Abortion Providers: No Place to Share

Every year, the National Abortion Federation -- sort of an abortion provider's guild, if you will -- gathers for an annual meeting in which they share with one another the trials and triumphs of their business. A recently released video looks at a topic they've brought up before: Nobody understands what it's like to be the person actually doing the abortion. Those who actually do the abortions feel marginalized and shut out even by their own political allies.

"Our stories don't really have a place in a lot of pro choice discourse and rhetoric, right?," laments Dr. Lisa Harris, Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of Michigan, during a panel discussion.

She delves into the details of what her audience clearly appreciates. "The heads that get stuck that we can't get out. The hemorrhages that we manage. You know, those are all parts of our experiences. But there's no real good place for us to share those."

Indeed. Most of us, when we go home to our families and friends, can complain about the difficult day we've had at work. A cashier can share the story of a rude customer. A truck driver can lament about the idiot in a Camaro who cut him off. An attorney can grouse about the troublesome ruling a judge made.

Even people with jobs that tend to be yucky can find time to vent with family and friends. A trash collector might not discuss the maggots over dinner, but he could bring it up with friends on a fishing trip. A surgeon wouldn't bring up a huge tumor at a cocktail party, but she could bring it up over yard work, perhaps.

But under what circumstances could one discuss fishing around inside a woman's body with forceps, trying desperately to pull out a human head?


Dr. Uta Landy, founder of the Consortium of Abortion Providers, relates another experience common to them all, judging from the chuckle it elicits: "An eyeball just fell down into my lap, that that is gross!"

Nobody's going to want to hear at all. Not even people who are adamantly pro choice. Perhaps especially not people who are adamantly pro choice. Loose eyeballs and stuck heads aren't the sort of things one wants to be thinking about when asserting abortion as a mere exercise in bodily rights.

Imagine if you will, a pro choice rally regarding late-term abortion laws. What's being discussed? Women's circumstances. A teenager who put off admitting that she was pregnant. A mom learning that her unborn child has a serious illness or disabililty. A family facing financial hardship.

Imagine that Dr. Ann Schutt-Aine, Director of Abortion Services for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, puts her two cents in. It's tricky to avoid breaking the law against doing "partial birth abortions," defined in the law as pulling the living fetus out feet first past the umbilicus (umbilical cord), and then killing the partially-birn fetus.

She wants to explain how she manages to avoid breaing the law when a live fetus starts to come out whole. "If I'm doing a procedure, and I'm seeing that .... it's about to come to umbilicis, then I might ask for a second set of forceps, hold the body at the cervix, and pull off a leg, or two, so it's not PBA."

Her fellow activists aren't exactly going to gather around her and express their sympathy for how hard it is to stop in the middle of delivering a live baby in order to yank off a limb or two.

Talking about the real flesh-and-blood fetus being dismembered, and the real flesh-and-blood mother hemorrhaging on the abortion table, tends to turn people off of the whole idea of abortion.

Tends to.

Talcott Camp, Deputy Director of the ACLU Reproductive Health Freedom Project evidenly found the NAF event eye-opening but not off-putting.

"I'm like -- Oh my God! I get it! When the skull is broken, that's really sharp! I get it! I understand why people are talking about getting that skull out, that calvarium."

And at some level, Dr. Lisa Harris hopes that there are lots of folks out there like Ms. Camp, who can hear the gory details and still retain an enthusiasm for the abortion-rights cause.

"Given that we actually see the fetus the same way," Dr. Harris says, "and given that we might actually both agree that there's violence in here, ask me why I come to work every day. Let's just give them all the violence, it's a person, it's killing. Let's just give them all that."

She speaks with the confidence that comes from believing that the violence is justified. No doubt her fellows at the NAF meeting agree with her that the violence of abortion is justified. If they weren't able to convince themselves of that, very few of them would be able to stomach doing a second abortion after looking at the mangled human remains produced by the first.

I'd love to see the discourse move in that direction. The entire prolife movement would love to see the discourse move in that direction. Let's by all means look squarly at the violencd that is abortion and ask if it's justified. But there are two groups of people who will never get onto that bandwagon: Those who need to maintain public support for abortion-on-demand, and those who need to keep their businesses afloat by convincing as many women as possible that abortion doesn't involve the destruction of a human being.



NOTE: YouTube keeps yanking the video, so please let me know if I need to go grab another link.

VERIFIED: Gosnell Got "Snipping" Idea at NAF Seminar

In an earlier post, "Snipping" and Why the Left Must Silence Us on Gosnell, I reiterated my theory that serial murderer / abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell got the idea of killing a baby by taking scissors to the back of its neck from Martin Haskell's D&X presentation paper to the National Abortion Federation.  In that presentation, Haskell taught this prestigious group of highly reputable providers how to use his new and improved abortion method. This method, like Gosnell's preferred method, involved getting the fetus out entirely in one piece. You might have heard this procedure referred to as "partial birth abortion."

Last night I stumbled across a bombshell: Verification of my suspicion that the similarity of technique was not mere coincidence. Gosnell himself, in an interview, said that he had attended that presentation and adapted his own variation of Haskell's technique.

My discovery began on YouTube, of all places, where I'd been looking for fresh approaches to the Gosnell story. I found this video, "Steve Volk Discusses his Interview With Dr. Kermit Gosnell."

Learning that Volk, a writer for Philadelphia Magazine, had access to Gosnell was an exciting development. Learning that an e-book was available about what he had learned from speaking to Gosnell whetted my appetite. I went straightway to Amazon.com, bought Gosnell's Babies,* and read it cover to cover. In its electronic pages, I found what I'd been looking for.

Martin Haskell's presentation paper from the NAF seminar

Gosnell, then, never questioned whether he should continue providing abortions. But after The Silent Scream, he did feel obligated to reduce the pain he caused. And he carried this thought around with him until 1992, when he saw Martin Haskell deliver one of the most controversial medical presentations in history, at a Dallas conference of abortion providers.

....

.... Haskell described a procedure in which the surgeon reaches into the uterus with a grasping forceps and pulls the fetus, limb by limb, into the vagina, until only the skull has yet to pass the cervix. As Haskell wrote: "The surgeon then forces ... scissors into the base of the skill," "spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening," and uses a suction cannula to "evacuate the skull contents." In layman's terms, the doctor stabs the fetus in the back of the neck at the base of the skull and uses a Karman cannula or catheter to suck out its brains

Gosnell then took Haskell's procedure and modified it to fit his own practice.

... Gosnell looked at this procedure in 1992 and saw an opportunity for mercy. In a technique he evolved over the years, he brought the tips of the scissors together, like a knife, to puncture the base of the fetus's neck. He widened the scissors to open the wound he created, revealing the spinal cord. And he severed that cord, believing this would end every sensation of the fetus, quickly and in the most humane manner possible.

Gosnell told Volk more about his use of the "snipping" technique. Just as Gosnell's staff reported to the Grand Jury, Gosnell reported to Volk that in response to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, Gosnell tried to comply, as other abortionists were doing, by injecting digoxin into the unborn baby's heart.

But even guided by ultrasound, he often seemed to miss. Sometimes, afterward, the fetus emerged, and...

The arm just jumped. Didn't it? The leg jerked. Isn't that baby ... breathing? And sometimes, one of his assistants asked: Is that baby alive?

No, he assured them. That wasn't a real movement.

During Gosnell's trial, the prosecutor asked a reputable abortion practitioner if other late-term doctors sometimes had a mishap with the lethal injection, leading to the birth of a live baby. She testified that yes, that does happen sometimes, and when it does the baby is provided with "comfort care." It is wrapped in a blanket, she said, and kept warm until it dies.

Illustration of the logistical difference
between an extraction abortion, promoted
by the National Abortion Federation, and
Gosnell's practice of "snipping."

A reality that became clear during the trial was difficult for Volk to come to grips with.

Even with babies at the legal point of viability, 24 weeks, if Gosnell had simply provided "comfort care" instead of snipping their necks, he would have faced nothing more than third-degree felony charges, potential seven-year sentences. The scissors he used because he took them to be "more merciful" are what made him a murderer.

For him, for us, the difference between being a doctor just doing his job and first-degree homicide was, first, a matter of geography: Did he kill the baby in utero, or outside the womb? And, second, a matter of execution: a 5.5-inch-long pair of surgical scissors, or a blanket and time?

Gosnell insisted to Volk, as his lawyer had insisted during the trial, that the babies were already dead before "snipping."And try as he might, Volk never got a satisfactory answer from Gosnell as to why, if the baby was already dead, any further action on his part was necessary.

He snipped the necks of dead babies, he claimed, merely to prevent any possible pain reception -- as if dead babies feel any pain at all.

I pressed him on this, explaining that it simply didn't seem credible for a medical doctor to be worrying about the pain experienced by a fetus he felt sure was dead. But Gosnell put me off, saying, "It will take me some time to articulate my answer." He never could explain himself. And his answers seemed carefully couched: "I never saw anything I took as fetal movement," he said.

In the end, the rationale for anything Kermit Gosnell did strikes one less as rationale than as rationalization. Running the pill mill was, in Gosnell's mind, providing poor people in the neighborhood with the chance to earn a living as drug dealers, thus stimulating the local economy. Operating a filthy facility was simply catering to an underprivileged clientele. A law banning outpatient abortions at or beyond 24 weeks, and mandating that any abortion at or beyond 24 weeks be justified with a "health" claim, was complied with fully by charting advanced pregnancies as exactly 24.5 weeks, mentally "rounding down" to 24 weeks, and reflecting that he'd want his own daughter to be able to obtain such an abortion. As for thrusting surgical scissors into the neck of a freshly-delivered baby, that was a merciful means of preventing pain.

As crazy as Gosnell's rationalizations sound, how different are they from the rationalizations that abortion apologists make? Far from being horrified at the idea of stabbing a nearly-delivered, living, moving baby in the back of the neck with scissors, the participants who watched a video of Haskell performing the procedure responded by giving him a standing ovation. And lest there be any doubt that the baby in question was moving, Haskell even joked that the baby often "helps" by wrapping its little arms and legs around the hand of the doctor that is about to kill it.

The abortion lobby went to bat big time in favor of the National Abortion Federation and its fully endorsed and enthusiastically promoted practice of stabbing the baby in the back of the neck just prior to completing a vaginal delivery. How can any of us pretend that a man who worked at a NAF clinic was doing something entirely different when he stabbed the baby in the back of the neck just after completing a vaginal delivery?

This schizophrenic rationalization needs to be exposed. Filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney are in the process of crowdfunding a TV movie that will bring the reality of abortion in America -- as exemplified in the practice of Kermit Gosnell -- to the largest possible audience. Go to Gosnell Movie and send a message. It need only cost you $1, less than the cup of a bottle of water or a cup of coffee. Tell the world that we're tired of letting this sort of thing go on utterly unexamined. Pray and spread the word. Support the Gosnell movie. End the silence.

For more about why it's vital that this movie be made, read:

• Gosnell Clinic Even Nastier than Grand Jury Reported
• The Gosnell Patient Who Barely Escaped With Her Life 
• Kermit Gosnell and the Milgram Experiment 
• Gosnell: The One That Got Away, and Hope for Others 
• Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line? 
• Gosnell and Post-Viability Abortions 
• Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened 
• Why "Gosnell" Must be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told

*Steve Volk, Gosnell's Babies: Inside the Mind of America's Most Notorious Abortion Doctor, a Philadelphia Magazine E-Book, Metro Corp. 2013

Kermit Gosnell and the Milgram Experiment

Kermit Gosnell, Pearl Gosnell, Elizabeth Hampton
Sherry West, Adrine Moton, Tina Baldwin
Steven Massof, Maddline Joe, Elleen O’Neil

Most people, when confronted with the Kermit Gosnell scandal, can not seem to wrap their minds around how Gosnell's employees could participate in such a barbaric practice as "snipping" the spinal cords of live-born babies. Certainly members of the Grand Jury expressed astonishment. The explanation, however, should be obvious to anybody familiar with the Milgram Experiment.

Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Participants were instructed to give what they believed were a series of increasingly painful electrical shocks to another person. More than half of the participants obeyed the experimenter to the end -- administering what they'd been made to believe were lethal shocks.

Millgram summed up his findings:

Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Kermit Gosnell's employees, fortunate to be have jobs in a city with an unemployment rate of nearly 11%, were being reassured by their boss that they were doing nothing wrong in "snipping" babies. Tina Baldwin testified that Gosnell had told her this was simply how such procedures were done, that this was “part of the demise.”

At one point in his Grand Jury testimony, Steve Massof tried to suggest that the clinic’s practice of cutting babies’ spinal cords was somehow part of a late-term procedure called intact dilation and extraction (IDX), commonly referred to as “partial birth abortion” and banned under federal law since 2007. In an intact dilation and extraction, which was used most often to abort pregnancies beyond 17 weeks, the fetus was removed from the uterus as a whole. In order for the head to pass through the cervix without damage to the mother, the doctor would collapse the fetal skull by making an incision at the base of the neck and suctioning the contents. This procedure was done while the baby was still inside the mother.

Illustration of the logistical difference
between an extraction abortion, promoted
by the National Abortion Federation, and
Gosnell's practice of "snipping."

Let's pause a moment and allow Martin Haskell, who popularized the D&X ("IDX" or "partial birth abortion") technique, describe the procedure. He presented a video of the procedure to his fellows at the National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar in Dallas in 1992, and received a standing ovation for his pioneering work in "reproductive health care." The following is taken verbatim from his presentation paper:

With a lower extremity in the vagina, the surgeon uses his fingers to deliver the opposite lower extremity, then the torso, the shoulders and the upper extremities. The skull lodges at the internal cervical os. Usually there is not enough dilation for it to pass through. The fetus is oriented ...spine up.

At this point, the right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left had along the back of the fetus and 'hooks' the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down). Next he slides the tip of the middle finger along the spine towards the skull while applying traction to the shoulders and lower extremities. ….

While maintaining this tension..., the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.

Reassessing proper placement …, the surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull.... The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.

How significant is the difference between the technique Haskell was teaching to a seminar of the most reputable abortion providers in the world and the technique Kermit Gosnell taught to his ragtag staff?

I believe that Massof was truly testifying as to what Gosnell had told his staff. Gosnell reassured them that this was all okay, just part of "ensuring fetal demise." And really, think about it: How significant is the difference between plunging scissors into the baby's neck just prior to completing the delivery and plunging scissors into the same baby's neck just after completing the delivery? It's the same baby, wriggling in your hands. 

Haskell, during his presentation, joked that the baby sometimes "helps" by wrapping her little arms and legs around his hand as he's steadying the child in preparation for the fatal plunge.How great a leap of conscience -- how great a distinction between "reproductive health care" versus capital murder -- if it's purely a matter of seconds and inches?

In their own descriptions of how they grow accustomed to the gruesome work at abortion, practitioners in perfectly ordinary legal abortion facilities describe what sounds very much like a real life example of the Millgram effect. Practitioners experience dismay, shock, horror, and moral revulsion about what they're doing to the unborn babies, and they train themselves to continue to do so anyway. Consider these admissions by practicing abortionists:

When performing a D&E abortion, the gynecologist is aware of being the active agent in the procedure. On the one hand, the doctor is sparing the patient the pain and emotional distress of the amnio abortion. On the other hand, he or she is the one who is crushing and dismembering the fetus in a D&E procedure, which can be emotionally disturbing… As the doctor tends to take responsibility and assume guilt for the procedure, she or he may have disturbing and recurrent ruminations or dreams. Doctors have found that these negative reactions decrease as they get used to the procedure....*

Nobody wants to perform abortions after ten weeks because by then you see the features of the baby, hands, feet. It’s really barbaric. Abortions are very draining, exhausting, and heartrending. There are a lot of tears. …  The only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman as my patient and block out the baby.**

We have produced an unusual dilemma. A procedure is rapidly becoming recognized as the procedure of choice in late abortion, but those capable of performing or assisting with the procedure are having strong personal reservations about participating in an operation which they view as destructive and violent…We have reached a point in this particular technology where there is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator. It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like electric current…***

Is it really that surprising that once people get used to working in an abortion clinic, once they can get accustomed to dismembering a living fetus at 12, 16, 20 weeks, people can become accustomed to "snipping" the spine of a live-born infant at 22, 24, 26 weeks? If wrenching the arms off a wriggling fetus while monitoring its heartbeat on an ultrasound machine is just a form of health care, how wrong can it be to do a quick "snip" to a tiny baby's neck?

It struck me that our tolerance of widespread abortion as a society has been a gigantic Milgram experiment. The majority of Americans indicate moral opposition to abortion -- with even 22% of self-identified "pro-choice" Americans consider abortion wrong most of the time. Yet we tolerate it, defend it, practice it, submit to it. Is it really because we believe it's not wrong? Or is it because the designated experts insist that it's necessary? The doctors, the counselors, the women themselves, all morally revolted by the act itself, but participating anyway. Why? well, as Milgram said:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

In the Milgram experiment, it was Stanley Milgram telling the subjects to violate their own sense of right and wrong. For Gosnell's employees, it was their boss. Who is it telling the ordinary abortionists to do what they do? And why? And why do we tolerate it?

We need to awaken this country to the reality of what is done behind closed doors in the name of "reproductive health care." A contribution to GosnellMovie.com will help to make a TV movie about Gosnell's crimes and present the story to the maximum number of people.

Funding need not set you back any more than $1 -- less than the cost of a cup of coffee or a bottle of water. If you can't contribute, or have already contributed funding, keep in mind that both prayer and spreading the word about the project are also vital contributions to the efforts. Together we can wake up a sleeping nation.

For more about why it's vital that this movie be made, read:

• Verified: Gosnell Got Snipping Idea at NAF Seminar
• Gosnell Clinic Even Nastier than Grand Jury Reported
• The Gosnell Patient Who Barely Escaped With Her Life
• Gonsell: The One That Got Away & Hope for Others
• Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line?  
• Why "Gosnell" Must be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect
• Gosnell and Post-Viability Abortions 
• Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder 
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened 
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• "Snipping" and why the Left Must Silence Us on Gosnell
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told

* Goldsmith, et. al.; "2^nd Trimester Abortion by Dilation and Extraction (D&E): Surgical Techniques and Psychological Reactions.", Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians in Atlanta, Georgia, 13 – 14. October 1977
** John Pekkanen. M.D.: Doctors Talk About Themselves (Delcorte Press: New York, 1988)
*** Dr. Warren Hern, “Meeting of American Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians” OB GYN News, page 196

Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder

Kermit Gosnell

Last year, in a little-noted trial, Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted of murder in the deaths of three of the hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of newborn babies he killed by severing their spinal cords while their mothers lay nearby, overdosed to the brink of death on a cocktail of drugs given to them at Gosnell's direction by his accomplices. (I have addressed elsewhere what I believe to be the source of this practice of taking scissors to the back of the baby's neck in order to "ensure fetal demise".)

Whether or not Gosnell was guilty of murdering any of these babies hinged not on the question of whether or not Gosnell killed them. (He'd never denied that he'd killed them.) It hinged on the question of whether he "ensured fetal demise" before or after the baby fully emerged from the birth canal.

For the babies, of course, the difference was irrelevant. But for Gosnell, the difference was profound.


Gosnell's attorney argued -- successfully in the cases of four infants -- that Gosnell had "ensured fetal demise" prior to the infant leaving the womb at all. This would have taken the Federal Partial Birth Abortion ban (with its penalty of up to 2 years in prison) entirely off the table. Under the PBA ban, the gestational age of the fetus is irrelevant, as long as its death is achieved without the baby exiting the womb intact. (Removing one limb at a time from the womb in the process of dismembering, and thus killing, a living baby is permissible.)

That would have left Gosnell facing only Pennsylvania's Abortion Control Act. If the prosecution could prove that a baby had been of more than 24 weeks of gestation, Gosnell could theoretically have faced at most up to a $10,000 fine and up to 7 years in prison. However, even with a fetus admittedly past 24 weeks, a successful "health of the mother" defense would have reduced the charges to two misdemeanors: performing a post-24 week abortion outside a hospital, and failing to send the fetal remains from a post-24-week abortion to a pathologist.

To borrow a phrase from the real estate business, the most three most important factors distinguishing between a woman exercising her right to choose and a doctor committing murder are location, location, and location.

• Baby in the womb: possible misdemeanors
• Baby mostly in the birth canal: felony abortion with fine and/or imprisonment
• Baby entirely out the birth canal: capital murder

LeRoy Carhart

Interestingly enough, the abortion lobby rolled over on the 24-week cutoff portion of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act, which was passed in 1982. Ten years later, however, they pulled out all the stops to challenge the Partial Birth Abortion Ban.

Late-abortion specialist LeRoy Carhart argued, on behalf of himself and anybody else who wanted to be permitted to kill partially-born babies, that the practice is just a perfectly safe and legal facet of reproductive health care. In short, as long as the scissors enter the neck while the baby's head is still lodged in the mother's pelvis, it's just a woman's right to choose an abortion.

As for the legal status were the baby to emerge from the  mother's body still alive, the abortion lobby has not lobbied for permission to actively finish the child off with a handy pair of scissors. However they have argued -- in many cases successfully --  in favor of just allowing the baby to die of neglect. No less prominent person than Barack Obama has defended the practice of allowing babies who survive abortions to die of neglect. (More on this in a subsequent post.)

To further muddy the waters comes the entire issue of fetal viability, which the Supreme Court slapped down as being 24 weeks of gestation. The Abortion Control Act starts with that 24 weeks but allows some wiggle room there. In fact, every law regarding abortion at or past a gestational age at which "viability" is assumed leaves that issue largely up to the abortionist. Simply disposing of the remains would make prosecution virtually impossible, because the law defers to the aborting physician's judgment. Considering what happened to Phill Kline in Kansas when he attempted to hold Planned Parenthood and George Tiller accountable for violating his state's ban on post-viability abortions, a prosecutor would be committing political suicide to even investigate, much less file charges regarding, post-viability abortions.

Dr. William Waddill

All of this highlights what has been most shocking to me about the entire Gosnell situation: that Seth Williams had the courage to go after an abortionist for killing babies at all. I believe that were the surrounding circumstances not so egregious -- the filth, the cat feces, the dead mothers, the jars of fetal feet -- Gosnell's legal troubles would have been limited to the Federal drug charges. Without the squalor and depraved indifference to the women's lives, charging Gosnell for murder in the deaths of abortion survivors would have been far too risky. No prosecutor in his right mind would relish spending a lot of time and money on a case that might end up like the Baby W case in California, in which abortionist William Waddill strangled a 32-week abortion survivor in a hospital nursery in front of several horrified nurses and a neonatologist, but was able to walk because of two successive hung juries quibbling over the legal definition of causing the baby's "death."

All of this is just to point out what the Gosnell case reveals about the bizarre and often contradictory legal status of a viable baby just prior to or just after an abortion. It's not just a matter of life and death to the babies in question. It was also quite literally a matter of life and death to Kermit Gosnell, who faced the possibility of being executed for being a bit slow with the scissors.

Getting the Gosnell story in front of the public can bring this macabre dilemma into the public consciousness. Filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have launched a crowdfunding effort to produce a movie about Gosnell's crimes.I'm asking my readers to support this project in any way they can:

• Contributing funding of as little as $1, less than the cost of a soft drink, both to help financially and to send a message that the people want the cover-up to end.
• Prayer that what was done -- and continues to be done -- in the darkness will come to light.
• Spreading the word about this vital project.

Let's make this a reality.

For more about why it's vital that this movie be made, read:

• Verified: Gosnell Got Snipping Idea at NAF Seminar
• Gosnell Clinic Even Nastier than Grand Jury Reported
• The Gosnell Patient Who Barely Escaped With Her Life 
• Kermit Gosnell and the Milgram Experiment 
• Gosnell: The One That Got Away, and Hope for Others 
• Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line? 
• Gosnell and Post-Viability Abortions 
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened
• Why "Gosnell" Must Be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• "Snipping" and why the Left Must Silence Us on Gosnell
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told

"Snipping" and Why the Left MUST Silence Us on Gosnell

Why are the abortion lobby and their media lapdogs and Hollywood buddies loath to see the Gosnell movie get made? Because it hits too close to home. It makes them ask uncomfortable questions.

It's been a year since infamous Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell (pictured, left) went on trial for murdering live-born infants at his filthy abortion mill. But where did Gosnell get the idea for "snipping" the necks of live-born infants in order to "ensure fetal demise"? 

Of all the ways to kill a squirming newborn, a scissors to the back of the neck seems a bit arbitrary. It doesn't even seem like the easiest method of "ensuring fetal demise." Even sharp scissors don't just snip through bone the way they snip through paper.

I don't think Gosnell simply pulled the idea of "snipping" out of thin air. I'm guessing he got it from somewhere. I'm guessing that he got it from a highly reputable source. 

I direct your attention, gentle reader, to Martin Haskell's D&X presentation paper to the National Abortion Federation, in which Haskell (pictured, right) teaches this prestigious group of highly reputable providers how to use his new and improved abortion method. This method, like Gosnell's preferred method, involved getting the fetus out entirely in one piece. You might have heard this procedure referred to as "partial birth abortion."

I'll let Haskell explain the method himself:

"...the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors (pictured -- ed.) in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine... until he feels it contact the base of the skull.... the surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull.... Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening."

That the baby starts out alive, and that the goal of using the blunt, curved Metzenbaum scissors is to to "ensure fetal demise" is pretty clear when one listens to Haskell's presentation and the discussion afterward. He chuckled that the baby sometimes "helps" -- his word -- by wrapping its little arms and legs around the "surgeon's" hand while the scissors are being positioned.

No, the idea of jamming scissors into the back of a living, wriggling baby's neck is not one that is original to the illustrious Dr. Kermit Gosnell. He clearly sat at the feet of the master when he learned how to make sure that the abortion patient doesn't go home with a live baby.

I don't even think that Gosnell came up with the term "ensure fetal demise" on his own. Haskell made reference to two different methods used in late second-trimester abortions to ensure "fetal demise." 

I would also love to know if Gosnell attended this particular gathering of reputable abortion providers. It was held in September of 1992 in Dallas. A peek into this -- and into entire extent of the National Abortion Federation's role in the Gosnell debacle -- would certainly be a more productive use of Congressional time than taking turns carping about whether or not journalists (who should, after all, be outside Congressional influence) are giving the Gosnell story enough coverage. 

PS: Please feel free to use this image that sums up the whole matter:

Let's force them to confront reality. The Left went to bat big time in favor of the National Abortion Federation endorsed and promoted practice of stabbing the baby in the back of the neck just prior to completing a vaginal delivery. How can they pretend that a man who worked at one of their clinics was doing something entirely different when he stabbed the baby in the back of the neck just after completing a vaginal delivery?

Go to Gosnell Movie and send a message. It need only cost you $1, less than the cup of a bottle of water or a cup of coffee. Tell the world that we're tired of letting this sort of thing go on utterly unexamined. Pray and spread the word. End the silence.

For more about why it's vital that this movie be made, read:

• Verified: Gosnell Got Snipping Idea at NAF Seminar
• Gosnell Clinic Even Nastier than Grand Jury Reported
• The Gosnell Patient Who Barely Escaped With Her Life 
• Kermit Gosnell and the Milgram Experiment 
• Gosnell: The One That Got Away, and Hope for Others 
• Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line? 
• Gosnell and Post-Viability Abortions 
• Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened 
• Why "Gosnell" Must be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told

Gosnell, Carhart, and the PBA Ban (Part 4)

In Part 1, I gave some background on post-viability abortions, which were invented by the Supreme Court in 1973. In Part 2, I described the advent of the procedure that came to be known as Partial Birth Abortion. In Part 3, I looked at how the Partial Birth Abortion Ban changed -- albeit only temporarily -- the practice of Philadelphia quack Kermit Gosnell.

Today I'll look at how the ban changed the practice of LeRoy "Meat in a Crock Pot" Carhart.

When Carhart (pictured) challenged the Partial Birth Abortion ban, he testified about what was then his standard abortion practice. Carhart indicated that he tried to grab the baby and get it positioned to where he could suck out the brain without taking the baby apart first. But sometimes, he indicated, the baby would stick a limb out through the cervix, and it was just easier to pull that part off and go from there:

Carhart: My normal course would be to dismember that extremity and then go back and try to take the fetus out either foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first.

Question: How do you go about dismembering that extremity?

Carhart: Just traction and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get a hold of which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the os, using the internal os as your counter-traction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be. Sometimes you will get one leg and you can’t get the other leg out.

Question: In that situation, are you, when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?

Carhart: Yes.

Question: Do you consider an arm, for example, to be a substantial portion of the fetus?

Carhart: In the way I read it, I think if I lost my arm, that would be a substantial loss to me. I think I would have to interpret it that way.

Question: And then what happens next after you remove the arm? You then try to remove the rest of the fetus?

Carhart: Then I would go back and attempt to either bring the feet down or bring the skull down, or even sometimes you bring the other arm down and remove that also and then get the feet down.

Question: At what point is the fetus...does the fetus die during that process?

Carhart: I don’t really know. I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.

When Live Action did an undercover investigation of Carhart recently, he had changed his approach, using a digoxin injection into the baby's heart to make sure that it was dead before he even started the procedure:

Woman: So I'll have a dead baby in me?

Carhart: For three days, yeah.

Woman: Will it start to decompose or something:

Carhart: No. It's like putting meat in a Crock Pot, OK? 

So the PBA ban got Carhart to change the method he used for killing the baby. While we can assume that it's painful for the baby to have a large-bore needle stuck through its chest into its beating heart, that is surely less painful than being dismembered alive and conscious, able to move and put a limb out through the mother's cervix. Though the ban didn't save these babies' lives, it did provide them with a somewhat more merciful death.

Carhart also indicated to the Live Action investigator that he was careful to follow the law. He did not break the Nebraska law by perpetrating abortions past the legal limit, but instead had those patient travel to Maryland, where he could legally perform elective abortions through 26 weeks. Left to himself, Carhart is not a lawbreaker.

He did, however, perpetrate illegal third-trimester abortions in Kansas while he was working for infamous late-term abortionist George Tiller. Carhart perpetrated the illegal third-trimester abortion that killed Christin Gilbert (pictured). However, Tiller was able to maintain a clinic where such illegal abortions were openly perpetrated because of his tremendous political clout. He had no less a personage than the Governor protecting him. Carhart evidently has not on his own initiate cultivated such relationships in the states where he is practicing now. Whether he would do so if abortion were banned entirely is open to speculation.

Odds are that Carhart could be kept in check by clearly written laws that distinguished between direct abortion (deliberately killing the baby) and indirect abortion (performing a procedure necessary to protect the mother's live but which necessitated delivering the baby prior to viability). The law would have to include clear and severe penalties for deliberately killing the baby. This would make it extremely difficult for even the Governor to get the doctor out of trouble if a local prosecutor went after the lawbreaker. 

Carhart's age (he was born in 1941) makes it likely that were his livelihood to be taken away, he would just retire. However, is is a tireless advocate for abortion -- particularly post-viability abortions -- so he would still be trying to pull political strings and would have to be monitored and thwarted in his efforts to remove protection from unborn babies and their vulnerable mothers.

Gosnell, Carhart, and the PBA Ban (Part 3)

In Part 1, I gave some background on post-viability abortions, which were invented by the Supreme Court in 1973. In Part 2, I described the advent of the procedure that came to be known as Partial Birth Abortion. 

Now let's look at the ban and what it meant for abortion practitioners.

A trained eye can see the impact of Martin Haskell's "D&X" presentation paper all over the Kermit Gosnell Grand Jury Report. After all, sticking a scissors in the base of a living baby's skull to kill it didn't originate with Gosnell. In fact, the Grand Jury Report itself says:
At one point in his Grand Jury testimony, Kermit Gosnell employee Steve Massof "tried to suggest that the clinic’s practice of cutting babies’ spinal cords was somehow part of a late-term procedure called intact dilation and extraction (IDX), commonly referred to as 'partial birth abortion' and banned under federal law since 2007."

That Gosnell saw what he was doing as a modified PBA is clearer when we come to another employee's testimony:

Kareema Cross testified that when she first started working at the clinic, in 2005, Gosnell slit the neck of every baby. But he subsequently told the workers that the law changed so that he could not do that anymore. .... Cross said that Gosnell then tried a few times to use a new procedure: He tried to inject a drug called digoxin into the fetus’s heart while it was in the womb. This was supposed to cause fetal demise in utero. But because Gosnell was not skillful enough to successfully administer digoxin, late-term babies continued to be born alive, and he continued to kill them by slitting their necks.

Clearly Gosnell was trying to work inside the law. He tried to modify his practice to be in compliance as he understood it, even though he was violating other laws left and right. 

While the Partial Birth Abortion Ban did at least result in an attempt to change procedures to something that would be slightly less painful for the baby, in Gosnell's case at least it ultimately had no effect. What's more had Gosnell managed to kill the baby while it was only partially born, he would have only been guilty of violating the Abortion Control Act, and not guilty of murder.

When Roe falls, the laws will have to be tightened up so that there will be no chance of an abortionist weaseling around.

Gosnell, Carhart, and the PBA Ban (Part 2)

In Part 1, I gave a bit of background to the whole practice of post-viability abortions, which were invented by the Supreme Court in 1973 and embraced wholeheartedly by a select group of intrepid abortion practitioners who weren't about to let a little thing like a baby thwart their ambitions.

Post-viability abortions are a subset of abortions past the midpoint in pregnancy, at which point the baby is too big and sturdy to easily dismember. It was for these abortions in general, and not post-viability abortions in particular, that a solution was sought.

Hysterotomy (delivering a baby via c-section and just letting it die) is a massively invasive procedure and can lead to unpleasant legal ramifications if somebody in the OR realizes that you're killing a viable baby and is enough of a retrograde throwback to have a problem with that.

The old-style instillation abortions (putting poison in the amniotic fluid) were, like hysterotomy, too dangerous to do outside a hospital. Not only was that prohibitively expensive, but in a hospital, the doctor didn't have as much control over who dealt with the patients, and thus he was risking the problem I mentioned before of buttinski nurses who would see a live baby and wouldn't just drop it in the bucket and stick it in the closet per instructions.

Once ultrasound machines became common, however, abortionists discovered that rather than just load the amniotic fluid down with poison and hope the baby swallows and inhales enough of it to die, they could jab a needle straight into the baby's heart or brain and deliver a lethal dose much more reliably.

Once the baby is dead, the abortionist can let it soften overnight -- "like meat in a crock pot" as LeRoy Carhart said -- and take it out in pieces the next day, or he can induce labor and let the mother deliver it into the toilet, as George Tiller preferred to do.

Some doctors, however, found the crock-put baby thing a bit troubling. Among them was Dr. James McMahon in California, who had two issues brewing.

First of all, he had a strange fascination with the idea of dilating the cervix as wide as he could. He quoted another abortionist as describing opening the cervix "like a lotus in the moonlight." Personally I find that creepy, but then I have a problem with dropping a live baby into a bucket and covering it with formaldehyde so I'm clearly an unenlightened busybody like those troublesome nurses that couldn't be trusted to deal appropriately with saline survivors.

Second of all, many of his patients were aborting wanted babies that had been diagnosed with some problem. These parents wanted to see the baby after it was dead. A macerated, mutilated fetus isn't a pretty sight.

McMahon came up with a solution, which he dubbed "intrauterine cranial decompression." He'd drag the living baby out feet-first, then stop just before delivering the head to suck out the brains, "decompressing" the "cranium." All he'd have to do was have a nurse stuff the collapsed head with cotton batting to round it out and he'd have a very presentable dead baby to show the parents.

"Intrauterine cranial decompression" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and perhaps because of this it didn't catch on very quickly. Then in 1992, Dr. Martin Haskell made a presentation to the National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar in Dallas. He tweaked McMahon's technique and dubbed it "D&X," for "dilation and extraction." With such a catchy name, how could it fail?

The method caught on, but the prolifers caught wind of it, and the proverbial shit hit the fan. The prolifers gave the procedure the name that finally stuck -- Partial Birth Abortion -- and managed to get it banned.

What a bunch of killjoys.