NRL News
202.626.8824
dadandrusk@aol.com

The Gosnell murder trial and Fox News’s “See No Evil”

May 6, 2013

By Dave Andrusko

“And the reason [Kermit Gosnell] was doing this [allegedly delivering aborted babies alive and then killing them] is because he had 46 lawsuits and he was paying up money for women who were maimed and mutilated. And it was easier to deliver a baby rather than go in there and extract it himself.” — Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore, as shown Friday on “Fox News Reporting: See No Evil – The Kermit Gosnell Case.”

“Such an attitude [a “straight line from parental consent to a complete ban on abortion”] makes having an honest conversation about abortion almost impossible. That is just one of the many reasons I hate talking about it. Additionally, there is no upside in our media culture to challenging this sacred cow. More likely, there is a price to be paid, which is why so few people take it on. However, I cannot legitimately say I am a person who cherishes human rights—the animating issue of my life and a frequent topic of my writing—and remain silent about our country’s legally endorsing infanticide.” — Liberal columnist Kristen Powers, writing this morning on what the murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell tells us.

JDMullanetweets3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

— Two tweets Monday from JD Mullane, a columnist for the Bucks County Courier Times and The Intelligencer who has carefully followed the trial.

 

FoxNewsGosnellThere were very good reason National Right to Life sent out a mass email to a tremendous number of people Friday, alerting them to a one-hour Fox News special on the background to the Kermit Gosnell murder trial and what a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury of seven women and five men had heard over the past six weeks.

It wasn’t that we had an advance copy or anything like that. NRLC was confident that if any news outlet not tucked deep in the pockets of the Abortion Industry fairly tracked the story, those Americas who would hear about the case would be deeply shocked.

Fox News chose the perfect moderator: Bret Baier. Baier is very low key, sticks to the facts, and comes across as a reporter/anchor with no axe to grind. That’s why he was just the one to host “See No Evil—The Kermit Gosnell Case”: the facts do speak for themselves. They need no embellishment because they are horrifying almost beyond description.

The opening quote from Ms. Pescatore which begins the post helped the viewer who has no kept up with the case (easy to do since most of the major media did their best to minimize coverage) to understand why Gosnell is accused of murdering four babies by aborting them alive and then slitting their spinal cords. Why didn’t Gosnell just kill the babies in utero by injecting Digoxin?

Subscribe-to-our-email-list

Well, for starters, as we reported Friday, Jack McMahon, Gosnell’s flamboyant defense attorney, stated flatly that they weren’t born alive, because in fact, Gosnell did administer Digoxin. Any testimony that these babies moved, twitched, even screamed misread what were simply “reflexes,” he insisted.

But police found no evidence of Digoxin when they searched the abortion clinic, and according to prosecutors, “Gosnell had stopped using the drug to save money,” Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Joseph Slobodzian explained. “Instead, prosecutors allege, Gosnell gave patients heavy doses of the labor-inducing drug Cytotec so they would spontaneously abort. If the fetus was alive, Gosnell allegedly would then cut the spine to kill it.”)

Moreover as former members of his own staff testified to the Grand Jury or at the murder trial (or both) Gosnell was too incompetent to inject the lethal drug. After trying—and failing—he went back to delivering these huge, well-developed babies alive and then cutting their spinal cords, according to witnesses. Pastore brings in an important additional factor: 46 lawsuits had been brought against the West Philadelphia abortionist and he was paying on an unknown number of them.

So McMahon was angry not because Fox broke new news. Not because they didn’t give a pro-abortion Democrat the opportunity to argue that the case will solidify support for “abortion rights.” And not because Baier overdramatized.

Nor could he be angry that Fox News had reported on a feature of Gosnell’s history—the 1972 “Mother’s Day Massacre”—that the Jury had not heard testimony about. In fact, they had.

Here’s how the Grand Jury described what took place:

Randy Hutchins testified that Gosnell told him about what has been called the “Mother’s Day Massacre.” According to a February 25, 2010, article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Gosnell offered to perform abortions on 15 poor women who were bused to his clinic from Chicago on Mother’s Day 1972, in their second trimester of pregnancy.

Unbeknownst to the women, Gosnell planned to use an experimental device called a “super coil” developed by a California man named Harvey Karman, who had run an underground abortion service in the 1950s. Hutchins related what Gosnell explained to him:

At the time that he agreed to do this, there was a device that he and a psychologist were working on that was supposed to be plastic – basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. All right. They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, it would then – the gel would melt and these 97 things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus, and the fetus would be expelled. The problem was that they never tested it. They didn’t test it on any animals. They never did any – any – any other human trials. This was not something that was sanctioned by the FDA. This was just something that he decided – he and this guy decided they were going to use on these women. …

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health subsequently did an investigation that detailed serious complications suffered by nine of the 15 women, including one who needed a hysterectomy.

The complications included a punctured uterus, hemorrhage, infections, and retained fetal remains. The CDC researchers recommended strict controls on any future testing of the device.

McMahon is hot not because the jury may have seen the special but because he is probably angling for some justification to appeal a guilty verdict, should one (or more) come down. No new ground was broken in “Speak no Evil,” just a reminder of what happens when we put our humanity in deep freeze or pretend that abortion on demand does not contain a lethal expansionary logic.

Categories: Gosnell