Doctor Is Charged in Killing of Newborns
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: January 19, 2011
An abortion doctor who served minority and immigrant women in his clinic in Philadelphia was charged with multiple counts of murder on Wednesday in the deaths of a woman and seven newborn babies whose spinal cords had been cut with scissors, the district attorney’s office said.
Matt Rourke/Associated Press
Prosecutors called Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s clinic “a baby charnel house.”
Prosecutors charged Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, with eight counts of murder in the deaths of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, a refugee from Nepal, who received high doses of anesthetic for an illegal late-term abortion performed in 2009 and of seven infants who were born, killed and then disposed of in Dr. Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic, the Women’s Medical Society.
Prosecutors laid out their case in a 281-page grand jury document that read like a grisly script. Plastic bags and mineral water bottles holding aborted fetuses were found stashed in Dr. Gosnell’s clinic. Jars containing the severed feet of babies lined a shelf, the Philadelphia district attorney, Seth Williams, said in a statement.
Dr. Gosnell, a family practitioner who was not certified in obstetrics, performed late-term abortions, after 24 weeks, which are illegal, and employed staff members who were not trained medical professionals, including a teenage girl, prosecutors said. Nine of his employees were also charged.
“It is very important to remember that Dr. Gosnell is presumed innocent,” a lawyer for Dr. Gosnell, William J. Brennan, said. “I would hope there is not a rush to judgment and that he has an opportunity to review this very lengthy charging document.”
In the grand jury document, prosecutors called Dr. Gosnell’s clinic “a baby charnel house,” riddled with fetal remains and reeking of cat urine, with furniture and blankets stained with blood. Medical equipment was broken and supplies were reused.
“The real business of the ‘Women’s Medical Society’ was not health, it was profit,” the document stated. It detailed a practice of selling prescription painkillers during the day, and at night, performing abortions for cash for women who could not get them elsewhere because they were too pregnant.
When labor was induced and a baby was born, Dr. Gosnell would kill it by cutting into its neck and severing its spinal cord in a process he referred to as “snipping.” In one case involving a 17-year-old who was 30 weeks pregnant, prosecutors said that Dr. Gosnell induced labor, severed the baby’s spine and put the body in a shoe box. “The doctor joked that the baby was so big, ‘he could walk me to the bus stop,’ ” the document said.
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