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Gosnell 2010 interview video

Philadelphia doctor under fire, local woman speaks out

Reported by: Catherine Varnum
Email: cvarnum@ActionNewsJax.com

Action News talks with a victim about a violation of trust between her and her doctor.

It's a story that is hard to hear, but it involves something so personal, so intimate, that it can't be ignored. Philadelphia Dr. Kermit Gosnell, is under investigation after complaints from dozen's of women across the nation. Licensed investigators say he was performing abortions and injuring them in the process. They also report finding more than two dozen fetuses in his Pennsylvania office.

For one woman, she had an abortion, but days later still had a baby's arm and leg in her body. Now, one brave local woman is coming forward. She still lives with regret and pain because all she wanted was a big family. "He had a warm personality. I trusted him," said the Jacksonville woman.

The woman went to Philadelphia's Dr. Kermit Gosnell in 1979. She was pregnant and looking for a compassionate doctor. She didn't want her identity shown, but told Action News about the horrifying experiences she went through. "This is your option, either you have no foot or you try to run around after your child with no foot or you have no child," she said. "You feel pressured, so I did what I regret." You had an abortion asked Action News reporter Catherine Varnum. "Yes."

But it didn't stop there. Several years later, she went to Dr. Gosnell again, thinking she was pregnant. "He told me I wasn't pregnant," she said. But she says he was wrong. "I was four and a half months pregnant and it almost killed me."

The Jacksonville woman isn't alone. Other women from the Philadelphia area are coming forward after Dr. Gosnell's office was searched by federal agents. Dr. Gosnell says he has no idea why he's under fire. "I was shocked, I was shocked, they thought I knew why they were there, and I really didn't," said Dr. Gosnell.

State licensing investigators suspended the doctor's license after, they say a woman died during an abortion in his office and more than two dozen frozen fetuses were found inside a freezer. Some of those fetuses date back to when the Jacksonville woman was under his care. She hopes they weren't one of hers. "I just think about all those other women that he talked to."

Dr. Gosnell says he didn't do anything wrong and that's why this Jacksonville woman says this doctor needs to be punished. "I expect to be vindicated and I feel its important to practice again," said Dr. Gosnell.

"He needs to be punished. What he did and is doing is not right. If you don't lock him up, he's not going to stop he'll do it someplace else," she said.

The woman also says she's still having surgeries because of what Dr. Gosnell did to her. She says scar tissue keeps growing that causes her great pain. All she ever wanted was a big family.

Right now no criminal charges have been filed against Dr. Gosnell. Forty-six women have come forward saying Dr. Gosnell forced them into abortions.

http://www.actionnewsjax.com/content/topstories/story/Philadelphia-doctor-under-fire-local-woman-speaks/kZ1PhWUchEm7gdUquiFKZg.cspx

Doctor From Hell . . . Or Godsend?

By DAVID GAMBACORTA, gambacd@phillynews.com 215-854-5994

POSTED: March 11, 2010

IN A MATTER of a few moments - long enough for men with badges to say that they had a search warrant - Kermit B. Gosnell's 43-year medical career came to a grinding halt.

A squad of imposing federal agents greeted Gosnell with the warrant when he arrived at his West Philadelphia practice, the Women's Medical Society, on Feb. 18.

The agents began raiding the clinic, which was filled at the time with patients who were waiting to be seen by the doctor.

"It was tremendously traumatic - totally unexpected," Gosnell, 69, said this week. "I was told [by agents] that I knew what this was about. But I really didn't know."

After the raid, pieces of the now-familiar tale fell like dominoes.

On Feb. 22, state authorities temporarily suspended Gosnell's medical license, labeling his clinic "deplorable" and a danger to the public. Investigators said that unlicensed employees were medicating and examining patients.

Horror stories emerged, in the form of state documents and old lawsuits. The clinic was linked to the death of one patient, then another.

An array of women came forward claiming that Gosnell had seriously injured them during abortions, leveling accusations that included puncturing their organs and leaving pieces of fetuses inside them.

The bad news continued to pile up. On March 2, health officials in Delaware suspended Gosnell's license to practice in their state.

Yesterday, the head of the National Abortion Federation said that the agency had refused Gosnell's request to become a member after its investigators found more than a dozen violations of the federation's guidelines during a visit to the clinic in December.

But other, more positive stories came to light, too, from patients who described Gosnell in glowing terms, likening him to an old-fashioned physician who makes house calls and cares more about people and neighborhood roots than getting paid on time.

Indeed, in an interview with the Daily News on Monday, Gosnell - a tall, freckled, soft-spoken man - repeatedly talked about his devotion to the impoverished community that he's served for decades.

So, the question is: Which of the two caricatures is the real Kermit Gosnell: the doctor who was running a clinic with bloodstained floors where women suffered unthinkable complications from abortions, or the caring physician who was a godsend to a poor, underserved population?

'A positive force'

It wasn't always like this, with the eye-catching headlines and cringe-worthy stories about abortions gone wrong.

There was a time when Gosnell was just another kid in West Philly, trying to figure out what to do with his life. He said that he grew up an only child and attended Central High School.

He admired the work ethic of his mother, Cornelia, who was a court clerk for the city. It was she who suggested that he consider a career as a physician.

"She thought it would be a good profession for me," Gosnell recalled while sitting at a conference table in the Center City office of his attorney, William J. Brennan.

He studied in the 1960s at Jefferson Medical College where, he said, he was among those who pushed for the "liberalization of the performance of therapeutic abortions."

Gosnell said that he also studied drug rehab, and later served as director of narcotic rehabilitation for the Young Great Society, which was organized by legendary anti-drug activist Herman Wrice.

"It was very much of an avant-garde, community-sponsored organization that sought to effect change in Mantua," he said, "and there was significant change in that community."

Gosnell became licensed as a physician and surgeon in Pennsylvania in July 1967. Three years later, he was licensed in New York, and began performing abortions at a clinic called Women's Medical Services, in New York City.

It was before the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case, which declared abortion legal up to the 24th week of pregnancy.

"I found the experience very difficult," Gosnell said. "You were under time constraints to perform the procedures so that the patients could get transportation back to wherever they were from.

"There was very little opportunity to assure that this was the best decision for the patient."

He soon returned to Philadelphia and set up a practice at 36th and Walnut streets.

"I wanted to be an effective, positive force in the minority community," Gosnell said.

But that office ended up in controversy. In 1972, he performed experimental "super coil" abortions on women that resulted in serious injuries to nine patients, the Inquirer has reported.

Gosnell was not charged with any wrongdoing; the experimental procedure had been developed by a psychologist from California.

Around that same time, Gosnell said, he was a single father with two boys who cooked "three batches of food on Sunday for the rest of the week." (He later married and raised seven children. )

Still, he apparently found time to make an impact in the community by helping drug addicts get back on their feet.

Herbert Creighton, 64, of Wynnefield, said Gosnell gave him a job at the Mantua Halfway House, where the doctor served as director.

"I had some problems back them," Creighton said. "I was messing with drugs and all kinds of stuff. He [Gosnell] kept me out of jail and changed my whole life around. He's a wonderful guy."

Flexible practice

In 1978, Gosnell became board-certified in family practice and opened the Women's Medical Society at 38th Street and Lancaster Avenue. Abortion procedures, Gosnell said, made up about 30 percent to 40 percent of his workload.

Armed with a gentle demeanor and a willingness to bend certain rules, he won the affection and admiration of many of the patients who relied on him for primary care.

"When I wasn't working, I didn't have money to pay him," said Deborah Gray, 57, of West Philadelphia, a patient of Gosnell's for 37 years. "I had no health insurance, but he would put the money I owed him on the books."

Gray used Gosnell for anything that ailed her. If she needed medication, he often would retrieve some from a closet in his office and give it to her free, sparing her a pharmacy run, she said.

Once, he delivered medication to her father when he suffered a bad case of the flu, Gray said. "If you were ever sick and couldn't get to his office, he would call in to the pharmacy for you," she added.

"Many times people have not been able to fully pay me for my services," Gosnell noted. "As a principle, I have not refused to provide them care."

Another longtime patient, Debra Reynolds, described Gosnell as "an old-fashioned doctor in a country town that you could call any time."

Reynolds, 52, of West Philly, said Gosnell treated her and provided her with medication even though she was once uninsured for 10 years. "He's done so many things for the love of this community," she added.

Yet while Gosnell undoubtedly remained popular with his primary-care patients, hints of trouble began to surface with women who turned to him for abortions.

'Extensive' problems

The horror stories stretch back to the 1980s.

Some surfaced in the pages of long-forgotten civil lawsuits; others came to light when the former patients of Gosnell reached out to the media.

There was a common theme: women, some as young as 13, had gone to Gosnell for abortions - some as late as five months into their pregnancies - only to suffer serious complications.

Marie Smith, 33, of West Philadelphia told the Daily News last month that she nearly died after Gosnell performed an abortion on her in 1999.

Smith said that doctors told her that the arm and leg of the fetus had been left inside her. She sued him in 2001 and was awarded $5,000, court records show.

Another patient, Dana Haynes, sued Gosnell in 2008, claiming that he had lacerated her uterus, cervix and small bowel during an abortion in 2008, according to court documents.

Haynes claimed that Gosnell allowed her to bleed for hours before calling an ambulance.

Other patients told similar tales and depicted the clinic as dirty and frightening.

The malpractice complaints were made worse by allegations that Gosnell was relying on uncertified employees to medicate and examine patients.

State officials fined him $1,000 in 1996 because an uncertified assistant had treated one patient and had written a prescription in 1990.

Last month, state investigators said that an unlicensed employee had medicated a pregnant woman, Karnamay Mongar, who died after an abortion at the clinic in November.

Gosnell's attorney did not let him address any of the claims leveled against him and noted that he has not been charged with a crime. But the doctor said that students from numerous local medical schools have worked at his clinic over the years.

He was clearly irked by claims that his clinic was "deplorable" or had "bloodstained floors," as state investigators had said.

"If you're looking for a hospital setting, it's very different. It's designed to be comfortable for our patients," Gosnell said, as he showed this reporter iPhone photos taken inside his clinic, which appeared bright and clean.

Gosnell noted that in December he asked officials from the National Abortion Federation (NAF) to evaluate his clinic.

"They didn't raise any concerns about cleanliness," Gosnell said. "The only issues were administrative. There was no clinical, technical or hygienic criticism at all."

"That's not true at all," said Vicki Saporta, president of NAF, who was dumbfounded by Gosnell's account of how the agency had assessed him.

Saporta told the Daily News yesterday that officials from the NAF, which sets the standard for abortion care in North America, visited Gosnell's clinic for two days because he had requested to become a member of the federation.

She said that NAF "denied his membership request" because the clinic didn't meet the federation's standards.

"There were 19 areas where [the clinic] was in noncompliance with our guidelines. It was quite extensive," Saporta said.

Gosnell, however, appears to believe that his clinic is inviting and comfortable even as outside agencies view it as anything but.

Gosnell's attorney forbade him from addressing much of the other disturbing accusations, noting that the doctor hasn't even been charged with a crime.

But he was clearly bothered by the Frankenstein-like portrait that much of the public has of him because of recent news stories.

"No one is perfect. Everyone tries to be perfect. I aspire to perfection, certainly for my patients," he said, as his eyes drifted and voice trailed off.

Finally, he settled on a thought. "I feel in the long term I will be vindicated."

Staff writer Dana DiFilippo contributed to this report. http://articles.philly.com/2010-03-11/news/24957137_1_medical-license-abortions-clinic

Excuses, excuses after liberal media finally covers Gosnell trial

By Dan Gainor
Published April 16, 2013
FoxNews.com

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/04/16/excuses-excuses-after-liberal-media-finally-covers-gosnell-trial/?intcmp=obinsite#ixzz2Qymg8kak
Now that some in the media have finally been shamed into covering the Gosnell abortion trial, the only thing left for journalists is finding the right alibi for ignoring it for so long. It’s like watching an episode of “Law & Order,” complete with a horrific journalistic crime and an endless stream of media excuses.

In print, online and on TV, lefty journalists came up with excuse after excuse to say they couldn’t possibly have had a typical lefty bias. Journalists offered up racism, classism, ignorance and more as possible excuses.

CNN’s resident media critic Howard Kurtz tried the blame-conservatives approach, claiming “The conservative media didn't do much either.” Ah yes, those tens of thousands of conservative reporters and editors who work, where exactly?

Shame is an amazing thing.

Kurtz couldn’t even be honest or factually correct enough to call the victims “babies,” choosing the lefty term “fetuses,” even for living, breathing children.

CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin was just as willfully ignorant during the April 12 “Anderson Cooper 360.” Toobin knocked any conservative allegation of bias. “Well, the people making those criticisms by and large are conservatives, who are saying the liberal media is trying to protect abortion rights by not showing this horror show. I don’t buy that at all,” he claimed.

Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi raised the tough question. He gave the “conservative Media Research Center” credit (Hint: It’s where I work.) for pushing the story. Then he asked: “Could it be, as conservative bloggers have charged since shortly after the trial began March 18, that the media had taken a pass because Gosnell — who stands accused of killing seven newborn infants and one mother — is an abortion doctor whose alleged crimes run counter to the mainstream media’s supposed support for abortion rights?

He included several unsatisfying answers. ABC didn’t say. NBC tried to dodge. CBS admitted correctly that it planned to cover it. “Fox News has been the only consistent national TV source on the story,” Farhi wrote. He added that MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” would cover it on April 15 and they did.

His own paper had given multiple responses.

On April 11 at 7:08 p.m., health reporter Sarah Kliff defended her failure top cover Gosnell. “I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime, hence why I wrote about all the policy issues you mention,” Kliff said. Conservatives set Twitter aflame that night, making “Gosnell” a trending topic.

By 5:43 p.m. on the next night, the Post had changed its tune. Executive Editor Martin Baron, told the paper’s Erik Wemple Blog: “We believe the story is deserving of coverage by our own staff, and we intend to send a reporter for the resumption of the trial next week. In retrospect, we should have sent a reporter sooner.” The Post was joined by The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Shame is an amazing thing.

CBS, the only broadcast network that has ever previously mentioned the case in its coverage, back in 2011, covered it over the weekend and on Monday morning. The “This Morning” story had reporter Jan Crawford warning that “some of the details you are about to hear are very disturbing” and “there are almost no words” to describe what witnesses said happened in the clinic. One quote in the story had a man saying “the grand jury went to the scene wearing Hazmat suits.”

While CBS acknowledged there was a debate over the media coverage, it did its best to do CYA reporting. The segment interviewed Walt Hunter, who “broke the original story,” and reminded viewers it had reported on the story in 2011. The network left out how CBS had ignored the story ever since, admitting “his trial has received little national news coverage.” The report cited a USA Today column by Kirsten Powers with complaints about the lack of coverage “that went viral on Twitter” and were then picked up by House Republicans.

Liberal outlets, while bashing Gosnell, were mostly dismissive of the whole debate.

The lefty American Prospect came up with “Five Lessons from the Gosnell Abortion-Clinic Controversy” – essentially ways to rationalize the media not covering it. Those included claiming that “many prominent feminists” had covered it and the evil media ignored them and that somehow the stigma of abortion hurts women. The Prospect didn’t explain how women had gotten past that “stigma” 50 million times since Roe v. Wade. And while it mentioned the Powers column, it didn’t even spell her first name correctly.

Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald tried the Kurtz strategy, blaming conservatives. After all, it’s not like most in the media will point out how silly that was. He whined, “it’s difficult to take complaints seriously from people who haven’t used their own public platforms to push a story they think others are now ignoring.”

Even liberal Wikipedia considered deleting its own page on the trial because “his case has not received national attention.” Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. The media ignore something and then when it doesn’t get press, Wikipedia disappears it like in the old Soviet Union.

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, who had created a stir admitting the “trial should be a front-page story,” tallied the 14 different theories why the “case didn't get more media attention.” Most of those were media or liberal rationales. It was an extensive list including the laughable Mother Jones theory that conservatives were “working the refs.” The lefty, Soros-funded magazine charged: “it didn't get much coverage until conservatives decided they could make hay with charges that the story was being deliberately suppressed by the liberal media.”

Because, of course, that’s what conservatives wanted was “hay,” not balanced news coverage on a life-or-death topic. The Mother Jones big complaint was that the conservative media hadn’t reported more thoroughly on the case. That’s right, because the conservative media’s non-existent pool of thousands of reporters is equal to what the Times, Post, Gannett and others can bring to bear.

Conservative blogger David Burge summed up conservative criticism of the media succinctly. “Ben Carson or Kermit Gosnell: guess which doctor the media consider ‘controversial.’”

We all know the answer, but at least journalists have to admit both exist now.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently about media for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/04/16/excuses-excuses-after-liberal-media-finally-covers-gosnell-trial/?intcmp=obinsite#ixzz2QymtHVKE

Medical Examiner: ‘House of Horrors’ Abortionist Stored Baby Body Parts in Cat Food Containers

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – A medical examiner involved with the case of ‘House of Horrors’ abortionist Kermit Gosnell testified on Monday that body parts of babies killed at the facility were stored in cat food containers and water jugs.

Sam Gulino told jurors that the containers were placed in red plastic bags and shoved into the freezer in the basement of Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia. He said that he had to thaw the containers, wherein he discovered the partial remains of 47 aborted babies.

“It was the first time I had to deal with fetuses that were frozen and that I had to thaw out,” Gulino stated.

He explained that some of the containers had only feet in them, and in one instance, there was part of a pelvis and a right leg of a baby that he estimated as being 14-15 weeks in gestation. Gulino said that three of the babies may have been able to survive outside the womb had they not been killed, but could not confirm if any of the children that he examined had been born alive.

Investigators had reported similar findings in 2011 during their initial sweep of the facility, citing jars of baby feet in formaldehyde lined on the shelves, and bags and containers holding the remains of deceased children.

“My grasp of the English language doesn’t really allow me to fully describe how horrific this clinic was — rotting bodies, fetal remains, the smell of urine throughout, blood-stained,” stated District Attorney Seth Williams following the investigation.

The Grand Jury Presentment also outlined that “James Johnson, who worked for Gosnell since 2001, testified [during the investigation] that his duties included collecting the red biohazard bags of fetal remains and putting them in boxes for pickup by an outside firm, Stericycle.” Gosnell did not always pay his Stericycle bills, however, and so some of the fetuses were stored in the freezer until Stericycle resumed service.

Gulino’s testimony marked the fifth week of the trial, which has featured gruesome details from those who worked at the abortion facility with Gosnell. As previously reported, former employee Lynda Williams told the jury last week that when she snipped the neck of a baby who was born into the toilet, his or her arm jumped. However, co-worker Sherry West said that she couldn’t bring herself to kill a tiny newborn that was crying before it died.

“There was this clear glass pan, and I saw it and I thought, ‘What do you expect me to do?’” West told the court.

“It didn’t have eyes or a mouth, but it was screeching, making this noise,” she recalled. “It really freaked me out and I said, ‘Call Dr. Gosnell,’ and I went back out front.”

Similarly, Stephen Massof testified the week prior that it would “rain fetuses” on some days at the facility, and that he witnessed Gosnell snip the spinal cords of at least 100 newborn babies.

“It was literally a beheading,” Massof stated as he described the “snipping” technique. “It is separating the brain from the body.”

Former employee Adrienne Moton likewise admitted last month that she had participated in the procedure.

“I could remember a good 10 times that I did it,” she said, obviously nervous.

Moton advised that one of the children that was aborted was approximately 30 weeks in gestation. She cried as she spoke of the child, a boy, whom she said Gosnell boasted was big enough to walk to the bus stop.

All of Gosnell’s former employees are currently behind bars for their involvement in the matter.

Abortionist Kermit Gosnell

As previously reported, abortionist Kermit Gosnell, 72, was taken into custody in 2011 following an investigation into his practice, called the Women’s Medical Society. Investigators had not initially been aware that Gosnell was running a late-term abortion facility, but visited the location over suspicions about the illegal sale of controlled substances.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, who leveled the charges against the abortionist, described Gosnell’s operation two years ago as a “House of Horrors.”

“[Investigators] found jar after jar after jar of fetal remains and specifically severed feet in jars,” he explained in front of a panel following the compilation of the Grand Jury Report. “They found medical waste bags just strewn everywhere.”

He now faces seven counts of first-degree murder — the most severe charge, which signifies that the acts were premeditated — for the deaths of babies who were believed to have died after birth, as well as one count of third-degree murder for the death of Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old woman who died during an abortion. Over 30 other charges have also been leveled against the abortionist.

Gosnell could face the death penalty for his crimes if convicted.
http://christiannews.net/2013/04/17/medical-examiner-house-of-horrors-abortionist-stored-baby-body-parts-in-cat-food-containers/

Obama: Abortion violators should be prosecuted

By Dave Boyer
The Washington Times
Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/17/obama-abortion-violators-should-be-prosecuted/#ixzz2QylzZjUU
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

Speaking for the first time about the murder trial of an abortionist in Philadelphia, President Obama said Wednesday that any abortion provider who violates the law should be prosecuted.

“If an individual carrying out an abortion, operating a clinic or doing anything else is violating medical ethics, violating the law, then they should be prosecuted,” Mr. Obama said on NBC’s “Today” show.

It was his first comment on the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who operated an abortion clinic in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia and is charged with killing live late-term fetuses after removing them from the womb, among other offenses.

Mr. Obama said he is “familiar” with the case but added, “I can’t comment on it because it’s an active trial.”

Asked about his own views on abortion, Mr. Obama said, “I think President Clinton said it pretty well when he said abortion should be safe, legal and rare.”

As an Illinois state senator in 2003, Mr. Obama voted against several bills that would have provided legal protection to babies who survived an abortion. He said during a debate on one of those bills that he had confidence that doctors would do whatever was necessary to keep an infant alive after birth.

The Illinois bills were attempted after nurses like Jill Stanek and Allison Baker testified that abortion providers allowed infants who were born alive to be left on hospital counters or in rooms, where they sometimes took an hour or more to die.

His campaign documents later said he voted against such “born-alive infants protection” bills because they would undermine Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a federal constitutional right. One of the Illinois bills he voted against specified that no provision of it should be construed as denying federal abortion rights.

• Cheryl Wetzstein contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/17/obama-abortion-violators-should-be-prosecuted/#ixzz2Qyljfgyx
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72 lawmakers to ABC, NBC, CBS: Explain failure to cover abortionist Kermit Gosnell

By Cheryl K. Chumley
The Washington Times
Thursday, April 18, 2013

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/18/72-lawmakers-abc-nbc-cbs-explain-failure-cover-abo/#ixzz2QyclTXbv
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

Seventy-two members of Congress on Wednesday sent letters to executives at three major networks — ABC, CBS, NBC — expressing outrage at their blatant avoidance of Kermit Gosnell’s grisly abortion trial.

Calling it a purposeful blackout, the legislators said they were “profoundly appalled” at the networks’ bias, The Daily Caller reported.

“The broadcasters’ blackout of the Planned Parenthood infanticide lobbying scandal and the Gosnell ‘House of Horrors’ murder trial are the biggest and most politically motivated media cover-ups in our nation’s history,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, as reported by The Daily Caller. “Censorship and media bias allows the corrupt abortion industry to profit at the expense of innocent women and children. The mainstream media has a responsibility to report the truth, not turn a blind eye to the biggest civil rights issue of our time.”

Witnesses at the trial have said that Mr. Gosnell instructed them on the best way to cut babies’ necks to ensure death. Mr. Gosnell is charged with killing seven babies and one adult woman, and testimony as his trial enters its fifth week has been gruesome at times.

The lawmakers also wrote, The Daily Caller reported: “Surely … [the details of the trial] meet your threshold criteria for a national news segment. Yet, despite this obvious fact, coverage of these stories has eluded your news divisions. … We see no excuse for your failure to report these stories other than blatant media bias.”

© Copyright 2013 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/18/72-lawmakers-abc-nbc-cbs-explain-failure-cover-abo/#ixzz2QyceLsFe
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Liberal commentator admits the left is avoiding Kermit Gosnell trial to protect abortion rights

By Cheryl K. Chumley
The Washington Times
Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/17/liberal-commentator-admits-left-avoiding-kermit-go/#ixzz2QycMVoCX
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It took almost five weeks, but national media outlets finally are beginning to cover the horrific abortion trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell — and at least one of liberal political bent has admitted that the blind eye was purposeful, in order to protect the future of abortion.

“For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights,” said Marc Lamont Hill, an associate professor at Columbia University and a frequent television analyst who advances liberal views. He made the comment during a HuffPost Live segment that looked at the media blackout.

SEE RELATED: Obama: Abortion violators should be prosecuted

“Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is,” he said, as The Huffington Post reported.

The trial has released what even President Obama called earlier this week “unsettling details” about the abortion industry.

For instance: One witness testified that Dr. Gosnell taught him how to cut the necks of babies in order the make sure they died. And others have testified they were called to perform abortions, despite little training or medical licensing.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/17/liberal-commentator-admits-left-avoiding-kermit-go/#ixzz2Qyc5jSq5
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A Jury of Your Peers
How conservatives used Twitter to goad the media into covering the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell.

By David Weigel|Posted Monday, April 15, 2013, at 8:38 PM

It started with a Twitpic. By April 11, the PhillyBurbs.com columnist J.D. Mullane had spent weeks watching the trial of abortionist and accused murderer Kermit Gosnell. Mullane had tweeted links to Gosnell trial updates from LifeSiteNews.com, and links that suggested a biased media was ignoring the trial—“Guns and babies: A tale of two massacres.” He’d sparred with pro-choice tweeters. “What went into Gosnell's red waste bags was no different that what goes in the waste at any Planned Parenthood clinic,” he’d said to another suburban columnist.

“What happens at Planned Parenthood clinic is legal, safe,” said the columnist, Kate Fratti.

“It’s not safe for the children snuffed,” said Mullane.

On April 11, Mullane covered the trial in person and noticed the rows of empty media seats. They were largely empty. “It was just so striking to me,” he said. “I took out my iPhone and snapped a picture, only intending to use it in my weekly column.” Mullane retweeted the photo a few more times, with different captions, because it had been packed into a snowball. Kirsten Powers, a Fox News commentator who usually reports from the left, published a USA Today column on the “blackout.”

Troy Newman, president of the Kansas-based Operation Rescue, had been on the phone for “five or ten minutes” with two other pro-lifers, launching a campaign to “Break the Gosnell Media Blackout.” People who wanted the media at the trial would tweet the accused’s last name—#Gosnell—to get it trending, preferably attached to some facts about the trial. The severed feet in jars. The urine stench in the unclean facilities. The “raining fetuses and blood.” It was, said Newman, “a perfect case that makes the point I’ve been making for 20 years.” A Facebook page set out the rules, and the mission:

Can you imagine the media reaction if the case were reversed and it was a pro-lifer on trial for 7 counts of 1st degree murder? Exactly. We are going to make "new media" work on behalf of Kermit Gosnell's innocent, helpless victims. The mainstream media is acting like nothing is happening, however—if we unite & spread the word far enough, we can FORCE the media to cover this horrific story.
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It worked. An estimated 106,000 #Gosnell tweets later, on April 15, Mullane reported that major networks and newspapers had sent their reporters to cover the trial—Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post. Hours later, after bombs went off in the last leg of the Boston Marathon, hopes of pushing this to “the front page” waned. But in between the Twitpic and the breaking news, there’s a lesson about how conservatives can use social media—and only social media—to move the press.

Why did it take social media? Conservatives’ own tools weren’t working. Operation Rescue had dispatched its own reporters to the trial—chiefly Cheryl Sullenger, a policy adviser to the group who spent two years in prison conspiring to blow up the Alavarado Medical Center. (She’s since apologized.) Starting in March, Sullenger was filing reports from inside Gosnell’s Philadelphia trial, with photos, one of a baby so large that Gosnell joked it “could have walked to the bus stop.”

It didn’t cross over. There were scattered media reports on the trial, and plenty of Philadelphia-area coverage. Some magazines—Slate included—had covered the Gosnell case two years earlier, when a grand jury report of remarkable, grisly detail was put out by the city. But there was no camera in the courtroom, and news organizations didn’t feel any pressure to cover the story.

Thus: Twitter. The single most effective campaign to goad the media into Gosnell coverage came from Mollie Hemingway, a press critic for the blog GetReligion. Hemingway did not wait for reporters or editors to comment on the story; she didn’t email them and wait for comment. “Inspired by Kirsten Powers’ USA Today column,” she tweeted at them, then recorded the unanswered tweets for readers, starting the experiment with Associated Press social issues reporter David Crary. “His favorite stories deal with homosexuality,” wrote Hemingway, “but he also gives some love to abortion-related stories.” Just not to Gosnell.

This was a warm-up: Hemingway found a reporter who could personify that photo of the empty court benches. She tweeted at Sarah Kliff, the health care policy reporter for the Washington Post’s WonkBlog subsite.

WaPo health policy reporter @SarahKliff has 80+ site hits on Akin/Fluke/Komen and zero on Gosnell? Would love an explanation.

Kliff tweeted back:

Hi Molly – I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime, hence why I wrote about all the policy issues you mention.

It was exactly the wrong response. Hemingway’s item about the exchange was shared or liked on Facebook 68,000 times—nearly seven times more than the #Gosnell campaign page, which was operating independently of all this. By Friday morning Kliff’s tweet was prima facie evidence for conservatives that the media was spiking the story; one site offered a “tip line” for any reporters whose papers spiked Gosnell coverage. By Friday afternoon, the Post was regretting that “we didn’t send a reporter sooner” to the trial. By Monday, Kliff was in full mea culpa mode: “When I described the case of abortion provider Kermit Gosnell on Twitter last week as a local crime story, I was clearly wrong.”

Why did this work so well? Not long ago, the preferred method of browbeating the media into covering a story was “melting the phones,” or deluging a reporter with emails. Why were tweets and Twitpics so much better equipped to turn on the shame-rays?

Easy: It’s completely public. It’s a limiting medium, too, one that limits a reporter’s response to 140 characters. That’s excruciating for a member of the fourth estate; I once ticked off a longform magazine writer and got a five-paragraph email demanding that I tweak one sentence describing his article. There’s no real entry fee to Twitter, no difference between the user with 40 followers, the media critic with a question, or the TV anchor who wonders where this hashtag came from. Almost every factor that elevated the #Gosnell story was present for the Trayvon Martin story. That’s not comparing the facts of the cases; that’s just saying, the hashtag knows no mercy.

Neither does the news cycle. By Monday afternoon, the media trend-spotters who’d rediscovered Gosnell were combing Twitter for Boston Marathon survivors and witnesses. In the Philadelphia courtroom, surrounded—maybe temporarily—by the national press, Mullane was eyed warily by a bailiff.

“ ‘Anybody who is seen taking pictures, we are taking the phone and throwing it in the toilet,’ ” said the bailiff, according to Mullane. “ ‘You’re never getting it again.’ That’s one reason, maybe, that TV isn’t interested in the story.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/04/kermit_gosnell_abortion_trial_conservatives_took_to_twitter_to_shame_mainstream.html

Judge Drops 3 Murder Charges Against Gosnell

By DAN STAMM and MARYCLAIRE DALE
NBCPhiladelphia.com

April 23, 2013

It took the prosecution five weeks to present their case against West Philly abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. It took defense attorney Jack McMahon a couple of hours to knock a big hole in a critical part of their argument.

On the very first day he began to present his defense, McMahon was able to convince the judge to drop three first-degree murder charges against Gosnell. McMahon argued that "there is not one piece...of objective, scientific evidence that anyone was born alive" at Gosnell's clinic.

Judge Jeffery Minehart heard the prosecutions counter argument and then went into chambers for about thirty minutes. Before he came out to announce his decision, his court clerk cautioned the jury as well as the two dozen or so journalists, bloggers and observers in the courtroom not to overreact when the ruling was read.

Minehart granted the acquittals and broke for lunch. Journalists raced out of the room to get word to their news outlets, which ran the gamut from national media like CNN, Fox News and the New York Times, to bloggers working for primarily conservative organizations.

Prosecutors have argued that the babies were viable and that Gosnell and his staff cut them in the back of the neck to kill them. They put 36 witnesses on the stand, including former workers who testified that they saw babies breath, watched limbs move and listened to cries and whines.

Gosnell was originally charged with eight counts of murder. Seven first-degree murder charges are for accusations that he killed seven newborns. The third-degree murder charge is for the 2009 death of Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old Bhutanese refugee prosecutors say received lethal doses of sedatives and painkillers at the clinic while awaiting an abortion.

.He also is charged with violating Pennsylvania abortion law by performing abortions after 24 weeks, operating a corrupt organization and other crimes.was originally charged with seven counts of first degree murder.

Gosnell, 72, still faces five remaining murder charges and the possibility of the death penalty if convicted of any of the first-degree cases.

Judge Jeffery Minehart has not explained the reasoning behind today's ruling.

A gag order remains in place for the trial, but McMahon did have a few brief things to say to the press as the court recessed for lunch.

“We still have a long way to go,” McMahon said.

Former staffer Eileen O'Neill is also on trial. The 56-year-old Phoenixville woman is charged with practicing medicine without a license, and taking part in a corrupt organization. Six of the nine theft by deception charges she faced were dropped today as well because the prosecution didn't present any witnesses to support those charges.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/51633712/ns/local_news-philadelphia_pa/t/judge-drops-murder-charges-against-gosnell/&c=nPVrgKML_6umZT3oW0IHvTJNV8Q_JdYF6lnyDV7SQis&mkt=en-us

REPORT OF THE GRAND JURY

IN THE COURT OF COMMON PLEAS
FIRST JUDICIAL DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA
CRIMINAL TRIAL DIVISION
IN RE : MISC. NO. 0009901-2008
COUNTY INVESTIGATING :
GRAND JURY XXIII : C-17
____________________________________________
REPORT OF THE GRAND JURY
__________________________________________
R. SETH WILLIAMS
District Attorney

IN TilE COURT OF COMMON PL(l:ASı
FII{ST ,JUI)ICIAL DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIAı
CRIMINAL TRIAL DIVISIONı
IN RE MISe. NO. 0009901-2008
COUNTY INVESTIGATING
(;RAND JURY XXIII C-17
FINDINGS AND ORDER
AND NOW, this / r of January, 2011:' after having examioed the Report and
Records of the County Investigating Grand Jury XXIII, this Court finds that the Report is
within the authority of the Investigating Grand Jury and is otherwise in accordance with
the provisions of the Investigating Grand Jury Act, 42 Pa.C.S. §4541, et seq. In view of
these findings, the Court hereby accepts the Report and refers it to the Clerk of Court for
tiling as a public record.
BY THE COURT:

IN THE COURT OF COMMON PLEAS
FIRST JUDICIAL DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA
CRIMINAL TRIAL DIVISION
IN RE : MISC. NO. 0009901-2008
COUNTY INVESTIGATING :
GRAND JURY XXIII : C-17
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Overview .....................................................................................................................1
II. The Raid......................................................................................................................19
III. Gosnell’s Illegal Practice ...........................................................................................23
IV. The Intentional Killing of Viable Babies..................................................................99
V. The Death of Karnamaya Mongar ...........................................................................117
VI. How Did This Go On So Long? ................................................................................137
Pennsylvania Department of Health ............................................................137
Pennsylvania Department of State ...............................................................173
Philadelphia Department of Public Health..................................................199
Other Doctors .................................................................................................212
VII. The Criminal Charges ...............................................................................................219
VIII. Recommendations of the Grand Jury ......................................................................247
Appendices:
A. Anesthesia Chart
B. Anesthesia for Surgery
C. Price List
D. K. Mongar file

Section I: Overview
This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we
mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester
of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with
scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in
which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among
them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two
occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that
something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.
Let us say right up front that we realize this case will be used by those on both
sides of the abortion debate. We ourselves cover a spectrum of personal beliefs about the
morality of abortion. For us as a criminal grand jury, however, the case is not about that
controversy; it is about disregard of the law and disdain for the lives and health of
mothers and infants. We find common ground in exposing what happened here, and in
recommending measures to prevent anything like this from ever happening again.
The “Women’s Medical Society”
That was the impressive-sounding name of the clinic operated in West
Philadelphia, at 38th and Lancaster, by Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D. Gosnell seemed
impressive as well. A child of the neighborhood, Gosnell spent almost four decades
running this clinic, giving back – so it appeared – to the community in which he
continued to live and work.
But the truth was something very different, and evident to anyone who stepped

1

inside. The clinic reeked of animal urine, courtesy of the cats that were allowed to roam
(and defecate) freely. Furniture and blankets were stained with blood. Instruments were
not properly sterilized. Disposable medical supplies were not disposed of; they were
reused, over and over again. Medical equipment – such as the defibrillator, the EKG, the
pulse oximeter, the blood pressure cuff – was generally broken; even when it worked, it
wasn’t used. The emergency exit was padlocked shut. And scattered throughout, in
cabinets, in the basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags and plastic jugs, were fetal
remains. It was a baby charnel house.
The people who ran this sham medical practice included no doctors other than
Gosnell himself, and not even a single nurse. Two of his employees had been to medical
school, but neither of them were licensed physicians. They just pretended to be.
Everyone called them “Doctor,” even though they, and Gosnell, knew they weren’t.
Among the rest of the staff, there was no one with any medical licensing or relevant
certification at all. But that didn’t stop them from making diagnoses, performing
procedures, administering drugs.
Because the real business of the “Women’s Medical Society” was not health; it
was profit. There were two primary parts to the operation. By day it was a prescription
mill; by night an abortion mill. A constant stream of “patients” came through during
business hours and, for the proper payment, left with scripts for Oxycontin and other
controlled substances, for themselves and their friends. Gosnell didn’t see these
“patients”; he didn’t even show up at the office during the day. He just left behind blank,
pre-signed prescription pads, and had his unskilled, unauthorized workers take care of the
rest. The fake prescriptions brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But this

2

drug-selling operation is the subject of separate investigation by federal authorities.
Our focus was on the other side of the business.
Murder in plain sight
With abortion, as with prescriptions, Gosnell’s approach was simple: keep volume
high, expenses low – and break the law. That was his competitive edge.
Pennsylvania, like other states, permits legal abortion within a regulatory
framework. Physicians must, for example, provide counseling about the nature of the
procedure. Minors must have parental or judicial consent. All women must wait 24
hours after first visiting the facility, in order to fully consider their decision. But
Gosnell’s compliance with such requirements was casual at best. At the Women’s
Medical Society, the only question that really mattered was whether you had the cash.
Too young? No problem. Didn’t want to wait? Gosnell provided same-day service.
The real key to the business model, though, was this: Gosnell catered to the
women who couldn’t get abortions elsewhere – because they were too pregnant. Most
doctors won’t perform late second-trimester abortions, from approximately the 20th week
of pregnancy, because of the risks involved. And late-term abortions after the 24th week
of pregnancy are flatly illegal. But for Dr. Gosnell, they were an opportunity. The bigger
the baby, the more he charged.
There was one small problem. The law requires a measurement of gestational
age, usually done by an ultrasound. The ultrasound film would leave documentary proof
that the abortion was illegal. Gosnell’s solution was simply to fudge the measurement
process. Instead of hiring proper ultrasound technicians, he “trained” the staff himself,
showing them how to aim the ultrasound probe at an angle to make the fetus look

3

smaller. If one of his workers nonetheless recorded an ultrasound measurement that was
too big, it would just be redone. Invariably these second ultrasounds would come in
lower. In fact, almost every time a second ultrasound was taken, the gestational age
would be recorded as precisely 24.5 weeks – slightly past the statutory cutoff.
Apparently Gosnell thought he would get away with abortions that were just a little
illegal. In reality, of course, most of these pregnancies were considerably more
advanced.
But the illegal abortion business also posed an additional dilemma. Babies that
big are hard to get out. Gosnell’s approach, whenever possible, was to force full labor
and delivery of premature infants on ill-informed women. The women would check in
during the day, make payment, and take labor-inducing drugs. The doctor wouldn’t
appear until evening, often 8:00, 9:00, or 10:00 p.m., and only then deal with any of the
women who were ready to deliver. Many of them gave birth before he even got there.
By maximizing the pain and danger for his patients, he minimized the work, and cost, for
himself and his staff. The policy, in effect, was labor without labor.
There remained, however, a final difficulty. When you perform late-term
“abortions” by inducing labor, you get babies. Live, breathing, squirming babies. By 24
weeks, most babies born prematurely will survive if they receive appropriate medical
care. But that was not what the Women’s Medical Society was about. Gosnell had a
simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered: he killed them. He didn’t call it
that. He called it “ensuring fetal demise.” The way he ensured fetal demise was by
sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called
that “snipping.”

4

Over the years, there were hundreds of “snippings.” Sometimes, if Gosnell was
unavailable, the “snipping” was done by one of his fake doctors, or even by one of the
administrative staff. But all the employees of the Women’s Medical Society knew.
Everyone there acted as if it wasn’t murder at all.
Most of these acts cannot be prosecuted, because Gosnell destroyed the files.
Among the relatively few cases that could be specifically documented, one was Baby
Boy A. His 17-year-old mother was almost 30 weeks pregnant – seven and a half months
– when labor was induced. An employee estimated his birth weight as approaching six
pounds. He was breathing and moving when Dr. Gosnell severed his spine and put the
body in a plastic shoebox for disposal. The doctor joked that this baby was so big he
could “walk me to the bus stop.” Another, Baby Boy B, whose body was found at the
clinic frozen in a one-gallon spring-water bottle, was at least 28 weeks of gestational age
when he was killed. Baby C was moving and breathing for 20 minutes before an
assistant came in and cut the spinal cord, just the way she had seen Gosnell do it so many
times.
And these were not even the worst cases. Gosnell made little effort to hide his
illegal abortion practice. But there were some, “the really big ones,” that even he was
afraid to perform in front of others. These abortions were scheduled for Sundays, a day
when the clinic was closed and none of the regular employees were present. Only one
person was allowed to assist with these special cases – Gosnell’s wife. The files for these
patients were not kept at the office; Gosnell took them home with him and disposed of
them. We may never know the details of these cases. We do know, however, that,
during the rest of the week, Gosnell routinely aborted and killed babies in the sixth and

5

seventh month of pregnancy. The Sunday babies must have been bigger still.
Butcher of women
Dr. Gosnell didn’t just kill babies. He was also a deadly threat to mothers. Not
every abortion could be completed by inducing labor and delivery. On these occasions,
Gosnell would attempt to remove the fetus himself. The consequences were often
calamitous – though that didn’t stop the doctor from trying to cover them up.
One woman, for example, was left lying in place for hours after Gosnell tore her
cervix and colon while trying, unsuccessfully, to extract the fetus. Relatives who came to
pick her up were refused entry into the building; they had to threaten to call the police.
They eventually found her inside, bleeding and incoherent, and transported her to the
hospital, where doctors had to remove almost half a foot of her intestines.
On another occasion, Gosnell simply sent a patient home, after keeping her
mother waiting for hours, without telling either of them that she still had fetal parts inside
her. Gosnell insisted she was fine, even after signs of serious infection set in over the
next several days. By the time her mother got her to the emergency room, she was
unconscious and near death.
A nineteen-year-old girl was held for several hours after Gosnell punctured her
uterus. As a result of the delay, she fell into shock from blood loss, and had to undergo a
hysterectomy.
One patient went into convulsions during an abortion, fell off the procedure table,
and hit her head on the floor. Gosnell wouldn’t call an ambulance, and wouldn’t let the
woman’s companion leave the building so that he could call an ambulance.
Undoubtedly there were many similar incidents, but even they do not demonstrate

6

Gosnell at his most dangerous. Day in and day out, the greatest risks came when the
doctor wasn’t even there. Gosnell set up his practice to rely entirely on the untrained
actions of his unqualified employees. They administered drugs to induce labor, often
causing rapid and painful dilation and contractions. But Gosnell did not like it when
women screamed or moaned in his clinic, so the staff was under instruction to sedate
them into stupor. Of course his assistants had no idea how to manage the powerful
narcotics they were using. Gosnell prepared a list of preset dosage levels to be
administered in his absence. But no allowances were made for individual patient
variations, or for any monitoring of vital signs. All that mattered was the money. The
more you paid, the more pain relief you received. It was all completely illegal, and
completely unsafe.
Only in one class of cases did Gosnell exercise any real care with these dangerous
sedatives. On those rare occasions when the patient was a white woman from the
suburbs, Gosnell insisted that he be consulted at every step. When an employee asked
him why, he said it was “the way of the world.”
Karnamaya Mongar was not one of the privileged patients. She was a 41-yearold,
refugee who had recently come to the United States from a resettlement camp in
Nepal. When she arrived at the clinic, Gosnell, as usual, was not there. Office workers
had her sign various forms that she could not read, and then began doping her up. She
received repeated unmonitored, unrecorded intravenous injections of Demerol, a sedative
seldom used in recent years because of its dangers. Gosnell liked it because it was cheap.
After several hours, Mrs. Mongar simply stopped breathing. When employees
finally noticed, Gosnell was called in and briefly attempted to give CPR. He couldn’t use

7

the defibrillator (it was broken); nor did he administer emergency medications that might
have restarted her heart. After further crucial delay, paramedics finally arrived, but Mrs.
Mongar was probably brain dead before they were even called. In the meantime, the
clinic staff hooked up machinery and rearranged her body to make it look like they had
been in the midst of a routine, safe abortion procedure.
Even then, there might have been some slim hope of reviving Mrs. Mongar. The
paramedics were able to generate a weak pulse. But, because of the cluttered hallways
and the padlocked emergency door, it took them over twenty minutes just to find a way to
get her out of the building. Doctors at the hospital managed to keep her heart beating, but
they never knew what they were trying to treat, because Gosnell and his staff lied about
how much anesthesia they had given, and who had given it. By that point, there was no
way to restore any neurological activity. Life support was removed the next day.
Karnamaya Mongar was pronounced dead.
See no evil
Pennsylvania is not a third-world country. There were several oversight agencies
that stumbled upon and should have shut down Kermit Gosnell long ago. But none of
them did, not even after Karnamaya Mongar’s death. In the end, Gosnell was only
caught by accident, when police raided his offices to seize evidence of his illegal
prescription selling. Once law enforcement agents went in, they couldn’t help noticing
the disgusting conditions, the dazed patients, the discarded fetuses. That is why the
complete regulatory collapse that occurred here is so inexcusable. It should have taken
only one look.
The first line of defense was the Pennsylvania Department of Health. The

8

department’s job is to audit hospitals and outpatient medical facilities, like Gosnell’s, to
make sure that they follow the rules and provide safe care. The department had contact
with the Women’s Medical Society dating back to 1979, when it first issued approval to
open an abortion clinic. It did not conduct another site review until 1989, ten years later.
Numerous violations were already apparent, but Gosnell got a pass when he promised to
fix them. Site reviews in 1992 and 1993 also noted various violations, but again failed to
ensure they were corrected.
But at least the department had been doing something up to that point, however
ineffectual. After 1993, even that pro forma effort came to an end. Not because of
administrative ennui, although there had been plenty. Instead, the Pennsylvania
Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion
clinics at all. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of
administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that
inspections would be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions. Better to leave
clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and
babies would pay.
The only exception to this live-and-let-die policy was supposed to be for
complaints dumped directly on the department’s doorstep. Those, at least, would be
investigated. Except that there were complaints about Gosnell, repeatedly. Several
different attorneys, representing women injured by Gosnell, contacted the department. A
doctor from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia hand-delivered a complaint, advising the
department that numerous patients he had referred for abortions came back from Gosnell
with the same venereal disease. The medical examiner of Delaware County informed the

9

department that Gosnell had performed an illegal abortion on a 14-year-old girl carrying
a 30-week-old baby. And the department received official notice that a woman named
Karnamaya Mongar had died at Gosnell’s hands.
Yet not one of these alarm bells – not even Mrs. Mongar’s death – prompted the
department to look at Gosnell or the Women’s Medical Society. Only after the raid
occurred, and the story hit the press, did the department choose to act. Suddenly there
were no administrative, legal, or policy barriers; within weeks an order was issued to
close the clinic. And as this grand jury investigation widened, department officials
“lawyered up,” hiring a high-priced law firm to represent them at taxpayer expense. Had
they spent as much effort on inspection as they did on attorneys, none of this would have
happened to begin with.
But even this total abdication by the Department of Health might not have been
fatal. Another agency with authority in the health field, the Pennsylvania Department of
State, could have stopped Gosnell single-handedly. While the Department of Health
regulates facilities, the Department of State, through its Board of Medicine, licenses and
oversees individual physicians. Like their colleagues at Health, however, Department of
State officials were repeatedly confronted with evidence about Gosnell, and repeatedly
chose to do nothing.
Indeed, in many ways State had more damning information than anyone else.
Almost a decade ago, a former employee of Gosnell presented the Board of Medicine
with a complaint that laid out the whole scope of his operation: the unclean, unsterile
conditions; the unlicensed workers; the unsupervised sedation; the underage abortion
patients; even the over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street. The

10

department assigned an investigator, whose investigation consisted primarily of an offsite
interview with Gosnell. The investigator never inspected the facility, questioned other
employees, or reviewed any records. Department attorneys chose to accept this
incomplete investigation, and dismissed the complaint as unconfirmed.
Shortly thereafter the department received an even more disturbing report – about
a woman, years before Karnamaya Mongar, who died of sepsis after Gosnell perforated
her uterus. The woman was 22 years old. A civil suit against Gosnell was settled for
almost a million dollars, and the insurance company forwarded the information to the
department. That report should have been all the confirmation needed for the complaint
from the former employee that was already in the department’s possession. Instead, the
department attorneys dismissed this complaint too. They concluded that death was just
an “inherent” risk, not something that should jeopardize a doctor’s medical license.
The same thing happened at least twice more: the department received complaints
about lawsuits against Gosnell, but dismissed them as meaningless. A department
attorney said there was no “pattern of conduct.” He never bothered to check a national
litigation database, which would have shown that Gosnell had paid out damages to at
least five different women whose internal organs he had punctured during abortions.
Apparently, the missing piece in the “pattern” was press coverage. Once that began, after
the raid, the department attorney quickly managed to secure a license suspension against
Gosnell.
Similar inaction occurred at the municipal level. The Philadelphia Department of
Public Health does not regulate doctors or medical facilities; but it is supposed to protect
the public’s health. Philadelphia health department employees regularly visited the

Women’s Medical Society to retrieve blood samples for testing purposes, but never
noticed, or more likely never bothered to report, that anything was amiss. Another
employee inspected the clinic in response to a complaint that dead fetuses were being
stored in paper bags in the employees’ lunch refrigerator. The inspection confirmed
numerous violations of protocols for storage and disposal of infectious waste. But no
follow-up was ever done, and the violations continued to the end.
A health department representative also came to the clinic as part of a citywide
vaccination program. She promptly discovered that Gosnell was scamming the program;
more importantly, she was the only employee, city or state, who actually tried to do
something about the appalling things she saw there. By asking questions and poking
around, she was able to file detailed reports identifying many of the most egregious
elements of Gosnell’s practice. It should have been enough to stop him. But instead her
reports went into a black hole, weeks before Karnamaya Mongar walked into the
Woman’s Medical Society.
Ironically, the doctor at CHOP who personally complained to the Pennsylvania
Department of Health about the spread of venereal disease from Gosnell’s clinic, the
doctor who used to refer teenage girls to Gosnell for abortions, became the head of the
city’s health department two years ago. But nothing changed in the time leading up to
Mrs. Mongar’s death. And it wasn’t just government agencies that did nothing. The
Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and its subsidiary, Penn Presbyterian Medical
Center, are in the same neighborhood as Gosnell’s office. State law requires hospitals to
report complications from abortions. A decade ago, a Gosnell patient died at HUP after a
botched abortion, and the hospital apparently filed the necessary report. But the victims

12

kept coming in. At least three other Gosnell patients were brought to Penn facilities for
emergency surgery; emergency room personnel said they have treated many others as
well. And at least one additional woman was hospitalized there after Gosnell had begun
a flagrantly illegal abortion of a 29-week-old fetus. Yet, other than the one initial report,
Penn could find not a single case in which it complied with its legal duty to alert
authorities to the danger. Not even when a second woman turned up virtually dead.
So too with the National Abortion Federation. NAF is an association of abortion
providers that upholds the strictest health and legal standards for its members. Gosnell,
bizarrely, applied for admission shortly after Karnamaya Mongar’s death. Despite his
various efforts to fool her, the evaluator from NAF readily noted that records were not
properly kept, that risks were not explained, that patients were not monitored, that
equipment was not available, that anesthesia was misused. It was the worst abortion
clinic she had ever inspected. Of course, she rejected Gosnell’s application. She just
never told anyone in authority about all the horrible, dangerous things she had seen.
Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this
was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in
question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and
because the subject was the political football of abortion.
Names
Obviously, Kermit Gosnell is the man with the clearest criminal culpability for
what happened here. But many of the people who worked for the Women’s Medical
Society should also be charged with criminal offenses; and many of the people who
worked for the public, while not criminally liable, should be called out.

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We group the criminal charges into three categories: charges arising from the
baby murders and illegal abortions; charges in connection with the death of Karnamaya
Mongar; and charges stemming generally from the ongoing operation of a criminal
enterprise.
We were able to document seven specific incidents in which Gosnell or one of his
employees severed the spine of a viable baby born alive. We charge Gosnell, Lynda
Williams, Adrienne Moton, and Steven Massof with murder in the first degree. Along
with Sherry West, they are also charged with conspiracy to commit murder in relation to
the hundreds of unidentifiable instances in which they planned to, and no doubt did, carry
out similar killings. We also charge Gosnell with various violations of the Abortion
Control Act, including infanticide and performing illegal late-term abortions. Charged as
co-conspirators with him in this regard are Williams, West, and Pearl Gosnell, his wife.
Two employees were Gosnell’s accomplices in the administration of the drugs
that killed Karnamaya Mongar. We charge Gosnell, Lynda Williams, and Sherry West
with third-degree murder, drug delivery resulting in death, violations of the controlled
substance act and conspiracy. Gosnell, West, and Elizabeth Hampton are charged with
hindering apprehension (and Hampton also with perjury) for lying to the police, to the
hospital, and to us about how this woman died.
Illegality was so integral to the operation of the Women’s Medical Society that
the business itself was a corrupt organization. We charge Gosnell, Lynda Williams,
Sherry West, Adrienne Moton, Maddline Joe, Tina Baldwin, Pearl Gosnell, Steven
Massof, and Eileen O’Neill with running that organization or conspiring to do so. We
charge Massof and O’Neill, in conspiracy with Gosnell, with theft by deception for

14

pretending to be doctors, and billing for their services as if they were licensed physicians.
Gosnell should also be charged with obstruction and tampering for altering his patient
files to hide illegality, and for destroying or removing other files entirely. As a final note,
we charge Gosnell and Tina Baldwin, his employee, with corrupting the morals of a
minor. Gosnell hired Tina’s 15-year-old daughter as a staff member. She was required
to work 50-hour weeks, starting after school until past midnight, during which she was
exposed to the full horrors of Gosnell’s practice. Bad enough that he expected grown-ups
to do it.
That leaves the government employees whose job was to make sure that things
like this don’t happen. Worth special mention is Janice Staloski of the Pennsylvania
Department of Health, who personally participated in the 1992 site visit, but decided to
let Gosnell slide on the violations that were already evident then. She eventually rose to
become director of the division that was supposed to regulate abortion providers, but
never looked at Gosnell despite specific complaints from lawyers, a doctor, and a medical
examiner. After she was nonetheless promoted, her successor as division director,
Cynthia Boyne, failed to order an investigation of the clinic even when Karnamaya
Mongar died there. Senior legal counsel Kenneth Brody insisted that the department had
no legal obligation to monitor abortion clinics, even though it exercised such a duty until
the Ridge administration, and exercised it again as soon as Gosnell became big news. The
agency’s head lawyer, chief counsel Christine Dutton, defended the department’s
indifference: “People die,” she said.
Lawyers at the Pennsylvania Department of State behaved in the same fashion.
Attorneys Mark Greenwald, Charles Hartwell, David Grubb, Andrew Kramer, William

15

Newport, Juan Ruiz, and Kerry Maloney were confronted with a growing pile of
disquieting facts about Gosnell, including a detailed, inside account from a former
employee, and a 22-year-old dead woman. Every time, though, they managed to dismiss
the evidence as immaterial. Every time, that is, until the facts hit the fan.
We want better from our public servants. We trust that their actions will be
reviewed, and that they will be held accountable.
What to do
If oversight agencies expect to prevent future Dr. Gosnells, they must find the
fortitude to enact and enforce the necessary regulations. Rules must be more than words
on paper.
We recommend that the Pennsylvania Department of Health plug the hole it has
created for abortion clinics. They should be explicitly regulated as ambulatory surgical
facilities, so that they are inspected annually and held to the same standards as all other
outpatient procedure centers. Inspectors should review patient files, including ultrasound
images, on site. Equipment, and employees’ licenses, should be scrutinized. Secondtrimester
abortions should be performed or supervised by physicians board-certified in
obstetrics and gynecology.
The Pennsylvania Department of State must repair its review process. Complaints
should be taken by internet and telephone, and patients should be assured of
confidentiality and a response when the investigation is completed. No complaint should
be dismissed until the subject’s full history of prior complaints has been considered, and
malpractice databases have been examined. Reports about individual doctors should be
cross-checked against reports about the medical offices where they have worked, and

16

vice versa.
The Philadelphia Department of Public Health should do at least as much to
control infectious medical waste as it does to inspect swimming pools and beauty parlors.
Statutory changes are necessary as well. Infanticide and third-trimester abortion
are serious crimes. The two-year statute of limitations currently applicable for these
offenses is inadequate to their severity. The limitations period for late abortion should be
extended to five years; infanticide, like homicide, should have none. Impersonating a
physician is also a serious, and potentially very dangerous, act. Yet under current law it
is not a crime at all. An appropriate criminal provision should be enacted. There may
also be other statutory and regulatory revisions that we, as lay people, have not thought to
consider. Legislative hearings may be appropriate to further examine these issues.
We recognize that these relatively technical recommendations will be unsatisfying
to those fighting the abortion battle. “Pro-choice” advocates will argue that the real
solution is government-funded abortion. “Pro-lifers” will see the case as an indictment of
all legalized abortion.
We must leave these broader questions to others; our authority as a grand jury is
more limited. But we exercise its full extent by recommending the maximum response
available under the criminal law: murder charges. If you willfully disregard a deadly risk
to the mother’s life, and kill her, you will be charged with murder. If you deliver a viable
baby, born alive, and kill it, you will be charged with murder. That prospect may make
doctors more careful about performing abortions, especially abortions approaching the
legal limit. We hope so.

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18 [blank page]

Section II: The Raid
On February 18, 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and detectives from
the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office executed search warrants at the Women’s
Medical Society, a clinic operated by Dr. Kermit Barron Gosnell at 3801-05 Lancaster
Avenue in Philadelphia. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the
Philadelphia Police Department, and the District Attorney’s Dangerous Drug-Offender
Unit had been investigating Gosnell and his clinic for months, based on reports of illegal
prescription drug activity.
During the drug-trafficking investigation, District Attorney’s Detective James
Wood learned from one of the clinic employees that a woman had died in November
2009, following an abortion procedure. Detective Wood discovered other disturbing
details about Gosnell’s medical practice. The premises were dirty and unsanitary. Gosnell
routinely relied on unlicensed and untrained staff to treat patients, conduct medical tests,
and administer medications without supervision. Even more alarmingly, Gosnell
instructed unlicensed workers to sedate patients with dangerous drugs in his absence.
Based on this information, Detective Wood believed that further investigation of
the woman’s death the previous November was warranted. The detective searched for a
police report on the incident, but finding none, he went to the Philadelphia Medical
Examiner’s Office to try to identify the woman and to find out more about her death.
Detective Wood learned that the dead woman was Karnamaya Mongar, and that her
toxicology report revealed an extremely high level of Demerol, a drug Gosnell used at the
clinic to anesthetize patients.

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In light of this suspicious death and the other significant health and medical
concerns, DEA Agent Stephen Dougherty invited personnel from the Pennsylvania
Department of State (which regulates doctors and the practice of medicine) and the
Pennsylvania Department of Health (which regulates health care facilities) to accompany
law enforcement officers on the February 18 raid. No one from these agencies had visited
the clinic in more than 15 years, even after the Department of Health had been informed
of Mrs. Mongar’s death months earlier.
The search team waited outside until Gosnell finally arrived at the clinic, at about
8:30 p.m. When the team members entered the clinic, they were appalled, describing it to
the Grand Jury as “filthy,” “deplorable,” “disgusting,” “very unsanitary, very outdated,
horrendous,” and “by far, the worst” that these experienced investigators had ever
encountered.
There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat
was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious
women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room,
where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets.
All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff – long before Gosnell arrived
at the clinic – and staff members could not accurately state what medications or dosages
they had administered to the waiting patients. Many of the medications in inventory were
past their expiration dates.
Investigators found the clinic grossly unsuitable as a surgical facility. The two
surgical procedure rooms were filthy and unsanitary – Agent Dougherty described them
as resembling “a bad gas station restroom.” Instruments were not sterile. Equipment was

20

rusty and outdated. Oxygen equipment was covered with dust, and had not been
inspected. The same corroded suction tubing used for abortions was the only tubing
available for oral airways if assistance for breathing was needed. There was no
functioning resuscitation or even monitoring equipment, except for a single blood
pressure cuff in the recovery room.
Ambulances were summoned to pick up the waiting patients, but (just as on the
night Mrs. Mongar died three months earlier), no one, not even Gosnell, knew where the
keys were to open the emergency exit. Emergency personnel had to use bolt cutters to
remove the lock. They discovered they could not maneuver stretchers through the
building’s narrow hallways to reach the patients (just as emergency personnel had been
obstructed from reaching Mrs. Mongar).
The search team discovered fetal remains haphazardly stored throughout the clinic
– in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers. Some fetal
remains were in a refrigerator, others were frozen. Gosnell admitted to Detective Wood
that at least 10 to 20 percent of the fetuses were probably older than 24 weeks in
gestation – even though Pennsylvania law prohibits abortions after 24 weeks. In some
instances, surgical incisions had been made at the base of the fetal skulls.
The investigators found a row of jars containing just the severed feet of fetuses. In
the basement, they discovered medical waste piled high. The intact 19-week fetus
delivered by Mrs. Mongar three months earlier was in a freezer. In all, the remains of 45
fetuses were recovered at the clinic that evening and turned over to the Philadelphia
medical examiner, who confirmed that at least two of them, and probably three, had been
viable.

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A simultaneous search of Gosnell’s house found patient files that he had taken
from the clinic. In a filing cabinet in his 12-year-old daughter’s closet, they found
$240,000 in cash and a gun.
On February 22, 2010, the Pennsylvania Board of Medicine suspended Gosnell’s
medical license, citing “an immediate and clear danger to the public health and safety.”
On March 12, the state Department of Health filed papers to begin the process of shutting
down the clinic.
The Philadelphia District Attorney submitted this case, pertaining to criminal
wrongdoing at Gosnell’s clinic, to the Grand Jury on May 4, 2010. We, the jurors, have
reviewed thousands of pieces of evidence and heard testimony from 58 witnesses. The
squalid spectacle that greeted investigators when they raided the clinic last February was
awful, to say the least. Yet even their descriptions of the scene could not prepare the
Grand Jurors for the shocking things we have since learned about Gosnell, his medical
practice, and the way abortion clinics are regulated in Pennsylvania.

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Section III: Gosnell’s Illegal Practice
Gosnell’s “medical practice” was not set up to treat or help patients. His aim was
not to give women control over their bodies and their lives. He was not serving his
community. Gosnell ran a criminal enterprise, motivated by greed.
Some 40,000 abortions are performed across the Commonwealth each year.
Abortion is normally one of the simplest and safest medical procedures. But not in
Gosnell’s clinic. Employing unlicensed, untrained workers in a facility that was grossly
inadequate and unsanitary, his operation made a pretext of providing health care. In the
absence of any regulatory oversight, Gosnell recklessly cut corners, allowed patients to
choose their medication based on ability to pay, and provided abysmal care – all to
maximize his profit.
We estimate that Gosnell took in as much as $10,000 to $15,000 a night, mostly
in cash, for a few hours of work performing abortions. And this amount does not include
the money he made as one of the top Oxycontin prescribers in the state. The Women’s
Medical Society stands as a monument to an absolute disdain for the health and safety of
women, and in many cases of babies who were born alive in this filthy clinic.
The deaths of women and of countless viable babies were a direct and foreseeable
consequence of the reckless and illegal manner in which Gosnell operated his clinic.
Employees at the Women’s Medical Society who testified before the Grand Jury
were not surprised when a lethal overdose of drugs killed one of Gosnell’s patients in
November 2009. They had seen many close calls and at least one other patient’s death
caused by Gosnell’s careless and criminal practices. They knew that Gosnell chose
unlicensed, untrained, and unsupervised workers to anesthetize his abortion patients, and

23

that the drugs, in accordance with his office procedure, were administered in the doctor’s
absence.
None of Gosnell’s employees were licensed or properly trained. Gosnell’s staff
warned him that two of his employees, Lynda Williams and Sherry West, were not only
unlicensed and unqualified, but sloppy and unconcerned as well. They presented an
obvious danger to the clinic’s patients, whom they routinely over-medicated and failed to
monitor.
But while Williams and West were perhaps slightly more careless than other
workers, their actions were consistent with the corner-cutting practice that Gosnell had
operated for decades. Every aspect of that practice reflected an utter disregard for the
health and safety of his patients, a cruel lack of respect for their dignity, and an arrogant
belief that he could forever get away with the slovenly and careless treatment of the
women who came to his clinic. The only thing Gosnell seemed to care about was the cash
he raked in from his illegal operation.
The fact that the doctor staffed his facility with unlicensed and indifferent
workers, and then let them practice medicine unsupervised, was only one factor that
made his clinic such a dangerous place for its patients. Dirty facilities; unsanitary
instruments; an absence of functioning monitoring and resuscitation equipment; the use
of cheap, but dangerous, drugs; illegal procedures; and inadequate emergency access for
when things inevitably went wrong, all put patients at grave risk – every day.
When two of Gosnell’s staff members sought abortions, they knew better than to
go to him. They went to other clinics, where they marveled that physicians actually

24

counseled patients, the facilities appeared sanitary, and a doctor was in the room when
they were medicated.
Mrs. Mongar was just one of many patients victimized by Gosnell’s depravity.
There were scores more. At least one other mother died following an abortion in which
Gosnell punctured her uterus and then sent her home. He left an arm and a leg of a
partially aborted fetus in the womb of another woman, and then told her he did not need
to see her when she became sick days later, having developed a temperature of 106
degrees. He perforated bowels, cervixes, and uteruses. He left women sterile.
He also killed live, viable, moving, breathing, crying babies. He killed them by
cutting their spinal cords after their mothers had delivered them after receiving excessive
amounts of medication designed to induce active labor. This report documents multiple
murders of viable babies. The evidence makes a compelling case that many others were
also murdered.
Gosnell and his employees performed abortions long after the legal limit. The
doctor’s unorthodox methods, especially with late second-trimester and third-trimester
pregnancies, virtually mandated the premature delivery of live babies – whose spinal
cords he would then routinely slit. These practices persisted for many years without
interruption by any regulatory body.
The pain, suffering, and death that he and his employees perpetrated were not the
result of accidentally botched procedures. It was Gosnell’s standard business practice, to
slay viable babies. The women who died, or whose health he recklessly endangered or
irreparably harmed, were simply collateral damage for the doctor’s corrupt and criminal
enterprise.

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Gosnell set up his practice so that, in his absence, excessively medicated patients
went into labor and often delivered live babies.
Latosha Lewis, who worked for Gosnell for over eight years, explained to the
Grand Jury how the doctor ran the clinic. According to Lewis and other staff members
who testified, the office was actually split into two practices – the abortion clinic, which
was mostly on the first floor, and a family practice on the second floor. (Witnesses
testified that the family practice had devolved in the last several years into mainly a “pain
management” practice.) The office opened at approximately 10:00 a.m., with family
practice patients coming only in the evenings. Abortion patients arrived throughout the
day. Gosnell, who was the only licensed doctor, did not usually arrive to see patients or
perform procedures until after 8:00 p.m.
Abortions were generally scheduled four days a week – on Mondays, Tuesdays,
Thursdays, and Saturdays. Gosnell did not see patients on Wednesdays, but some were
seen by his unlicensed staff. According to his staff, the doctor and his wife, Pearl,
performed extremely late-term procedures on Sundays. First-trimester abortions at the
Women’s Medical Society were generally one-day procedures and were performed all
four days. Second-trimester abortions were performed usually over a two-day period.
Questionable late-term and suspected third-trimester procedures took three days.
When Latosha Lewis began work at the clinic in 2000, the practice would perform
approximately 20 first-trimester and 5 or 6 second-trimester abortions every procedure
night. By 2009, however, the practice’s first-trimester abortions had dropped off
significantly. Lewis explained that Gosnell had a bad reputation in the Philadelphia
community, and local referral agencies would not recommend his clinic to women

26

seeking abortions. This assertion was confirmed by representatives of Philadelphia
community organizations that provide referrals and information on sexual health services.
As a result, Gosnell began to rely much more on referrals from other areas where
abortions as late as 24 weeks are unavailable. More and more of his patients came from
out of state and were late second-trimester patients. Many of them were well beyond 24
weeks. Gosnell was known as a doctor who would perform abortions at any stage,
without regard for legal limits. His patients came from several states, including Delaware,
Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, as well as from Pennsylvania cities outside the
Philadelphia area, such as Allentown. He also had many late-term Philadelphia patients
because most other local clinics would not perform procedures past 20 weeks.
While there was no doctor on the premises during the day, the clinic’s unlicensed
assistants saw abortion patients beginning at about 10:00 a.m. Women could walk in for
ultrasounds and for what the clinic staff called “pre-exams.” During the pre-exam, which
cost $125, one of the clinic’s workers would ask the patient about her past medical
history, allergies, and last menstrual period. The staff member would also draw blood,
take the woman’s blood pressure, and perform an ultrasound to determine the age of the
fetus – even though none of the staff was properly trained to do ultrasounds. The clinic
worker would have the patient sign the facility’s consent form (rarely if ever reviewing it
with the client), and then schedule the procedure.
Lewis testified that when she first went to work for Gosnell, he usually complied
with at least part of a Pennsylvania law that requires doctors to wait 24 hours after
counseling patients before performing an abortion. She said that Gosnell might wait a day
after the patient’s initial pre-exam, even if he did not provide the counseling.

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By 2008, as the number of women and girls seeking first-trimester abortions from
Gosnell shrank, the doctor disregarded the law to attract more patients. Lewis said that a
lot of times patients would not return after their first visit to the clinic. The doctor had his
staff offer procedures the same day that patients walked in the door – as long as the
patient paid in full, typically in cash.
If first-trimester patients wanted to proceed right away, the doctor would
complete the abortion that night using a five-minute suction procedure with an instrument
called a curette. Two patients present in the facility during the February 2010 raid told a
state Department of Health surveyor, “that it was the only clinic in town that you call the
day of and get an appointment and have the procedure done that day.”
Second-trimester procedures were more complicated because the woman’s cervix
had to be dilated sufficiently to extract the fetus. If the woman was between 15 and 24
weeks pregnant, a worker would usually schedule her to come back on a Monday or a
Friday night for the first step of a two- or three-day procedure. If, however, the pregnancy
was 24 weeks or more – and the patient had her money ready – dilation would often
begin that night.
The dilation procedure involved placing synthetic or seaweed rods called
laminaria into the woman’s cervix. The rods would expand as they absorbed moisture and
would slowly push the cervix open. Although Gosnell usually performed this delicate
procedure himself, it was not uncommon for him to have unlicensed employees pry open
the patient’s vagina with a speculum and insert the laminaria. After the laminaria were
placed, the patient would be sent home with pain medicine and Cytotec to soften the
cervix. Patients would be instructed to return the next day to complete the abortion or to

28

have laminaria replaced if the fetus was really large. Sometimes, if a patient had come
from out of state, the doctor would allow the woman to sleep in the facility. No personnel
stayed with these patients; they were left alone and unsupervised in the clinic.
Inserting laminaria is a standard procedure followed by doctors who perform
second-trimester abortions. Thereafter, Gosnell’s procedure was not only grossly out of
compliance with accepted medical standards, it was ghoulish, dangerous, and criminal.
Patients returned to the clinic the next day (if they hadn’t spent the night). The person at
the front desk, usually the unlicensed and untrained longtime employee Tina Baldwin,
would start medicating the patients by giving them more Cytotec to induce labor and
temazapan (Restoril) to make them sleepy. The doctor did not arrive before 8:00 pm or
later, despite the fact that patients frequently began arriving at noon.
For hours after they came to the clinic, patients were left naked from the waist
down (the clinic provided no robes, only blankets that were washed once a week).
Women sat in bloodstained lounge chairs in the “recovery room” while unlicensed,
unsupervised workers gave them large doses of various drugs.
Cytotec was administered hourly, or whenever the staff got around to it. Pills of
either 100 mg. strength or 200 mg. – the workers were unclear what they were giving –
were administered both buccally, that is, by placing them in the patient’s cheek or lip, or
vaginally. These frequent doses of Cytotec made the women’s uteruses contract and
cramp, throwing them into active labor and causing severe pain. Kareema Cross, a coworker
of Lewis’s, testified that as the patients got “bigger and bigger” over the years,
the workers would give more and more Cytotec.

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To make the patients “comfortable” – and keep them quiet – the clinic’s
unlicensed and untrained workers used butterfly needles for IV access and injected
several different strong, sedative drugs into the women and girls in order to, as Latosha
Lewis and Kareema Cross put it, “knock them out.”
All afternoon and evening, as patients woke and complained of pain, workers
would continue to medicate them with injections of sedatives. Between doses, the staff
would leave patients largely untended. This would go on until the doctor arrived, some
six or more hours after the patient did, or until the woman delivered.
Very often, the patient delivered without Gosnell being present. Lewis testified
that one or two babies fell out of patients each night. They dropped out on lounge chairs,
on the floor, and often in the toilet. If the doctor was not there, it was not unusual for no
one to tend to the mother or the baby. In fact, several of the clinic’s workers refused to
deal with the expelled babies or the placenta. So, after delivering babies, women and girls
would have to just sit and wait – sometimes on a toilet for hours – for Gosnell to arrive.
Lewis acknowledged that she would not do anything but wait with the women:
A lot of times this happened when [Gosnell] wasn’t there.
If . . . a baby was about to come out, I would take the
woman to the bathroom, they would sit on the toilet and
basically the baby would fall out and it would be in the
toilet and I would be rubbing her back and trying to calm
her down for two, three, four hours until Dr. Gosnell
comes. She would not move.
James Johnson, who supposedly cleaned the clinic and bagged its infectious
waste, confirmed Lewis’s account. He testified that sometimes patients “miscarried or
whatever it was” into the toilet and clogged it. He described how he had to lift the toilet

30

so that someone else – he said it was too disgusting for him – could get the fetuses out of
the pipes.
Amazingly, these premature deliveries – what Gosnell called “precipitations” –
were routine. The doctor’s customary practice called for intense and painful labor,
accompanied by heavy doses of potent drugs, all while he was absent from the clinic.
Lewis said Gosnell told her that he preferred it when women precipitated, often before he
got to the clinic, because it made his job easier. A surgical procedure to remove fetuses,
Lewis explained, could take half an hour. Whereas there was little to do – just suctioning
the placenta – when babies were already expelled. In addition, by avoiding surgical
abortions, Gosnell was less likely to perforate the women’s uteruses with surgical
instruments – something he had done, and been sued for, many times.
If fetuses had not precipitated, Gosnell would often have his staff physically push
them out of their mothers by pressing on the mothers’ abdomens.
According to a board-certified gynecologist and obstetrician who testified as a
medical expert, Gosnell’s labor-induction method of performing second-trimester
abortions – as opposed to a standard surgical procedure – entails significant risks,
including hemorrhage and debilitating pain that leaves patients unable to care for
themselves. The pain suffered by women in full labor requires careful supervision and
appropriate sedation. Thus, according to the expert, labor induction should be performed
only in a hospital setting, where medical professionals can monitor the women
throughout their labor. Gosnell had neither the staff nor the facility to perform this type of
abortion safely. He did it routinely anyway.

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Gosnell staffed his abortion clinic with unlicensed and unqualified workers.
Gosnell deliberately hired unqualified staff because he could pay them low wages,
often in cash. Most of Gosnell’s employees who worked with patients had little or no
remotely relevant training or education. Nor did they have any certifications or licenses to
treat patients. Yet they did so regularly, and without supervision – in violation of
Pennsylvania’s medical practice standards and the law.
Tina Baldwin testified that certification did not matter to Gosnell. He told his
workers that there was a “grandfather clause where if you – since he’s a doctor and he
taught you, you could be automatically whatever it is he taught you to be. You could be
certified because he taught you to do that.”
Gosnell had several employees who lasted just a short time at his clinic, but the
following were his principal employees after 2000:
Latosha Lewis worked at the clinic for approximately eight years, beginning in
2000 and ending on February 18, 2010. (She left to work at another facility for a year in
2002, and took two maternity leaves.) Although she completed an eight-month program
at the Thompson Institute, a for-profit vocational training institution in Philadelphia, she
received no certificate or license that qualified her for her responsibilities at the abortion
clinic. She was not trained or certified to perform ultrasounds, to administer medication,
or to deliver babies – all jobs that Gosnell assigned to her.
Lewis’s duties included conducting pre-exams and ultrasounds, drawing blood,
administering Cytotec and intravenous anesthesia, putting patient charts together,
assisting the doctor with procedures, and attending to patients in the recovery room. She

32

performed almost all of these tasks – except assisting with procedures – without
supervision from the doctor, and usually while he was absent from the facility.
For most of the time Lewis was employed at the clinic, she worked from about
10:00 a.m. until the night’s procedures were completed – sometimes as late as 2:00 or
3:00 a.m. In the beginning, Gosnell paid her $7 an hour, plus time-and-a-half overtime
for anything over 40 hours and $20 cash for every second-trimester abortion. He later
revised his pay scale, raising her base rate to $12 an hour, but not paying overtime. In
2008, Lewis stopped assisting with procedures and cut back her hours to 9:00 a.m. -5:00
p.m.
Lewis was working at the clinic on November 18, 2009, and conducted the preexam
of Karnamaya Mongar. She was also present the next day when Mrs. Mongar
returned, but left for the day before Mrs. Mongar began to have any troubles. Lewis
remained at the clinic until law enforcement raided it on February 18, 2010.
Tina Baldwin worked at the clinic for nine years, beginning in February 2001
and continuing until the practice closed in February 2010. She had the same training from
the Thompson Institute as Lewis, but did not get certified as a medical assistant until
2009, when she started to look for another job. From 2001 to 2005, Baldwin performed
the same duties at the clinic as Lewis – assisting with surgeries, anesthetizing patients,
performing ultrasounds, drawing blood, and working in the recovery room.
After 2005 Baldwin stopped working nights and instead staffed the reception desk
from about 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. She described her job as supervising the medical
assistants and “making sure everybody else did what they were supposed to do.” She also

33

dispensed Cytotec and Restoril for second-trimester patients, and collected the money for
their abortions.
Baldwin was at the front desk when Karnamaya Mongar came to the clinic for her
procedure on November 19, 2009. Baldwin gave her Cytotec and Restoril, but left the
clinic before paramedics were summoned.
Baldwin acknowledged that she was not trained – except by Gosnell – to perform
ultrasounds, and that she knew that she was not supposed to administer IV medication.
Yet she performed these duties and supervised other untrained workers, including her
teenage daughter Ashley, as they performed these duties, all in violation of standards of
professional conduct and Pennsylvania law.
Kareema Cross worked at the clinic for four and a half years, beginning in
August 2005, as another uncertified “medical assistant.” She performed the same duties
as Latosha Lewis – conducting pre-exams, assisting with surgeries, performing
ultrasounds, drawing blood, and administering IV medications. In 2008, when another
unlicensed worker, Steve Massof, left and Tina Baldwin and Latosha Lewis stopped
working nights, Cross’s responsibilities increased. She began to administer Cytotec
vaginally, and gave IV medication more frequently. She also had to staff the front desk at
times. Cross stopped assisting Gosnell with procedures in July 2009.
Ashley Baldwin was a 15-year-old high school sophomore when she started
working at Gosnell’s clinic in 2006. Tina Baldwin is her mother. Although Ashley was
just a teenager and still in high school, Gosnell had her assisting with procedures,
performing ultrasounds, intravenously sedating patients, and assisting patients as they
delivered in Gosnell’s absence. Gosnell claimed to her mother that allowing the teen to

34

essentially practice medicine was legal, through a “grandfather clause” which permitted
him to train workers and avoid certification requirements. Ashley worked as much as 50
hours a week, into the early morning hours, while a full-time high school student. She
was present on November 19, 2010, when Karnamaya Mongar went into cardiac arrest.
Sherry West was hired by Gosnell in October 2008. She had known Gosnell as a
patient for 35 years. She had recently been diagnosed with hepatitis C. The doctor hired
her to perform the same duties as his other “medical assistants.” Like them, she had no
training or certificate that would qualify her to do ultrasound examinations, administer
anesthesia, monitor patients in the recovery room, or do any of the other duties that she
performed. No precautions were taken to protect patients from exposure to hepatitis C.
West worked at the clinic every day except Wednesday and Sunday. She was paid
strictly in cash, at a rate of between eight and ten dollars an hour. Her hours were
supposed to be 3:00 p.m. to closing. She was present on the night that Karnamaya
Mongar died and was still working at the clinic on February 18, 2010, when the facility
was raided.
Lynda Williams was hired to work full-time in 2008. She had previously worked
with Gosnell at Atlantic Women’s Medical Services in Delaware, and had filled in from
time to time at 3801 Lancaster Avenue. Gosnell originally hired Williams to clean
instruments, but very soon had her anesthetizing abortion patients, performing
ultrasounds, administering Cytotec vaginally, and dealing with babies born alive while he
was not at the clinic. The way Williams dealt with the babies was the way the doctor
showed her – she cut their spinal cords with scissors. She was not certified or licensed to
perform any of these duties.

35

Williams commuted to work with Sherry West and kept the same hours. She and
West were supposedly attending to Karnamaya Mongar in the recovery room throughout
the afternoon of November 19, 2009. It was Williams who actually administered the
lethal mixes of Demerol, promethazine, and diazepam that killed Karnamaya Mongar.
When the clinic was raided in February 2010, she was still employed and still
administering anesthetics to patients.
Elizabeth (Liz) Hampton is Gosnell’s sister-in-law, his wife’s sister. She is also
the common-law wife of James Johnson, who was the clinic’s janitor and was in charge
of disposing of the medical waste. Hampton worked on and off at the clinic. Her duties
included cleaning instruments and answering phones. Although the evidence indicates
that Hampton did not usually administer medication, her initials “L.H.” appear on
Karnamaya Mongar’s file and seem to indicate that she gave Cytotec to Mrs. Mongar at
6:30 p.m.
Hampton was in fact present when Karnamaya Mongar was at the clinic on
November 19, 2009. She was also present when the clinic was raided three months later.
Adrienne Moton knew Gosnell through his niece and spent time with his family.
She worked evenings to assist with abortions, but, like the others, had no relevant training
or license. She assisted with procedures and cut the spinal cords of aborted babies.
Randy Hutchins was the only licensed medical provider, other than Gosnell, to
work with any regularity at the clinic in the last several years. However, it was not lawful
for him to perform the duties assigned by Gosnell because Gosnell did not obtain the
State Board of Medicine’s approval, as required. Hutchins testified that he worked for
Gosnell for a year in the 1980s but left after he stole money from the doctor. Hutchins

36

explained that he had a cocaine problem at the time. He returned to work at the clinic in
July 2009 partially because Gosnell was willing to allow him to work off the debt. From
August until the middle of September, Hutchins said, “I really didn’t get paid.”
Hutchins normally worked Mondays, Tuesday, and Fridays. His primary job was
to see “pain management” patients. However, his name also appeared on Karnamaya
Mongar’s records on Wednesday, November 18, 2009. Her chart shows that Hutchins
inserted laminaria the night before her procedure.
Hutchins quit in February 2010, before the raid, because Gosnell never filed the
paperwork required to allow him to work legally.
Maddline Joe worked for 17 years as the receptionist at Women’s Medical
Society. In 2007, she became the office manager. She was responsible for payroll,
insurance forms, and filing the reports on all abortions that were mandated by the
Abortion Control Act.
Anna Keith was Gosnell’s aunt. She was the office manager until she retired in
2007.
Jennifer Leach is a 28-year-old woman who had a time card as if she were an
employee of the clinic. She testified that Gosnell paid her $300 a week to provide
“psycho-social counseling” one day a week to non-abortion patients, even though she had
no training as a counselor. She acknowledged that she often did not show up to work at
the clinic.
Leach saw Gosnell as a patient when she was 17 years old. She said that she and
Gosnell had a “fling” on and off for a couple of years, ending the week before she
testified. Leach has an 11-year-old child.

37

Pearl Gosnell, the doctor’s third wife, also helped out in the office. Pearl assisted
with abortion procedures on Sundays and days the clinic was normally closed. She
worked at the clinic as a full-time medical assistant from 1982 until she married Gosnell
in 1990. After that, she said, she worked there “maybe every other day,” bringing “paper
towels, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, soap.” On Sundays, she assisted in the procedure
room and monitored the patients in the recovery room.
Pearl claimed that she was certified to take temperatures and blood pressure by
Lyons Technical Institute, but could not produce any records because, she said, the
school had closed. She is licensed in cosmetology.
Kermit Gosnell himself was not qualified. Under Pennsylvania law, an abortion
facility must have at least one doctor certified by the American Board of Obstetrics and
Gynecology, either on staff or as a consultant. Gosnell, the only licensed physician
associated with the Womens’ Medical Society, is not an obstetrician or gynecologist,
much less a board-certified one. In fact, 40 years ago, he started but failed to complete a
residency in obstetrics and gynecology.
Just as his clinic bore no resemblance to a bona fide medical facility, the image of
himself that Gosnell promoted had no truth to it. In newspaper and television interviews,
he portrayed himself as a hard-working, conscientious doctor doing the best he could for
his community. In fact, he left his clinic and his patients untended all day while he was at
home, relaxing or exercising. Any contributions he may have made to the community are
undermined by the substandard treatment that he passed off as medical care for the
indigent.

38

Gosnell routinely cracked jokes about babies whose necks he had just slit. He
treated his patients with condescension – slapping them, providing abysmal care, and
often refusing even to see or talk to them – unless they were Caucasian, or had money.
He yelled at and intimidated his staff. And he took advantage of poor women in desperate
situations.
Gosnell presented two of his unlicensed workers as doctors in his practice, and
allowed them to treat, diagnose, and prescribe medicine for patients.
Gosnell hired unlicensed medical school graduates Steve Massof and Eileen
O’Neill to practice as doctors at his clinic. They were presented to patients and staff as
“Dr. Steve” and “Dr. O’Neill, ” and Massof was listed on a sign inside the office door as
“Dr. Steve Massof, Medical Intern.” Both saw, diagnosed, and treated patients when
Gosnell was not at the clinic. And both prescribed medicine to patients who never saw
Gosnell – even though their prescriptions bore Gosnell’s signature. (Massof admitted
writing on pre-signed prescription pads; O’Neill insisted that Gosnell signed the
prescriptions after she wrote them.)
Massof was a 1998 graduate of St. George’s University Medical School in
Grenada. He had taken and passed some of the tests necessary to become a doctor in the
United States, but was never accepted into a residency program. Massof worked as a
bartender and cook in Pittsburgh after graduating from medical school. In 2003, Gosnell
hired Massof to work as a doctor at the clinic despite the fact that he knew that Massof
was not licensed to treat patients.
Massof testified that he had an “ECFMG” (Educational Commission for Foreign
Medical Graduates) certificate that qualified him to enter a residency program. But
Gosnell’s clinic had no residency program, and Massof’s certificate did not allow him to

39

practice medicine without the supervision of such a program. Massof was never
registered with Pennsylvania’s Board of Medicine as a graduate medical trainee, as is
required to practice medicine in the Commonwealth.
Nevertheless, Gosnell directed Massof to perform as the facility’s only “doctor”
daily from noon until Gosnell (or O’Neill, the other unlicensed doctor) arrived at the
clinic for the night – frequently some eight or nine hours later. Kareema Cross testified
that, while Massof was working at the clinic, Gosnell felt comfortable arriving as late as
9:00 or 10:00 p.m. During that time, Massof treated medical patients for conditions
including diabetes, asthma, pain, and infectious diseases; prescribed drugs; anesthetized
abortion patients; performed ultrasounds; delivered babies; removed placentas; cut
umbilical cords; and, in accordance with Gosnell’s practice, severed the spinal cords of
the late second-trimester and the third-trimester babies that precipitated.
Massof began working at the clinic in July 2003 and left in June 2008. His work
schedule was erratic. He normally worked six days a week from noon until 2:00 to 3:00
a.m. when the abortion procedures were completed. Gosnell paid him in cash: $300 a
week and an additional $30 for each second- or third-trimester abortion patient.
Eileen O’Neill testified that she graduated in 1995 from a medical school in
Texas. She described an odd course of residency in which she seemingly worked
simultaneously in Texas and at a Louisiana abortion clinic and then spent a month at
Gosnell’s clinic, where she said she “just stood around and did nothing pretty much.”
Louisiana Board of Medicine records show that O’Neill was licensed to practice
medicine in Louisiana from 1996 to 2000 (she testified, incorrectly, that she was licensed
from 1995 to 1998). She testified that she worked at the Delta abortion clinic in Baton

40

Rouge from 1998 to 2000, even though she also testified that she moved to Texas in
1998. She said that she worked at the Louisiana abortion clinic as a “side job.” During
that same time period, in 1998 or 1999, she said she was licensed to practice in Texas, but
obtained “special dispensation” to finish her residency at Reading Hospital in
Pennsylvania. She spent one month of her residency at Gosnell’s clinic.
O’Neill briefly held a “graduate medical training license” in Pennsylvania, but let
it expire in 2001. After her residency stints, she never held a medical license in
Pennsylvania. (She asserted that she has a license application pending now.)
O’Neill relinquished her Louisiana medical license in 2000 – she claimed because
of “post traumatic stress syndrome” – and has not been licensed to practice medicine in
any capacity since 2001. Despite being fully aware that she was not licensed, Gosnell
hired her to work at his clinic in 2002. O’Neill testified that she met Gosnell through
Leroy Brinkley, the owner of both the Baton Rouge abortion clinic and Atlantic
Women’s Services, the Delaware abortion clinic where Gosnell worked one day a week.
In her testimony, O’Neill tried to minimize her hours, her pay, and her
responsibilities at Gosnell’s clinic. She said that she commuted from Phoenixville to
work four hours a night (8:00 p.m. to midnight), three nights a week (Mondays,
Thursdays, and Fridays). She testified, under oath, that she was really a volunteer, and
that Gosnell just provided her with gas money. She testified:
A: He gave me travel money every now and then, just
whenever he had cash. He always said he never had any
money.
Q: So how much did you make?

41

A: For 15 hours a week, sometimes he give me 200 every
couple of weeks and sometimes 200 a month. Sometimes
400 every two months.
Gosnell, she said, paid her in cash.
O’Neill acknowledged that she saw patients and that they called her Dr. O’Neill.
But she claimed that her responsibilities were mainly paperwork, tasks such as
composing hardship letters, doing referrals, and filling out forms for disability and family
medical leave. She insisted that she saw patients only when Gosnell was at the clinic, a
claim refuted by her co-workers and disproved by her own files. Steve Massof testified
that every day she worked, O’Neill saw patients before Gosnell arrived for the night. And
Kareema Cross confirmed that O’Neill was regularly at the clinic before Gosnell came in.
O’Neill tried to assert that she did not treat patients, based on a fiction that the
doctor was always there supervising her. But her own testimony belied this sham:
Q: What do you mean that you didn’t treat patients?
A: Well, I never decide what the treatment is. That’s up to
him.
Q: What would you do –
A: Because I’m there with him all night. So I can talk to
him about patients.
Q: Okay. So your testimony is that he was with – that every
time you saw patients, where was he, the doctor?
A: Well, it depends, he would be in and out sometimes. I
mean the deal was, he was supposed to be seeing them with
me, but I’m sure there’s times when he didn’t. Sometimes
he just stuck his head in, you know.
Later, she qualified her claim further:
Q: … you’re saying all the services that you provided to the
patient was in the company of Dr. Gosnell.

42

A: No. I didn’t say that. I said I would like it to be. He was
always on the premises. Sometimes he’d just poke his head
in. Whatever he tells me to do, I would do.
Massof testified that O’Neill worked alone and unsupervised, that she treated
patients, and that she prescribed drugs. Latosha Lewis described O’Neill as “basically the
doctor that saw family practice patients.” Files found at the clinic show O’Neill signing
post-procedure pelvic exams as the “clinician.” Gosnell introduced O’Neill to an
evaluator from the National Abortion Federation (NAF), an association of abortion
providers, as the doctor who performed the first-trimester medical abortions (performed
with pills, not surgery) – and O’Neill confirmed to the NAF evaluator that she did treat
these patients.
Gosnell also introduced O’Neill to another one-time clinic worker, Randy
Hutchins, as a physician. Hutchins believed O’Neill was a licensed doctor because he
saw her treat patients at the clinic. Hutchins personally knew one of the patients – Della
Mann, a registered nurse who had worked at the clinic years earlier (and, again, for four
days in December 2009, when the NAF evaluator was present).
Mann told the Grand Jury that she had been a “patient” of O’Neill’s for several
years and a patient of Gosnell’s for over 20 years before O’Neill joined his practice. She
explained that she started seeing O’Neill when she arrived for an appointment with
Gosnell one night and was told by the person at the front desk that she would be seen by
“Dr. O’Neill” instead. Mann testified that for approximately seven years, until 2009, she
saw “Dr. O’Neill” for “each and every one of my visits.” She said that she saw Gosnell
only four or five times during that period. Mann listed a number of conditions for which
she had seen O’Neill. O’Neill had diagnosed her conditions, prescribed medication, and

43

signed her charts. Mann could not say whose signature was on the prescriptions, but she
saw O’Neill write them.
Mann never saw or talked to Gosnell about these conditions. He did not pop his
head in, and he did not consult with O’Neill. As far as Mann knew, O’Neill was her
doctor. And she always assumed that O’Neill was licensed. She certainly never suspected
that Gosnell allowed her to be treated by a “volunteer” at his clinic. Mann told the Grand
Jurors: “If I knew that she was not licensed, I wouldn’t have let her touch me.”
Mann did eventually stop seeing O’Neill, but it was not because she was not
licensed. Mann said that in 2008, she decided to stop going to Gosnell’s office because of
its reckless handling of patient files. She said that the files were left all over the place and
that anyone, including other patients, could have access to them.
O’Neill was in the clinic on February 18, 2010, when law enforcement conducted
the raid. She fled, however, before being interviewed – even though she had been told not
to leave.
The Women’s Medical Society was filthy and totally unsuitable as a medical office
or a surgical facility.
The Grand Jury toured the facility at 3801 Lancaster Avenue. It is unbelievable to
us that the Pennsylvania Department of Health approved this building as an abortion
facility. We were stunned to learn that, between 1978 and 1993, the department
sporadically inspected and approved the clinic, and then never inspected it again until
February 2010, when health department employees entered the facility at the request of
law enforcement officials who were investigating allegations of the illegal sale of drugs
and prescriptions.

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The physical layout of the clinic, a confusing maze of narrow hallways and
multiple twisting stairways, should have been an obvious bar to its use for surgical
procedures. The three-story structure, created by joining two buildings, had no elevator.
Access from procedure rooms to the outside by wheelchair or stretcher was impossible,
as was evident the night Karnamaya Mongar died.
According to former staff members, the facility had been substantially cleaned up
by the time the Grand Jury visited it. Between late February 2010, when the practice was
closed, and our tour of the clinic in August, significant efforts had been made to make the
facility look and smell cleaner. Despite such efforts, it remained a wretched, filthy space.
The walls appeared to be urine-splattered. The procedure tables were old and one had a
ripped plastic cover. Suction tubing, which was used for abortion procedures – and
doubled as the only available suction source for resuscitation – was corroded. A large,
dirty fish tank stood in the waiting room, filled with turtles and fish. The dirt-floored
basement was stuffed with patient files, plants, junk, and boxes of un-disposed-of
medical waste. The entire facility smelled foul.
These were the conditions after the facility had been shut down and cleaned.
Former employees, including Latosha Lewis and Kareema Cross, testified to the
abhorrent conditions when the clinic was operating. They described the odor that struck
one immediately upon entering – a mix of smells emanating from the cloudy fish tank
where the turtles were fed crushed clams and baby formula; and from boxes of medical
waste that sat around for weeks at a time, leaking blood, whenever Gosnell failed to pay
the bill to the disposal company.

45

They described blood-splattered floors, and blood-stained chairs in which patients
waited for and then recovered from abortions. Even the stirrups on the procedure table
were often caked with dried blood that was not cleaned off between procedures. There
were cat feces and hair throughout the facility, including in the two procedure rooms.
Gosnell, they said, kept two cats at the facility (until one died) and let them roam freely.
The cats not only defecated everywhere, they were infested with fleas. They slept on beds
in the facility when patients were not using them.
Kareema Cross testified about the procedure rooms: “The rooms were dirty.
Blood everywhere. Dust everywhere. Nothing was clean.” The bathrooms, according to
Lewis, were cleaned just once a week despite the fact that patients were vomiting in the
sinks and delivering babies in the toilets.

Medical waste and fetal remains were supposed to be picked up weekly by a
licensed disposal provider. Gosnell, however, did not pay his bills in a timely manner,
and the disposal provider would not pick up – sometimes for months. In the interim, and
as the search team discovered during the February 18 raid, freezers at the clinic were full
of discarded fetuses, and medical waste was piled up in the basement.
Fetal remains in the freezer
Sometimes, according to Tina Baldwin, fetal remains were left out overnight. “You knew
about it the next day when you opened the door … Because you could smell it as soon as
you opened the door.” According to a plan that Gosnell filed with the Philadelphia Health
Department in 2004, waste was to be stored in the basement for once-a-week pickup by a
waste disposal company. But he didn’t follow the plan. He failed to pay his bills. Weeks
went by without a pickup, and the containers in the basement leaked.

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Gosnell used and reused unsanitary instruments to perform abortions.
The instruments that were inserted into women’s bodies were also unsanitary,
according to the workers. Kareema Cross showed the Grand Jury a photograph she had
taken, showing how the instruments were purportedly sterilized. The photo shows a pan
on the floor. In it are the doctor’s tools, supposedly soaking in a sterilizing solution. But
the photo shows that the instruments cannot get clean because they do not fit in the pan,
and are not submerged. Gosnell would nonetheless pluck instruments from this pan on
the floor and use them for procedures. Cross said that she saw Gosnell insert into a
woman’s vagina a speculum that was still bloody from a previous patient. She testified
about how Gosnell would ignore her complaints about his unsanitary practices:
The instruments were dirty. It was plenty of times that I had
complained. He’ll – it would be a spec, a speculum and
he’ll use it. I would complain – I’ll leave the speculum on
his tray, so he can see it. So he can say something to
whoever is cleaning them. It’ll have blood on it. And he
would still use it and it was a lot of girls that was

48

complaining about getting infections . . . trichonomas,
chlamydia because of the instruments not being cleaned.
Several workers testified that Gosnell insisted on reusing plastic curettes, the tool
used to remove tissue from the uteruses, even though these were made for single use
only. Latosha Lewis testified that Gosnell would make his staff reuse the curettes until
they broke. Like Cross, Lewis believed it was the unsanitary instruments that were
causing patients to become infected with chlamydia and gonorrhea.
When inspectors from Pennsylvania’s Departments of Health and State surveyed
the facility in February 2010, they corroborated much of what the former staff members
described. Department of Health workers found that the suction source used by the doctor
to perform abortions was the only one available to resuscitate patients. They found the
tubing attached to the suction source was “corroded.” They also described the suction
source’s vacuum meter as “covered with a brown substance making the numbers on the
meter barely readable.” An oxygen mask and its tubing were “covered in a thick gray
layer of a substance that appeared to be dust.”

49

The inspector from the Department of State reported: “The clinic conditions are
deplorable and unsanitary … There was blood on the floor and parts of aborted fetuses
were displayed in jars.”
Gosnell had unlicensed and unsupervised staff routinely administer potent and
dangerous drugs when he was not present at the clinic.
As bad as the physical condition of the facility was, the practice that Gosnell
conducted inside of it was even worse. It was not a mistake or an exceptional
circumstance that forced Lynda Williams and Sherry West to sedate Mrs. Mongar when
Gosnell was absent from his clinic. According to multiple staff members, that was routine
procedure. In fact, Gosnell, the clinic’s only licensed medical provider, rarely arrived at
all before 8:00 p.m. Abortion patients, on the other hand, began arriving as early as noon.

50

It was Gosnell’s intention and instruction that his untrained and unlicensed staff
administer drugs – both to initiate labor and to sedate patients – before he arrived.
Patients, meanwhile, did not receive individual medical consideration. Drugs were
administered without regard to a patient’s weight, medical condition, potential risk
factors, or any other relevant factors that physicians need to weigh in determining
appropriate medication. Gosnell ordered his untrained and inexperienced staff to
administer drugs to patients even when they protested, as 16-year-old Ashley Baldwin
did, that they were not qualified. Gosnell told Ashley and other employees that if they
were not willing to administer medication and anesthetize patients, procedures that
Pennsylvania law requires a medical license to perform, they could not work at the clinic.
As Kareema Cross explained it, Gosnell told her when she was first hired that it
was her job to medicate the patients when they were in pain. But after assigning this as
one of her job responsibilities, he did not oversee what she did on individual patients.
Indeed, he couldn’t oversee his workers as they anesthetized patients, because he was
usually not at the clinic when they did so. His practice was to leave it to the untrained
workers to decide when to medicate and re-medicate the patients. He also left the precise
medication mixture to the judgment of his unlicensed, untrained staff.
Gosnell disliked it when workers disturbed him by calling for medication advice.
Ashley told us that he complained that they were “rushing him.” According to Lewis,
“You had to rely on your own. If you felt like they were in pain and you wanted to
administer medication, you would just administer the medication yourself.”
Williams was known by other staff members to improvise her own drug cocktails.
She would give a patient “[w]hat she thought she needed,” according to Ashley. “She

51

used what she wanted.” West would do the same. Other staff members repeatedly
reported this dangerous practice to Gosnell, yet he continued to give Williams
responsibility for drugging his second-trimester patients. Cross warned Gosnell in 2008
that Williams gave too much medication, but “Gosnell didn’t care what she did.” Cross
would tell Williams that she was giving too much medication; Williams would respond,
“well, that is what Dr. Gosnell told me to give.”
Gosnell’s practice of having unqualified personnel administer anesthesia began
years before the death of Mrs. Mongar. We heard from a former employee, Marcella
Stanley Choung, who told us that her “training” for anesthesia consisted of a 15-minute
description by Gosnell and reading a chart he had posted in a cabinet. She was so
uncomfortable medicating patients, she said, that she “didn’t sleep at night.” She knew
that if she made even a small error, “I can kill this lady, and I’m not jail material.” One
night in 2002, when she found herself alone with 15 patients, she refused Gosnell’s
directives to medicate them. She made an excuse, went to her car, and drove away, never
to return.
Choung immediately filed a complaint with the Department of State, but the
department never acted on it. She later told Sherilyn Gillespie, a Department of State
investigator who participated in the February raid, that she has worked at seven different
abortion clinics and “she has never experienced an illegally run, unsanitary, and unethical
facility such as the Women’s Medical Society operated by Dr. Gosnell.” She has never
reported any other provider or facility to state authorities.
Gosnell knew that using unlicensed and uncertified staff was wrong. He had
testified in the criminal trial of a man charged with illegally practicing medicine by

52

assisting Gosnell with abortion procedures in 1972. In 1996, he was censured and fined in
two states – Pennsylvania and New York – for employing unlicensed personnel in
violation of laws regulating the practice of medicine. As far back as 1989, and again in
1993, the Pennsylvania Department of Health cited him for not having any nurses in the
recovery room. Gosnell ignored the warnings and the law. He just paid his fines and
knowingly continued the dangerous practice of employing unqualified personnel to
administer dangerous drugs. It was his modus operandi.
Patients were allowed to choose any level of sedation, as long as they paid for it.
Gosnell did not actually prescribe the amount of medicine, if any, to be used on a
particular patient. Instead, he had his staff offer patients a list of medications that could
be bought a la carte, in differing quantities, for first-trimester abortions. This practice
demonstrates that he was not really practicing medicine; he was running a money-making
racket, cutting corners and endangering patients to maximize his profits.
Second-trimester patients always received the highest level of sedation – usually
after being administered multiple lesser doses – as part of their package price. The age,
size, health, and other characteristics of the individual patient were immaterial to the
dosage. Often clinic staff would begin administering medicine chosen by the patient
before the doctor ever saw the patient. It was routine for the unlicensed workers to
heavily sedate second-trimester patients hours before the doctor arrived at the clinic.
Even when Gosnell was in the clinic, he did not give written or oral orders for
medication. Rather, the unlicensed workers determined the mix of drugs they would
administer by referring to, although not always following, a chart that was posted in the
recovery room. The chart – a “cheat sheet” of the clinic’s sedation cocktails – was

53

handwritten by high-school-student Ashley Baldwin, who worked every night except
Sunday at the clinic, performing a variety of medical procedures for which she had no
training.
Ashley’s color-coded chart described the various levels of sedation that Gosnell
provided, and the mix of drugs that comprised them, as follows:
(1) Local (10 mg. of nalbuphine and 12.5 mg. of promethazine);
(2) Heavy (50 mg. Demerol, 12.5 mg. promethazine, and 5mg. diazepam);
(3) Twilight (75 mg. Demerol, 12.5 mg. promethazine, and 7.5 mg. diazepam); and
(4) Custom (75 mg. Demerol, 12.5 mg. promethazine, and 10 mg. diazepam).
Ashley Baldwin’s color-coded chart
Latosha Lewis described how she and the other unlicensed staff members
presented the choice of medication to the clinic’s patients:
You can pick which anesthesia you want to receive,
whether you want to be up, half asleep, if you want to be
knocked out, and it’s additional to your procedure, but local
anesthesia is included in the smaller cases and custom

54

anesthesia, which is the highest, to be put to sleep in the
bigger cases.
An “Anesthesia for Surgery” form [Appendix B] presented to patients for their
signature – and payment – did not identify or describe the drugs to be administered.
However, it suggested:
It will probably be best to pay the extra money and be more
comfortable if some of the following conditions are true for
you.
1. The decision to have the procedure is a difficult
decision.
2. Medication is usually necessary for your
menstrual cramps.
3. Your decision has been forced by your parents
or partner.
4. Your family members or friends “don’t like
pain.”
The “Custom” mix of medications is described on the form as follows:
Most women who choose CUSTOM SLEEP want to feel
ABSOLUTELY NO CRAMPS OR PAIN during their
procedure. A needle with an anticlotting medication is
inserted prior to the procedure and sedation is repeatedly
administered until the patient is comfortable throughout the
procedure.
The form has a place to sign next to “I choose CUSTOM SLEEP” and a blank where the
price of the “Custom” option is handwritten in. The price of the “Custom” sedation is
$150. The form explains the effects of the “Twilight Sleep” concoction in this way:
Most women who choose TWILIGHT SLEEP want to feel
VERY FEW OR VERY SLIGHT CRAMPS during their
procedure.
The cost listed is $90, which was in addition to the cost of the procedure. The form
describes the clinic’s “Heavy Sedation” option:
Most women who choose HEAVY SEDATION feel
SLIGHT TO MODERATE CRAMPS during their
procedure.

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Heavy sedation cost $50 extra.
All of the drugs listed on the chart, including those that put patients into a deep
sleep and could be considered general anesthesia, were offered to patients undergoing
first-trimester abortions – a procedure that usually takes only a few minutes and is
relatively pain-free even without medication. Legitimate abortion clinics give no
medication for these procedures, or small doses of a local anesthetic such as lidocaine to
numb the immediate area – an entirely different medication from the clinic’s misnamed
“local,” which includes a combination of narcotics given intravenously.
Even if the strong sedatives offered by Gosnell were being administered by
licensed professionals – which they were not – the implications of the clinic’s
“Anesthesia for Surgery” form are troubling for several reasons. First, decisions on
medication dosages were left totally up to patients, and were almost always made without
any consultation with a doctor. Even worse, the patients were encouraged to make these
decisions based on factors that have nothing to do with medicine – factors as irrelevant to
their health as their friends’ feelings about pain.
Probably most dangerous of all, Gosnell’s form offered patients a choice among
varying levels of pain, without any explanation of the risks presented by the various
drugs or the effects of increased dosages of the drugs. No legitimate medical practice
allows patients to choose their levels of anesthesia, especially when their choices are
uninformed and based solely on a description of cost and how much pain the patients
wish to feel.
We were particularly appalled by the reference in the form to a decision being
“forced” on a patient by a partner or parents. A legitimate practitioner would never

56

perform forced abortions. Gosnell would and did. As long as he was paid, the patient’s
wishes or circumstances were not his concern.
Patients received multiple, heavy doses of sedatives that kept them anesthetized for
several hours with no licensed medical professional on the premises.
In addition to revealing the mercenary, rather than medical, nature of Gosnell’s
practice, the anesthesia form confirms what Latosha Lewis and Kareema Cross told the
Grand Jury: the “custom” medication administered to second-trimester patients was not
just a single dose that was administered to keep the patients asleep through a surgical
procedure of limited duration. Rather, the medication was first “inserted prior to the
procedure” and sedation was “repeatedly administered” until the procedure was
completed.
Cross testified that she and the other workers would administer the “custom” dose
of medication just before the doctor performed the procedure. But all day long, the staff
had been administering powerful “twilight” levels of the sedating drugs:
Q: And what about if the patient was 20 to 24 weeks?
A: 20 to 24 weeks, [Dr. Gosnell] will do dilation for two
days. For 23 to 24, he’ll do dilation for two days and . . .
he’ll go in. We’ll give them the medication to put them to
sleep. At that time we give them custom.
Q: What’s that?
A: More medication. It’s higher than twilight because all
day we give them twilight to put them to sleep and make
them comfortable.
Q: So all day you’re putting people to sleep?
A: Yes.
Q: And they are waking up sometimes?

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A: Yes.
Q: And then you’re putting them back to sleep?
A: Yes.
Q: How many times would a patient wake up and go back
to sleep?
A: About three or four times.
Q: Before they’re going in for their procedure?
A: Yes.
Q: So, if a patient is between 20 and 24 weeks, she would
get even more additional medication?
A: Yes.
Q: So, she would have already been awake and asleep three
or four times throughout the day –
A: Yes.
Q: because she was given drugs throughout the day?
A: Yes.
Q: By either yourself or Ashley or Sherry or Lynda?
A: Yes.
Q: And then when [Dr. Gosnell] arrives on site, on the
premises, and he’s getting ready to take care of it, to
terminate the pregnancy, he would put the patient to sleep
again?
A: Yes.
Q: With a heavier dosage of medication?
A: Yes.
Q: Who would give that heavier dosage of medication?

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A: Me, Sherry. Sherry would be in recovery at that time.
Me, Lynda, or Ashley.
Q: And would he tell you at that point how much to give or
would you just give what you knew to give?
A: Just give what I knew to give.
Q: How did you know what to give?
A: Just from looking at the sign. . . .
Cross stated that she would check on patients every hour and give more medication if
they were cramping.
Latosha Lewis described the same standard procedures as Cross. She testified that
second-trimester patients would arrive at the clinic in the early afternoon. They would be
given Cytotec and Restoril by whomever sat at the front desk. Cytotec was given to
induce labor by softening the cervix and causing the uterus to contract. Restoril, Lewis
explained, was to calm the women’s nerves. Women were then placed in the “recovery
room” where any one of the several unlicensed workers placed an IV access in the
women’s hands. For the next several hours – sometimes as many as eight or nine –
women sat, medicated and in labor until either the doctor, or their baby, arrived. Lewis
testified:
We would undress them eventually from waist down, cover
them up, and just put a blanket over them and they would
sit there for hours while we’re – either every hour on the
hour or whenever we got a chance, we’re still giving them
more Cytotec. If the IV is in, we’re giving them pain meds
through the IVs. And that’s what we’re doing the whole
time until the doctor arrives, unless the baby comes out.

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Gosnell, she testified, was at home while his patients went into labor and his workers
repeatedly medicated them at will. The goal, according to the clinic’s workers, was to
keep the patients asleep.
According to Lewis, the workers would not document what she referred to as the
“mini-doses” or “in-betweens” that the workers gave continuously to achieve their goal –
a room full of comatose women.
Gosnell used medication – and slaps – to silence loud or complaining patients.
Tina Baldwin testified that, while the size and weight of the patients were
immaterial to dosages, one factor that did influence the staff’s use of medication was the
temperament of the patient. Baldwin said that she would call Gosnell at home when she
had a question about medicating a patient:
A: . . . He would ask you what her temperament was, you
know.
Q: Why did it matter what her temperament was?
A: I don’t know. He would just ask you what it was, you
know, what she was doing.
Q: For instance, if someone was carrying on, really crying
out in pain –
A: Oh, you would knock them out completely.
Q: Why?
A: Because he wouldn’t want you – he didn’t want to hear
all that. He just didn’t want to hear all that. He didn’t want
that in his office. He didn’t like confrontation. He didn’t
like nobody calling the police or anything. He didn’t like
none of that stuff going on.
Q: So he would just drug a girl in the back if she was
complaining and carrying on?

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A: If she was out of hand, yeah, she would get put under.
Q: How often would that happen?
A: Any time somebody got out of hand.
Q: How often would people get out of hand?
A: Let’s say 24 weeks and you’re feeling all of it, I would
say at least three a week, three or four a week, something
like that.
Q: And there’s other patients there with her, right?
A: Yeah. And when it gets like that, we try – they used to
take the other patients upstairs through the back way or we
would shut the front, shut the door before surgery and that
girl that was being a problem, nine times out of ten – you
would get her out of the way first. Put her in a room, put
her in a room, let’s give her her medication, quiet her up.
She’s upsetting everybody else. So usually she would get
done first.
If Gosnell was present in the clinic, drugs might be the back-up plan for subduing
unruly patients. Tina Baldwin testified that she saw Gosnell slap a woman on the thigh
when she got “a little bit rowdy.” Baldwin explained that when that did not quiet her, he
used drugs: “I mean he slapped her and that didn’t work, then he would medicate her and
put her under.” According to Baldwin, some women returned to complain and ask why
they had slap or hand marks on their thighs.
Even when Gosnell was in the building, he did not oversee the administration of
anesthesia – except when the patient was white.
Tina Baldwin told the Grand Jury that the untrained medical assistants, without
supervision by Gosnell, routinely administered even the final dose of sedation just before
the procedure – unless the patient was white. She testified:

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. . . it was two rooms back there. And if he was working on
one person in one room, you were in the other room you
were setting that patient up to be done when he’s done
because it was just a back and forth thing. You would go
ahead and medicate this person before he gets in the room.
Q: Okay. Was he present when you did that medication?
A: No, no. And sometimes he asked them – but it was a
race thing.
Q: What do you mean?
A: It was – he sometimes he used to – okay. Like if a girl –
the black population was – African population was big
here. So he didn’t mind you medicating your African
American girls, your Indian girl, but if you had a white girl
from the suburbs, oh, you better not medicate her. You
better wait until he go in and talk to her first. And one day I
said something to him and he was like, that’s the way of the
world. Huh? And he brushed it off and that was it.
Tina Baldwin also testified that white patients often did not have to wait in the
same dirty rooms as black and Asian clients. Instead, Gosnell would escort them up the
back steps to the only clean office – Dr. O’Neill’s – and he would turn on the TV for
them. Mrs. Mongar, she said, would have been treated “no different from the rest of the
Africans and Asians.”
Gosnell employed a high school student to medicate and monitor abortion patients
until he and other staff arrived at the clinic to perform abortions.
In September 2006, Gosnell hired Ashley Baldwin, Tina’s daughter, to work at
his clinic when she was just 15 years old. She was a sophomore in high school. She came
to the clinic each day in the early afternoon. In the beginning, her job was to answer
phones and do paperwork. But before the end of her sophomore year, Gosnell assigned
her to attend to the abortion patients in the recovery room.

62

For about a year, she was working “in the back” with other unlicensed workers
who knew Gosnell’s customs and practices. Kareema Cross, Latosha Lewis, Adrienne
Moton, and Steve Massof assisted Gosnell with the abortion procedures and were usually
at the clinic during the afternoon and evening before the doctor arrived. But as those
employees left, or cut back their hours, Ashley became responsible for more and more
activities involving patients.
In addition to attending to the patients in the recovery room, the now high-school
junior began to assist Gosnell in the smaller of the two procedure rooms – one the staff
referred to as “O’Keefe.” (The larger procedure room, where Gosnell performed laterterm
abortions, was named “Monet.”) Gosnell showed Ashley how to operate the
ultrasound machine – which he told her was old and didn’t really work – and how to
measure and record the size of the fetuses. This became a routine part of her job.
By her senior year, Ashley was doing just about everything in the clinic except
performing surgeries. She testified that Gosnell was coming into the clinic later and later,
and that when he came in later, so did Lynda Williams and Sherry West. Often, Ashley
was the only person staffing the clinic from the time her mother left at 6:00 p.m. until
whenever Williams and West, who drove to work together, arrived. Even when West and
Williams were at the clinic, Ashley said, Sherry West preferred to hang around at the
front desk instead of working.
Ashley testified:
I was just supposed to be in the recovery room, and inside
another small room. But since they weren’t there, I had to
bring the girls from the front to the back, set them up in
both rooms, wait until he got there, if a precipitation
happened, I had to handle it on my own.

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By “precipitation,” Ashley meant that women and girls actually delivered babies.
They delivered babies when Ashley was the only person present in the clinic to take care
of them, their babies, the placenta, and all of the other drugged patients waiting for
procedures. By Ashley’s own admission, the women and babies did not get any kind of
standard medical care. She described doing the best she could:
Q: Okay. You said that as a senior you would be working
and the babies would precipitate and you would be left to
take care of it; is that right?
A: Yes.
Q: How would you take care of it?
A: I would usually tell the girl to go to the bathroom, and I
would – there is a phone right by one of the bathrooms, and
I would call his phone.
Q: Call whose phone?
A: Doc. Call his cell phone while he’s running or doing
something.
Q: What do you mean by running?
A: He go for a run before he come to work.
Q: And that is why he would get there so late?
A: . . . Yes. Or go swimming. And I would wait until he got
there, so I would have to sit in the bathroom with the girl.
Q: How many times did you see babies precipitate when
you were there?
A: A lot. Mostly all the second tri’s mostly.
Other staff members confirmed that it was standard procedure for women to deliver
fetuses – and viable babies – into toilets while patients and staff waited for Gosnell to
arrive at the clinic.

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In addition to essentially delivering babies, Ashley medicated patients, performed
ultrasounds, filled out patient charts, and diagnosed sexually transmitted diseases using a
microscope that she said was not as good as the one in her high school chemistry lab.
Gosnell trained Ashley to administer intravenous medication by having her insert an IV
“butterfly needle” – once – into his hand and injecting a saline solution. She testified
about how he trained her concerning the actual drugs that she would use to medicate
patients:
Q: Okay. So there were times when you also gave
medication to patients when the doctor wasn’t there?
A: Yes.
Q: What kind of medications did you give?
* * *
A: Doc gave me a chart of medication. I couldn’t really
read the chart, so I made the chart over on my own and
color coded. And it was diazepam, nalbuphine, sometime
Demerol if there was no nalbuphine, and I forgot the other
one.
Q: Promethazine?
A: Promethazine, Yeah.
Q: How do you know how much to give a patient?
A: He gave me a book.
Q: The doctor gave you a book?
A: Yes.
Q: This is right after you turned 18 as a senior in high
school?
A: Yes.

65

Q: And did you read the book? Did you read the book?
A: Yes.
Q: What did it tell you?
A: It was a whole lot of percentages and decimal points and
stuff. He was just like: you have to focus on this part right
here. So, I just read and understood the part that he told me.
Q: Did you understand the book?
A: The part that he told me to read, the math, yeah, but not
the words.
Q: Okay. And so how did you know how to mix up or draw
up the medications?
A: He – he did them first, and then he told me to do them in
front of him.
Q: How much training did you get?
A: Just that twenty minutes.
Based on this “training,” Ashley would draw up the medications for as many as
20 patients a night. Ashley testified that she also administered drugs to first-trimester
patients who would go into the smaller procedure room where she worked. She said that
sometimes she would telephone the doctor if one of the first-trimester patients was in
pain and he was not at the clinic. He would tell her: “ Well, med them, I’m on my way.”
Ashley would then administer the “local ” or, as she referred to the mix, “the blue meds”
that were included with the fee for first-trimester patients.
The Grand Jury noted that, while testifying, Ashley mixed up Demerol with
diazepam when describing the drugs that constituted a “heavy” dose. She said the clinic’s
“heavy” mix of sedatives contained 50 mg. of diazepam and 12.5 mg. of promethazine.
On the chart, however, a “heavy” is described as 50 mg. of Demerol, 12.5 mg. of

66

promethazine, and 5mg. of diazepam. This mistake gave the jurors just a hint of how
dangerous Gosnell’s practice – its procedures and its staffing – was for his patients.
Ashley was working 50 hours a week at the clinic and Gosnell was paying her
$8.50 an hour – in cash. On her high school “work roster,” Gosnell wrote that she worked
from noon to 6:00 p.m. Her title was “student.” In truth, Ashley often worked until 2:00
a.m. and performed the duties of a registered nurse or a doctor. When asked who was in
charge of the clinic before Gosnell arrived, Ashley testified: “Me.”
The workers Gosnell hired were incompetent and uncaring in administering
anesthesia to his patients – while he was not on the premises.
Latosha Lewis and Kareema Cross testified that whatever they did know about
medicating patients they had learned from other unlicensed, untrained workers who came
before them. Lewis admitted that she was careless about medicating patients until she
overmedicated a patient to the point that the patient’s eyes rolled up into her head. She
testified that, after that frightening experience, she was more careful to measure when she
prepared injections and was more watchful when the patients were medicated.
In 2008, however, Lewis stopped assisting with the abortion procedures, and
Cross stopped in July 2009. Sherry West and Lynda Williams, whom Gosnell hired to
take over their duties, were not as conscientious. West had been a long-time patient of
Gosnell’s and, according to Cross, she and Lynda Williams both obtained narcotics –
Xanax, Oxycontin, promethazine, and Percocet – through Gosnell.
According to Lewis, Gosnell hired Sherry West when she lost her job at the
Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center after contracting hepatitis C. Yet,
despite her hepatitis, West regularly failed to wear gloves when treating patients. In fact,

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Cross testified that she never saw West wear gloves, even though West worked in the
procedure room with the doctor and inserted patients’ IV connections.
Cross also said that Williams and West did not know how to give injections
correctly, and that patients regularly came in to complain because their arms swelled up
after injections as a result of improper technique.
Even more dangerous was West and Williams’s reckless attitude toward
medicating patients. Cross, Lewis, and Ashley Baldwin all described West and Williams
as incompetent. Although medicating patients based on a predetermined chart is in itself
astonishingly reckless, West and Williams did not even follow the chart when medicating
patients. Neither seemed to understand – or care about – the grave risk to patients that
their haphazard approach posed. Latosha Lewis testified: “It was a game to them.” Lewis
said that when they were supposed to be administering medications, West and Williams
were “just goofing off and playing around.”
According to Kareema Cross, Williams was especially dangerous because she
imagined that she was the doctor. Williams seemed to feel it didn’t matter what she did,
because Gosnell didn’t care. Cross, Lewis, and Ashley Baldwin all testified that Williams
routinely overmedicated patients. This happened because she paid no attention to the
chart when she drew up the drugs in a syringe, and because she failed to keep track of or
to record what she administered. West, who had told Gosnell that she wasn’t comfortable
medicating patients, ended up following Williams’s lead.
Williams’s habit of using too much medication was so serious that Cross reported
it to Gosnell at least a year before Karnamaya Mongar died. Cross got the doctor’s
attention by telling him that he was losing money because Williams was using so much

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medication. As a result, Gosnell put a logbook in the recovery room to keep better track
of drugs. This solution, however, was designed to save money, not protect patients. Even
if the staff wrote in the logbook, which they frequently did not, they still did not record
dosages where it mattered – in the patients’ files. Cross said that Williams did neither.
Cross testified that she could recall at least 15 times when she had medicated a
second-trimester patient only to have Williams come along right behind her and medicate
again. Lewis said that no one, including herself, recorded the repeated doses of sedation
that the clinic’s staff administered to second-trimester patients to keep them anesthetized
throughout their – often six- or seven-hour – wait for the doctor.
Lewis was particularly concerned because Williams and West would medicate
patients and then not watch them. Even though the clinic had no machines to monitor
patients’ breathing or heartbeat, West and Williams would just leave the sedated patients
in the back and go out to the front desk to eat and do “other things.” Without the benefit
of machines, monitoring at a minimum would require physically watching the patients to
make sure they were breathing. Neither Williams nor West did this. Even Kareema Cross
admitted that she sometimes did not.
Indeed, given how the clinic’s practice was set up – with multiple secondtrimester
patients sitting for hours in induced labor, crying in pain, and receiving repeated
doses of sedation; with babies precipitating; with no doctor present, and unlicensed staff
who showed up only when they felt like it; and with virtually no monitoring equipment –
it would have been impossible even for a conscientious staff member to appropriately
monitor the patients.

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According to Ashley Baldwin, Williams medicated patients “whenever Sherry
told her to,” which was “whenever Sherry felt like somebody needed something.” As for
how Williams determined which drugs and how much to give, Ashley answered: “What
she thought they needed. She used what she wanted to.” Williams almost never referred
to the chart of medications and rarely called the absent doctor for instructions. Ashley
testified that Williams used a lot of diazepam and gave repeated doses. (As noted earlier,
the high-schooler mixed up diazepam and Demerol elsewhere in her testimony.) Ashley
explained that the workers did not usually call to consult with Gosnell because he
frequently became angry when they called him.
In addition to administering drugs to sedate patients, Gosnell’s unlicensed
workers also gave second-trimester patients repeated doses of Cytotec to soften their
cervixes, stimulate contractions, and induce labor. Most of the staff administered Cytotec
by placing a tablet inside the patient’s cheek or lip. But Williams administered it
vaginally.
As Ashley described the situation: Second-trimester patients were in a lot of pain
because of all the vaginal Cytotec Williams administered. Williams then administered
repeated, heavy doses of sedating drugs to make them “comfortable.” Cytotec causes
labor to begin. Women who were given excessive Cytotec would suffer excessive pain as
a result. According to Lewis and Cross, the goal of Gosnell’s assistants was to keep the
second-trimester patients knocked out during labor and delivery. The doctor was present,
if at all, only at the very end of this drug-induced delivery process.

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When something went wrong, Gosnell avoided seeking emergency assistance
for patients.
If something went wrong during a procedure – and it inevitably did, given
Gosnell’s careless techniques and gross disregard for patient safety – he avoided seeking
help. Sherilyn Gillespie, the Department of State investigator who participated in the raid,
interviewed a number of former patients whose experiences illustrate Gosnell’s alarming
and self-serving practice of covering up life-threatening mistakes, no matter the risk to
the patient.
Dana Haynes went to Gosnell for an abortion in November 2006. She called
relatives just before her procedure to tell them that she should be ready to be picked up
by 7:45 p.m. When Ms. Haynes’s cousins arrived, clinic staff refused to admit them into
the clinic and made excuses as to why Haynes was not ready. Finally, after hours of
waiting, the cousins gained entry to the clinic by threatening to call the police. They
found Ms. Haynes alone, incoherent, slumped over, and bleeding. There was no
monitoring equipment, and there was blood on the floor.
Gosnell called an ambulance only after the cousins demanded that he do so.
Kareema Cross testified that, after having problems performing Ms. Haynes’s abortion
and extracting only portions of her fetus, Gosnell had placed her in the recovery room
while he performed abortions on other patients. Rather than call an ambulance, Gosnell
kept Ms. Haynes waiting for hours after the unsuccessful procedure because he wanted to
try to fix it himself. By the time Ms. Haynes’s cousins rescued her from the recovery
room, Gosnell had tried at least twice, unsuccessfully, to complete the abortion.
Ms. Haynes was transported to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
There, doctors discovered that Gosnell had left most of the fetus inside her uterus and had

71

perforated her cervix and bowel. Ms. Haynes required surgery to remove five inches of
bowel, needed a large blood transfusion, and remained hospitalized for five days.
Similarly, Gosnell should have sent another patient, Marie Smith, to the hospital
when he was unable to remove the entire fetus during her abortion in November 1999.
But again, he just kept the patient waiting, sedated and bleeding in the recovery room
while he proceeded with other patients. Again, it was an insistent relative – Marie’s
mother – who found her. In Marie Smith’s case, Gosnell did not tell her that he had left
parts of the fetus inside her uterus. (Doctors are required to inspect the extracted tissue to
ensure they have removed it all.)
Instead, Gosnell allowed Marie Smith to go home. When her mother called days
later to report that Marie’s condition had worsened, he assured her that Marie would be
fine. Fortunately, the mother ignored Gosnell’s assurances and took her daughter to the
emergency room. When they arrived at Presbyterian Hospital, Marie was unconscious.
Doctors found that Gosnell had left fetal parts inside her and that she had a severe
infection. They told her she was lucky to be alive.
Another patient, a 19-year-old, had to have a hysterectomy after Gosnell left her
sitting in his recovery room for over four hours after perforating her uterus. Gosnell
finished performing the abortion at 8:45 p.m. on April 16, 1996, but did not call fire
rescue until 1:15 a.m. By the time emergency help arrived, the patient was not breathing.
She arrived at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in shock, having lost
significant blood. To save her life, doctors had to remove her uterus.
In at least one case, Gosnell prevented a patient’s companion from summoning
help. The patient, a recovering addict who was undergoing methadone treatment, started

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convulsing when Gosnell administered anesthesia. When she fell off the procedure table
and hit her head, the staff summoned her companion who was waiting for her. The
companion asked Gosnell to call an ambulance, but Gosnell refused. He also prevented
the companion from leaving the clinic to summon help.
Tina Baldwin told us that she knew of two or three times that Gosnell perforated a
woman’s uterus and then tried to surgically repair these mistakes himself. According to
Tina Baldwin, Gosnell did not even tell these patients that he had harmed them.
Gosnell took photographs of his patients’ genitalia before procedures and collected
fetuses’ feet in jars.
Gosnell engaged in other practices with patients that defy any medical or even
common-sense explanation. Steven Massof testified that the doctor would often
photograph women’s genitalia before he performed their abortions. According to Massof,
Gosnell told him that he was photographing women from Liberia and other African
countries who had undergone clitorodectomies, the surgical removal of the clitoris.
In his curriculum vitae, Gosnell described this activity as “clinical research:
clitoral surgery patients – cultural and functional realities.” There is no evidence,
however, that the doctor obtained the necessary permissions to engage in human
experimentation.
Massof said that Gosnell took pictures of women, and of fetuses, with a digital
camera and with his phone. Gosnell told Massof that he was taking the photographs for
“his teaching,” but Massof said that he was unaware that Gosnell taught anywhere.
Gosnell would often show the photographs to Massof and exclaim about the skill of the
surgeons who had sewn the women’s labia together, leaving only a small opening to
allow menstrual flow.

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Another of the doctor’s practices that defies explanation was his habit of cutting
the feet off of aborted fetuses and saving them in specimen jars in the clinic. Kareema
Cross showed the Grand Jury photographs she had taken in 2008 of a closet where
Gosnell stored jars containing severed feet. During the February 2010 raid, investigators
were shocked to see a row of jars on a clinic shelf containing fetal parts. Ashley Baldwin
testified that she saw about 30 such jars.
Severed fetal feet
None of the medical experts who testified before the Grand Jury had ever heard of
such a disturbing practice, nor could they come up with an explanation for it. The
medical expert on abortions testified that cutting off the feet “is bizarre and off the wall.”
The experts uniformly rejected out of hand Gosnell’s supposed explanation that he was
preserving the feet for DNA purposes should paternity ever become an issue. A small
tissue sample would suffice to collect DNA. None of the staff knew of any instance in
which fetal feet were ever used for this purpose.

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[To be continued]

Glenn Beck on Kermit Gosnell

Born-Alive Infants Protection
Act of 2002

H. R. 2175
One Hundred Seventh Congress
of the
United States of America
AT THE SECOND SESSION
Begun and held at the City of Washington on Wednesday,
the twenty-third day of January, two thousand and two
An Act
To protect infants who are born alive.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Born-Alive Infants Protection
Act of 2002’’.
SEC. 2. DEFINITION OF BORN-ALIVE INFANT.
(a) IN GENERAL.—Chapter 1 of title 1, United States Code,
is amended by adding at the end the following:
‘‘§ 8. ‘Person’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, and ‘individual’ as
including born-alive infant
‘‘(a) In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or
of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various
administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States,
the words ‘person’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, and ‘individual’,
shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens
who is born alive at any stage of development.

‘‘(b) As used in this section, the term ‘born alive’, with respect
to a member of the species homo sapiens, means the complete
expulsion or extraction from his or her mother of that member,
at any stage of development, who after such expulsion or extraction
breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord,
or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether
the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the
expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced
labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.
‘‘(c) Nothing in this section shall be construed to affirm, deny,
expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to
any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to
being ‘born alive’ as defined in this section.’’.
H. R. 2175—2
(b) CLERICAL AMENDMENT.—The table of sections at the beginning
of chapter 1 of title 1, United States Code, is amended by
adding at the end the following new item:
‘‘8. ‘Person’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, and ‘individual’
as including born-alive infant.’’.

Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Vice President of the United States and
President of the Senate
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-107hr2175enr/pdf/BILLS-107hr2175enr.pdf