(Editor’s Note: This story contains graphic material that may
upset some readers)
By Dave Warner
PHILADELPHIA, March 18 (Reuters) – Dr. Kermit Gosnell ran a
“house of horrors” in a West Philadelphia health clinic where
women went for late-term abortions, a prosecutor said in his
opening statement on Monday in a trial that will decide if the
doctor is guilty of murder in the deaths of seven infants and a
woman.
The district attorney’s office contends Gosnell, 72,
delivered live babies and then deliberately severed their spinal
cords, killing them. “This is not a case about abortion,”
Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore told the jury.
“This is a case about murder.”
Gosnell’s defense lawyer, John McMahon, characterized the
prosecution of his client, who is black, as “elitist, racist”
and said, “They (prosecutors) want to put a Mayo Clinic standard
on a West Philadelphia clinic.”
The charges against Gosnell and nine of his employees have
rekindled the debate in the United States about late-term
abortions. Abortions are banned in Pennsylvania after 24 weeks
of pregnancy.
McMahon tried to cast doubt on whether the deaths of the
infants constituted homicide. “The first rule of homicide is
someone has to be alive,” he told the jury. He said the
gestational age of infants is plus or minus three weeks. “The
estimates here are nothing more than guesses,” he said.
At the time his office filed the charges in 2011, District
Attorney and chief prosecutor Seth Williams, who is also black,
said he knew abortion was a hot-button issue but that “a doctor
who cuts into the necks severing the spinal cords of living,
breathing babies who would survive with proper medical
attention, is committing murder under the law.”
Gosnell, who has been in jail since his January 2011 arrest,
ran a clinic called the Women’s Medical Society.
He faces 26 charges, including murder for the deaths of the
seven infants and a woman who visited his office.
The prosecution contends the woman died of a drug overdose
administered by the clinic. If found guilty of this charge,
Gosnell could face the death penalty.
Dressed in a dark business suit, Gosnell displayed no
emotion during the opening statements of the trial, which is
expected to last several weeks.
Pescatore described unsanitary conditions, cats that ran
around the office, medical equipment that did not work and the
bodies of babies “that were treated like trash.”
“When you got inside (the clinic), it was like a house of
horrors,” Pescatore said.
Gosnell, she said, killed them by snipping their spinal
cords as soon as they were born.
“You are a doctor,” she said. “You have to at a minimum keep
these babies alive … That does not mean you can take a pair of
scissors and plunge it into their spinal cord,” she told the
jury.
If the newborn is breathing, she told the jury, “You cannot
kill it. That’s murder. That’s a human being.”
She said when investigators raided the clinic with a search
warrant in February 2010, “They saw more than they probably
wanted to see for the rest of their lives.”
McMahon told the jury that of 47 fetuses found in a clinic
freezer, 45 were clearly legal, under the legal limit (of 24
weeks). “The whole theory is bogus because this baby was not
born alive.”
Of the remaining two, McMahon said of one of them, “You know
what the evidence is going to show? Zero.”
“Their who theory is bogus because this baby was not born
alive,” McMahon said.
He said autopsy results on the other showed, “The baby never
lived.”
Gosnell pleaded not guilty to the charges on Monday, as did
the other defendant on trial, Eileen O’Neill, a medical school
graduate who does not have a license to practice medicine. Theft
by deception and false swearing are included in the charges
against O’Neill.
Eight other defendants have pleaded guilty to a variety of
charges and are awaiting sentencing.
(Editing by Daniel Trotta)
