Good morning to my colleagues, the Ranking Member, and especially to our guests. I look forward to hearing from our panel about the subject of late term abortions.
This is not the first occasion on which this Committee has discussed the importance of protecting babies after the fifth month of pregnancy and newborns who are born alive during botched abortions. At a hearing two years ago, we discussed the shocking case of a woman who entered a West Philadelphia abortion clinic for the purpose of terminating her pregnancy, but who never made it out alive.
This woman, Karnamaya Monger, was 41 years old and about 19 weeks pregnant when she entered that clinic and died during an abortion performed there. She was just one of many of the victims of Kermit Gosnell, in whose clinic babies were born alive and had their spines sliced with scissors after breathing on their own. Kermit Gosnell ran his clinic in West Philadelphia for well over three decades, performing numerous late term abortions in this period. The Grand Jury report on his crimes is stomach churning.
But the Gosnell case also raises the question of whether the substandard abortion clinic is a phenomenon that exists in other communities across the United States. That very question was examined in a May 2013 National Review article, entitled “Abortion’s Underside.” The author, Jillian Kay Melchior, hints that the Gosnell case may not be the isolated incident that some would have us believe.
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