Tag: Kermit Gosnell

Is there a bigger story behind this?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters3 Comments

What “an open, honest and under-oath detailed description of what goes on during state-of-the-art legal abortion” revealed in the Kermit Gosnell trial in Pensylvania, but which no Irish news outlet has ever printed or broadcast, is openly spelled out in the pages of the pro-abortion Irish Times today.

That story, in the Irish context, may be even more significant than the abortion story itself. Has the editor of the Irish Times cracked the stranglehold which his pro-abortion staff have held the paper in for more than a decade? Might we now get other media to follow suit and give the Irish people the honest discussion on this issue which they have been denied to date?

The article comes from two journalists, a husband and wife film-making team based in Los Angeles. They are  Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney and write of their experiences watching the trial of Gosnell. This was a trial ignored by Irish media – and a good deal of international media as well – because it did not flow with the politically correct current which sweeps our media along its biased way.

In their article they tell us that it was not primarily the crimes of Gosnell which shocked anyone who spent time at the trial. It was the evidence from legitimate abortion providers describing to the court what their daily practices involved.

It was the industrial scale of the abortion industry that shocked the jury and spectators who gasped (the only time during a horrific trial) when Dr Charles Benjamin matter of factly stated he had performed over 40,000 abortions. They write:

We were always fairly disinterested in abortion. And by “disinterested” we mean we never thought much about it but, when we did, believed it was an unfortunate but probably necessary part of modern life.

And as such we would have agreed with those who have called in The Irish Times and elsewhere for more honesty and openness about abortion in the belief it would lead to a more liberal abortion regime in Ireland.

However, our recent experience would suggest that campaigners might want to rethink this strategy if they want Irish people to support a campaign to repeal the eighth amendment. .

We are making a movie and writing a book about Dr Kermit Gosnell – described by ABC News as “America’s biggest serial killer”. Gosnell was a Pennsylvania abortion doctor who performed illegal abortions past the state’s 24-week limit. His abortion “technique” was to have the babies born alive and then to stab them to death with scissors.

His case led many people, investigators, lawyers and jury members to hear for the first time the reality of abortion, illegal and legal, and how it affected them might surprise those calling for more honesty surrounding the procedure.

A pro-choice prosecutor told us how she and her female co-worker were amazed that the legal limit in Pennsylvania was 24 weeks: “That’s six months” she remembers blurting out as they read the statue for the first time. Then they discovered that PA wasn’t an outlier.

In several US states you can have, and people do have, abortions up to the day of delivery.

But the evidence that shocked the most was the evidence that was supposed to reassure the most.

To highlight Gosnell’s illegality, prosecutors decided the jury should hear from “good abortionists”.

In other words just what those campaigning to repeal the eighth amendment to the constitution are demanding – an open, honest and under-oath detailed description of what goes on during state-of-the-art legal abortion.

It was the industrial scale of the abortion industry that shocked the jury first. They gasped (the only time during a horrific trial) when Dr Charles Benjamin matter of factly stated he had performed over 40,000 abortions.

An arm or a leg

Dr Karen Feisullin was also called to describe what a legal abortion looked like. The jury and many in the courtroom shifted uncomfortably as they heard about “tools going up into the uterus and basically pulling parts out . . . an arm or a leg or some portion of that”.

And those were the easy, early abortions. For later procedures, Dr Feisullin explained the foetus was so well-formed that it couldn’t be ripped apart in the uterus. It was normally removed – through the birth canal – completely intact. But, as Feisullin explained, a baby born at 23 weeks has a 40-50 per cent chance of surviving. To avoid a live baby coming out during an abortion, the doctor demonstrated how, before the abortion, a poison – potassium chloride – was injected through the woman’s stomach directly into the baby’s heart. This would stop the heartbeat, allowing the foetus to be pulled out intact.

Dr Feisullin was asked what would happen if she missed the heart and the baby was born alive.

She explained that the live baby would be covered with a blanket and given “comfort care”.

You could see the genuine puzzlement of people in the court about what “comfort care” was until Dr Feisullin cleared up any confusion.

“You . . . really just keep it warm, you know. It will eventually pass,” she said.

Steve Volk, a Philadelphia-based journalist for an alternative newspaper who described himself as comfortably pro-choice before the trail, said that, as Dr Feisullin spoke, his fellow reporters all checked if they had heard correctly.

Dehydration and neglect

Was it really standard medical practice to let a baby die of dehydration and neglect if an error was made during an abortion? It was and they were shocked.

Local journalist JD Mullane, who interviewed many of the key players, confirmed our research that the trial changed many minds and shook assumptions.

“Almost everyone . . . who spent significant time at the Gosnell trial was less pro-choice at the end. This change was probably because they were for the first time hearing about the reality of abortion from experts under oath . . .

“They had to tell the truth and they had to tell it in detail,” he said.

Out of the shadows

Those seeking to remove the constitution ban on abortion believe the best way to do it is to bring it out of the shadows in the hope that when people hear the details, they will support the liberalisation of abortion in Ireland.

Two years ago, we might have agreed with them.

But our experience of the Gosnell case is that anyone who has learned more about the reality of abortion – the pullings apart of the foetus, the injecting of poison into the heart, the “comfort care” – has come away with only negative feelings about the procedure.

It may be a case of be careful what you wish for.

It is “a debate about the humanity of the unborn child”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

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If only Eamon Gilmore, Enda Kenny and company would acknowledge some of these facts and their relevance to the treachrous path they are trying to lead Ireland along.

The New York Times reports on the Gosnell trial summing up:

PHILADELPHIA — They are known as Baby Boy A, Baby C, Baby D and Baby E, all of whom prosecutors call murdered children and the defense calls aborted fetuses — the very difference in language encapsulating why anti-abortion advocates are so passionate about drawing attention to the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, which wrapped up here on Monday with summations by both sides.
To anti-abortion leaders, the accounts have the power to break through decades of hardened positions in the abortion wars, not just because of the graphic details but because they raise the philosophical issue of why an abortion procedure performed in utero is legal, but a similar act a few minutes later, outside the womb, is considered homicide.
The distinction “is maybe a 15-minute or half-hour time frame and 10 inches of physical space,” said Michael Geer, the president of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, an anti-abortion group. “I think it’s going to resurrect a debate about the humanity of the unborn child.”

The most lethal euphemism of all?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Is this the most lethal euphemism of all? We have had ethnic “cleansing”, a clinical-sounding term for numerous and variously bloody instances of forced migration. We have had “cultural revolution” for mindless communist barbarities. We have even the benign-sounding term “re-education” veiling the gulags of soviet Russia. There was, of course – until now – the daddy of them all: the “final solution” covering the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.

But how about “planned parenthood”? We are fast reaching a stage where that very term, suggesting an acute sense of responsibility and connected with the most elemental and sublime of all human experiences, must send a shiver through us. But despite the horrendous evidence from the Gosnell trial in Philadephia, illustrating just the tip of the iceberg of human depravity which the abortion industry represents, and industry which is itself the very flagship of Planned Parenthood, we have the leader of the “free” world championing this “cause”.

This industrial health-service complex – which has nothing to do with health and less to do with service –  has accounted for the deaths of millions and millions of human beings, children and women, across the world in the past 50 years. You can take any approach to statistics you like and the figures will still come out showing that this is the single greatest human disaster that the world has ever seen. Don’t get distracted by the statistics but just for the record, one source cites

approximately 42 million abortions occurring every year worldwide. The same source calculates that abortion killed 73 times more Americans than died in battle in their last 12 wars combined.

There seems to be little doubt that the local Planned Parenthood group had been aware of complaints about what Dr. Gosnell was up to but did not intervene. The Philadelphia Daily News quoted the local group’s leader as saying that women had complained to the group about conditions at Dr. Gosnell’s clinic, and that the group would encourage them to report their complaints to the health department. That’s responsibility?

In the context of Obama’s shameless support for Planned Parenthood, show most recently by his going out of his way to celebrate with them last week, Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion group said: “President Obama blatantly ignored this inconvenient truth about the abortion industry’s horrific lack of oversight and disparaged the pro-life advocates who wake up each morning with the goal of saving the lives of unborn children and women from the pain of abortion,” said.

Mr. Obama at the dinner last week ignored the Gosnell case but condemned lawmakers who have targeted Planned Parenthood. “When politicians try to turn Planned Parenthood into a punching bag, they’re not just talking about you, they’re talking about the millions of women who you serve,” he told the group’s gathering, at a Washington hotel. “And when they talk about cutting off your funding, let’s be clear they’re talking about telling many of those women you’re on your own.”

He pledged his loyalty to the group. “You’ve also got a president,” he said, “who’s going to be right here with you fighting every step of the way.” Now they are chilling words.

Matt Barber in his TownHall.com column pulls no punches when he confronts these horrors.

 I mean, why are we surprised that an abortionist and his staff would, behind the walls of an always-lethal abortion clinic, commit one of the most horrific serial killings in American history? What did you think abortionists do, heal people?

 Why are we taken aback that there was no oversight, no regulation, or that Planned Parenthood, though privy to the clinic’s filthy, medieval conditions, refused to report it to the Department of Health? After all, Planned Parenthood, Barack Obama and the DNC have vehemently opposed all laws – such as those in Virginia, Mississippi and elsewhere – designed to prevent exactly the same kind of squalid conditions found in Gosnell’s clinic (and others), laws that simply direct abortion mills to meet the same minimal safety standards required of all other medical facilities.

 You didn’t really buy that whole “women’s health” nonsense, did you?

 We live in bewildering times. The President of the United States won his second term by a slender enough margin of the popular vote. But he is not just the President of the United States. He is the most powerful man in the world and for the old West he is effectively the unelected primus inter not-so-pares. As we were reminded during his last election campaign, had the peoples of Europe had a vote in  that election he would have won by a landslide.  Frightening.