When abortionist and convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell was sentenced today to 30 more years for running what prosecutors called a "pill mill," there was hardly any coverage. After all, the 72-year-old West Philadelphia abortionist is already serving three consecutive life sentences for murdering three babies that he'd he aborted alive, plus an additional three and half years more for involuntary manslaughter in the death of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar.
Indeed, one of the few brief accounts I ran across concluded, "The sentencing Monday afternoon effectively closes the book on Gosnell…" Here's where I flatly disagree.
Gosnell fought the drug charges—charges that he made a fortune writing bogus prescriptions for thousands of OxyContin, Percocet , and Xanax pills, on top of the fortune he made performing late, late abortions almost entirely on women of color.
He initially rejected a plea bargain (an additional 20 years) on the federal drug charges but then, once the murder trial was complete, Gosnell pleaded guilty. He "insists he had only good intentions as he repeatedly filled prescriptions for OxyContin and other painkillers for addicts," the local CBS affiliate reported. Ah, yes, Kermit Gosnell, the good-hearted drug addiction counselor.
This is of a piece with Gosnell's self-understanding that was never on better display than in the exclusive interview he gave a local reporter Steve Volk when he was in prison. His motives were always, always pure, and he was always, always misunderstood.
He adamantly insisted to reporter Volk that he never knowingly slit the spinal cord of a live baby. Here's what he told Volk:
"He said he'd never actually seen a baby move, beyond a 'reflex' when the scissors snipped the spinal cord. He snipped the necks of dead babies, he claimed, merely to prevent any possible pain reception—as if dead babies feel any pain at all."
To his credit, Volk chased him down but Gosnell continues to bob and weave.
"I pressed him on this, explaining that it simply didn't seem credible for a medical doctor to be worrying about the pain experienced by a fetus he felt sure was dead. …He could never explain himself. And his answers seemed carefully couched: 'I never saw anything I took as fetal movement.'"
This case will not go away because you can bet Gosnell will make sure one small e-book by one local reporter is not the last word on his career. Would anyone be surprised if a real book is in the works, one that in exchange for access to the man who ran a "House of Horrors" will be allowed to portray himself as half civil rights champion, half martyr, and all compassion?
Gosnell's case will not go away because there are other abortionists who may not do exactly what he did, but whose behavior is scandalous by anyone standards. Indeed there are some abortionists even the Abortion Establishment is eager to distance itself from. Every time there is a court case or one of these "rouges" tries to get his medical license back, the reporter will likely recall Gosnell.
There are many other reasons Gosnell's case will not and should not go away, including the head-in-the-sand insistence by big shots in the abortion industry in Pennsylvania and Delaware that they knew nothing—NOTHNG– about a man who operated what the prosecution called a "baby charnel house."
And the memory of what Gosnell did (according to the Philadelphia Grand Jury) to hundreds of babies long past the point of viability won't go way because I won't let it.
By Dave Andrusko, NRL News
