You want to look away … to close your eyes and ears to escape the hauntingly gruesome accounts of babies being delivered (or “precipitated” as former employees called it) and then killed outside their mothers’ wombs.

But as the story unfurls, there is even more to appall – and inform – the reader:

• Jill Stanek’s blog shares excerpts of the Grand Jury Report testimony by former employees, describing the horrific procedures which Gosnell had trained them to perform in order to kill viable babies; noting that they killed at least 100 – not just eight! – babies in this grotesque manner; and revealing how Gosnell lied to them about the ability of these babies – many beyond the gestational age of 24 weeks – to feel excruciating pain during the abortion.
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  WARNING: Both Jill’s blog post and the Grand Jury Report include extremely graphic photos and explicit descriptions of post-birth abortions of viable babies.

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  Why you need to know:  Because whether by aspiration or post-birth abortion, the result is the same – the killing of a human being.  We must work to protect the sanctity of life!

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• Gosnell operated the Women’s Medical Society and performed abortions there for almost 40 years. The Grand Jury report states that during that past 15 years, the Philadelphia Health Commissioner and the Pennsylvania Depts. of Health and State had received reports of health code violations, illegal abortions (PA law prohibits abortions past 24 weeks), improper disposal or handling of medical waste (including aborted fetuses), lawsuits as a result of botched abortions, and even patient deaths.
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  Former employees also reported that unlicensed employees were performing abortions throughout the work day; Gosnell – the only licensed medical professional at the clinic – typically worked from 6pm to 9pm.

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  After a site visit to the Women’s Medical Society and seeing the deplorable clinic conditions, the National Abortion Federation (NAF) denied Gosnell’s request for membership because the clinic didn’t meet NAF’s quality assurance standards.  NAF  didn’t report its findings to the authorities.With all this, the abortuary continued to operate, received Medicaid funding, and took an increasing number of out-of-area and out-of-state referrals for illegal late term abortions.  It was only when the press reported the story, and the public became aware that action was finally taken against Gosnell and the abortuary staff.

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  The final paragraphs of the Grand Jury report say it all:

  It is not our job to say who should be fired or demoted. We believe, however, that anyone responsible for permitting Gosnell to operate as he did should face strong disciplinary action up to and including termination. This includes not only the people who failed to do the inspecting, the prosecuting, and the protecting, but also those at the top who obviously tolerated, or even encouraged, the inaction.

  The Department of State literally licensed Gosnell’s criminally dangerous behavior. DOH gave its stamp of approval to his facility. These agencies do not deserve the public’s trust. The fate of Karnamaya Mongar and countless babies with severed spinal cords is proof that people at those departments were not doing their jobs. Those charged with protecting the public must do better.

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  Why you need to know:

  1. Because NARAL finds Pennsylvania’s regulation of abortion providers  to be burdensome – laws which, if they had been enforced, might have saved the lives of many third-trimester babies, and the 2 women killed by Gosnell’s clinic.
  2. Because just as the press shed the light on this horror and the bureaucratic negligence that allowed it to persist, we must also bring to light the abortion clinic conditions; the truth of how babies die through abortion; and the physical, emotional and spiritual fallout on the abortion survivors (mothers, fathers, etc.). This will help to win over hearts and minds to the need to protect human life at its most vulnerable.
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• How did this outrage continue unchecked for 40+ years? As Michelle Malkin noted recently, mass murder got a pass -
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… from the government agencies that knew, but looked the other way;

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… from the abortion clinic employees who took photos of the innocent victims, before dumping them “in shoe-boxes, paper bags, one-gallon spring-water bottles, and glass jars”;

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… from the NAF, who surely knew that the abortion industry would not benefit if the deplorable conditions in this clinic were publicized;

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… from those in the media who are attempting to deflect attention from the fact that the business carried out in this ‘House of Horrors’ was ALL about the desecration of human life:

Already, left-wing journalists and activists have rushed to explain that these abortion atrocities ignored for four decades by abortion radicals and rationalizers are not really about abortion. A Time magazine writer argued that the Philadelphia Horror was “about poverty, not Roe V. Wade.” A University of Minnesota professor declared: “This is not about abortion.”

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… and perhaps, from the average person, whose intellect has been numbed to the horror of abortion by terms such as “fetal demise”, “intact dilatation and evacuation”, “snipping”.  No matter how neutral the terminology, the meaning is the same:  infanticide.

Why you need to know: Because every human life is precious, we cannot give abortion  a pass.  Pray.  Learn.  Support groups that help women make life-affirming choices for their babies.  And step out in faith and compassion and resolve to win hearts and minds to the beauty and sanctity of life at ALL stages.