By William H. Perkins Jr.
Editor
Not a single Sanctity of Human Life Sunday goes by without Kermit Gosnell coming to my mind, because for me he sums up the entire scandal of abortion in this country. You will recall that Gosnell was convicted in Philadelphia, Pa., in 2013 of committing in his filthy clinic some of the most bizarre and unconscionable acts ever uncovered in the era of legalized abortion, including three murders.
Amazingly, there are still those among us who would defend abortion as some noble cause to benefit both a woman who doesn’t want a child and a child who would otherwise be brought into an overcrowded and inhumane world. Even more insane is the fact that these people hold up as selfless heroes the butchers like Gosnell who perform such procedures on desperate women and defenseless children.
When authorities raided Gosnell’s Philadelphia, Pa., abortion clinic in a search for illegal drug activity, they walked into a literal shop of horrors. Strewn about the clinic were bloody recliners and unsanitary equipment, and clogging nearly every drain in the building were human body parts — mangled pieces of unborn babies, actually — in various stages of decay.
The Pennsylvania State Department of Health, which along with other state agencies and licensing boards had been sitting on complaints about Gosnell since at least 2001, finally sprang into action. Revolting doesn’t begin to describe what they found.
Gosnell apparently did not even employ a licensed nurse at the clinic for long stretches of time. That didn’t stop the abortions, however, as he ordered unqualified and unlicensed employees to administer narcotics and other drugs to the mothers. There are allegations that he allowed those same employees to perform abortions when he was not available.
One employee of the clinic, an unlicensed graduate of a medical school in South America and himself convicted of numerous crimes at the clinic, testified at Gosnell’s trial that, “It would rain fetuses and blood.”
Gosnell is also alleged to have delivered full-term, viable babies and then severed their spinal cords with a pair of scissors. For some twisted reason known only to Gosnell, he cut off the feet of unborn babies and kept them in jars around the clinic. A grand jury that investigated Gosnell and his operation described the clinic as a “baby charnel house.”
Gosnell is hardly alone among the seamy fraternity of abortion providers. Since abortion during all nine months of gestation was legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, there have been thousands of reports of filthy clinics, violations of federal and state laws, barbaric acts committed on both mother and child, abortions performed on minors without parental permission, mistreatment of children born alive during botched abortions, unqualified employees perforating the mother’s internal organs with sharp instruments, and cover-ups of questionable deaths, to name only a few of the outrages.
As we learned during the Planned Parenthood scandal a few years ago, in many U.S. abortion clinics there is a disassembly line in place where live, freshly aborted babies gasping for breath are handed over to employees of a third party company to be gutted and sold for their body parts.
Well-paid lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians with perfect hair and expensive teeth have tried to convince us since the beginning that abortion was not only necessary but often the only recourse. They have tried to convince us that abortion clinics are as medically sound as any other clinic, and that abortion doctors are a misunderstood and persecuted lot.
Inarguably, anyone who still supports abortion after the Philadelphia revelations is the face of Kermit Gosnell. They all permitted what Gosnell did, in the sacred (to them) name of abortion.
People who still support abortion must acknowledge they care nothing about what happens to women and children in this country. People who still support abortion must admit that they endorse poorly regulated, disease-ridden clinics filled with rotting babies and mothers bleeding to death. People who still support abortion have to admit they’re enthusiastic about body parts being ripped from still-warm babies and sold for profit. They have to accept responsibility for these manifold indecencies, whether they like it or not.
No doubt, they are smug and satisfied with what happened in Philadelphia’s “baby charnel house.” That’s just the kind of people they are.
Editor’s Note: Opinions expressed on this website are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, The Baptist Record, nor the publication’s Advisory Committee. The author may be contacted at wperkins@mbcb.org.
