed intravenous anesthesia with potentially lethal narcotics, Williams said.

All 10 defendants were taken into custody, authorities said.

Two listed numbers for Gosnell in Philadelphia have been disconnected. Defense lawyer William J. Brennan, who represented Gosnell during the investigation, noted that the doctor served patients in a low-income city neighborhood for decades.

"Obviously, these allegations are very, very serious," Brennan said.

The grand jury said the woman who died was a patient who came to Gosnell's clinic for an abortion and died of cardiac arrest because she was given too much Demerol. Gosnell wasn't at the clinic at the time, but directed his staff to administer the drug to keep the woman, a healthy 41-year-old woman, sedated until he arrived, prosecutors said.

Gosnell has been named in at least 46 malpractice suits, including one over the death of a 22-year-old mother who died of sepsis and a perforated uterus in 2000. Many others also involve perforated uteruses. Gosnell sometimes sewed up the injury without telling women their uteruses had been perforated, prosecutors said.

Gosnell charged $325 for first-trimester abortions and $1,600 to $3,000 for abortions up to 30 weeks. Abortions are legal up to 24 weeks gestation in Pennsylvania, although most doctors won't perform them after 20 weeks, prosecutors said.

Some women came from across the mid-Atlantic for the illegal late-term abortions, authorities said. White women from the suburbs were ushered into a separate, slightly cleaner area because Gosnell believed they were more likely to file complaints, Williams said.

"People knew near and far that if you needed a late-term abortion you could go see Dr. Gosnell," Williams said.

Few if any of the sedated women knew their babies were born alive and then killed, prosecutors said. Many were first-time mothers who were told they were 24 weeks pregnant, even if they were further along, authorities said.

Gosnell got his medical degree from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and is board certified in family practice. He started, but did not finish, a residency in obstetrics-gynecology, authorities said.

"He does not know how to do an abortion. He's not board certified," Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore said. "Once he got them there, he saw dollar signs and did abortions that other people wouldn't do."

I am very pro-choice as I subscribe to theory that I don't like it when anyone else tells me what to do, so what right do I have to tell someone else what to do. However, this guy is going to set the pro-choice movement back by decades. When the pro-life people start to find out they are going to go ballistic.

 

I think that if I met him I would kill him.

I'm totally serious. I would kill him

 

He didnt perform abortions did he? He was convicted of murder so he murdered people. It can also hit the anti-choice movement as these are the kinds of places that would become much more common if abortion was banned.

 

He murdered children. I KNOW a baby can be born and survive at 7 months. They weren't foetus's, they were children

 

That's exactly right.

 

Death is too good for some people.

 

Ving Rhames character Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction: "I'ma call a coupla hard, pipe-hittin' niggers, who'll go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. You hear me talkin', hillbilly boy? I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'ma get medieval on your ass." Twould be fittin methinks.

 

As I'm sure you all know, I'm staunchly pro-life, with only one exception. Still, I publicly admit that this guy is not at all representative of the pro-choice movement in general. I don't honestly think the actual action is all that different (i.e killing a viable child vs killing a foetus that hasn't yet developed to that point), but at least what they do is sanitary and designed to protect the mothers.

And they don't keep bodyparts scattered about the office. *shudder*

 

This is going to re-ignite the discussion in America, and not in a unifying way.

 

I'm not so convinced of this. A substantial majority of Americans believe that abortion should be safe and legal in the first trimester, before the fetus is viable -- even if they aren't themselves comfortable with the idea of abortion. A vast majority believe that abortion should not be legal in the third trimester. The real debate is about what to do in the second trimester, that gray area where viability is less certain, and I doubt this is going to alter the substance of that debate in any meaningful way. It might get more shrill for a while, but that debate occurs so far beyond the margins of public opinion (pro-lifers attacking the morning after pill; pro-choicers defending partial birth abortion) that little to no real change in the abortion law is ever on the table.

I think I'm going to throw up. Sick bastards like him and his staff make me think about re-considering the death penalty. What really bothers me, though, is that it isn't just him or his staff. If there weren't people seeking late-term abortions (excepting of course those rare instances when the abortion is precipitated by a legitimate medical need), men like him wouldn't be able to ply their trade. What makes a woman carrying a healthy, viable 26+ week fetus and seeking abortion without any sound medical need any different from this doctor?

 

Desperation I think.

 

I don't really think so. I fail to see any measurable difference between delivering a viable child and then killing it as opposed to killing a viable child before delivering it. If I kill someone out of desperation, he's still dead -- and probably doesn't give a rat's ass about whether I killed him out of malice, desperation, or ignorance. The end result doesn't change.

 

I didn't say it excused it, it's just a theory on why these women went there

 

The other possibility is cost. The article did mention he preyed on the poor and underpriviledged. Maybe these women couldn't afford anything else, and he would only work once inducing birth was an option? Or, maybe, some of the women are just as much monsters as him and his staff. I won't rule that one out, either.

 

The man is a quack with a degree, and he had a staff of incompetent quacks without degrees. More than the outrages he committed, what about the outrage that he was able to do for so long so despite the significant number (how many, 55?) of malpractice lawsuits against him? Why didn't the medical professional associations didn't revoke his license? This is not just him, but a blatant lack of professional oversight.

The only reason why he probably was able to get away with this for so long was because he preyed on the underprivileged and poor who wouldn't sue him, or couldn't afford to sue him or didn't know what to do or who didn't even know that they were even entitled to compensation. And then of course there are the women wanting illegal late abortions for whatever reason; they sure weren't to report him to the authorities having comitted criminal offences themselves.

Considering the mayhem he caused to his patients and the obvious need for compensation in such cases, which can only be monetary - you have conservatives traditionally crying bloody murder over malpractice lawsuits, denouncing attorneys as ambulance chasers. Now what about his victims? Who is going to compensate them? Since the doctor is not going to do it voluntarily a lawsuit is the only way. Medical malpractice lawyers are the only help these women can get after the misfortune of running into a quack like this. Sobering.

Outrages like this will be the norm after a complete ban on abortions.

 

I really don't think so. What this guy did was illegal. Sure, late term abortion in and of itself is a criminal offense, but because these were viable babies, he's being charged with murder.

Pennsylvania has the death penalty, and so if he's convicted of multiple counts of murder, chances are he will be put to death for his actions. (If he lives long enough - the guy is already 69, and it's not uncommon for about 10 years to pass once all the appeals are heard before someone is actually put to death. At the very least, he'll never leave the prison alive though.) The minimum penalty for murder in PA is life in prison, with no possibility of parole for at least 25 years. Again, since he's 69, even at the minimum of 25 years, it's likely a life sentence.

So what, exactly, would the pro-life people be asking for? To outlaw that which is already illegal? The guy is either going to be put to death or imprisoned for life. He will be severely punished for his actions. I'm pro-choice, but I don't support the killing of viable fetuses, and neither does almost all pro-choice people. This isn't going to re-ignite the debate because there is no debate - virtually everyone already agrees that this guy's actions were criminal.

Conservatives do not denounce ALL malpractice lawsuits. They oppose those in which the compensation seems far in excess of the harm done. This is especially true in Pennsylvania, as there is no legal limit of how much you can sue a doctor for irrespective of the injury.

I have probably related this story before, but I will do so again: My brother is a doctor in the ER, and one of his fellow doctors treated a woman who came in with respiratory distress and a severe cough. They took a chest X-ray, and when nothing noteworthy showed up, they figured she had the flu, gave her a presription and sent her on her way.

Two days later she shows up at the ER again, and this time she has full blown pneumonia, which she likely was in the early stages of developing when she was there two days earlier. She ended up spending the next two weeks hospitalized, and after she got out, she sued the hospital for $1.2 million (don't know how she came up with that number) and won.

Even though my brother was not the attending physician he would state two things about the case. 1.) Given that the chest X-ray came back normal, the doctor's diagnosis of the flu as opposed to pneumonia is reasonable. The most common way to check for pneumonia is via a chest X-ray. 2.) Despite the mitigating factors involved, the hospital and doctor screwed up and this woman is entitled to some form of compensation - but not $1.2 million.

My brother concedes that spending two weeks in the hospital sucks balls. He can understand that the pain and suffering endured should be worth a considerable amount - probably on the order of tens of thousands of dollars. If the woman asked for a year's salary in settlement - say something around $50,000 - the hospital probably would have settled out of court.

The point is this - even doctors agree that there should be malpractice lawsuits and compensation for victims should be commensurate with the seriousness of the harm caused to them. And in this case, it should be a hell of a lot.

 

Sounds like the state of PA kind of dropped the ball here. Restaurants get inspected regularly to ensure health standards are being met, but not abortion clinics?

 

Aldeth,
one of the things is that the US has this weird instrument of punitive damages, which, as I understand, in particular in the hands of a jury can get seriously out of hand. If the jury feels the sued party was an a**hole, they will want to punish them. I read that it allows to set the damages to thirty times the damage caused, to teach'em. That was so in iirc a case against BMW, where the damages because of some defect at a car were $ 1000, and the punitive damages awarded thirty times that because somebody found BMW was behaving badly. Preposterous. In Germany the idea is 'natural restitution'; i.e. the creation of the situation before the damaging event. The person would have gotten his $ 1000 (in fact, he has the choice to have his car fixed, or to get the money) and that's it.

That means in the US the suing party has an interest in demonizing the sued party - and the result is in all likelihood a mud fest, with a clear incentive for escalation. The US system is actually discouraging settlements, because with the possibility of awarded punitive damages lawsuits offer to yield significantly more in damages.

But that hasn't to do with compensations in malpractice lawsuits per se but with apparently systemic problems in the US legal system. I see these problems mainly in the aforementioned instruments of (a) quota litis agreements (in which the attorney gets a share of the damages, say a quarter or third, at times working for free (and suing at no cost risk for the party represented), which gives an incentive to drive up compensations; this is considered unethical in Europe) and (b) in the punitive damages.

I have yet to hear conservatives to call for the abolition of punitive damages or quota litis agreements. All they propose is a cap on compensation. There may be cases in which that is just unfair. We have solved that in Germany by lists maintained by courts based on jurisdiction that suggests compensation based on injury and care requirements in case of a debilitating injury. These lists are recommendations, and not binding and courts can and do adjust based on the individual cases. But then, we try such cases by panels of specialised professional judges. Professional judges are far less easily impressed than laymen.