If you haven't read the horrific story of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, it's not your fault. Neither has most of the country.
It hasn't been covered by a single one of the three major national networks. Politico.com gave it a miss, so did the Wall Street Journal, there was no original reporting on the story in the Washington Post and the New York Times covered it once -- and then only on page A17 on day one of the Gosnell trial.
The first I saw of the story was a USA Today Kristen Powers column published last Thursday under the headline, "Philadelphia abortion clinic horror." Powers says what I believe we all should be saying right now: "We've forgotten what belongs on Page One."
In 2010 the FBI raided Kermit Gosnells abortion clinic to look for evidence that he was selling prescription drugs. Instead, agents said they found a scene of appalling medical neglect, the likes of which haven't been discovered since the "butcher days" prior to Roe v. Wade.
You can't write off this story as something from the imagination of a gaggle of far-right, pro-life wingnuts. The description of what agents found and what witnesses delivered as testimony comes directly from the FBI report.
It's not pleasant reading. But this report is something that shouldn't be ignored or downplayed.
Gosnell ran that clinic for decades, performing tens of thousands of abortions. What he's actually on trial for is his participation in the beheadings of seven children born alive and for killing one of the women who came to him for an abortion.
Witness accounts claim other women died and hundreds of babies were killed by delivering them and then snipping their spinal cords -- but these were the deaths prosecutors could charge him with.
Not a single investigator checked out Gosnell's clinic in 17 years -- 17 years. Here's an excerpt of what the FBI found when agents finally did go in:
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. Semiconscious 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.
Agents said there were aborted fetuses everywhere -- in the refrigerator, in cat-food containers, in orange juice cartons -- and a jar full of severed feet.
The jury report says that in some cases, the babies aborted at the clinic weren't fetuses at all, they really were babies. They were viable -- that is, they were breathing and moving. The report describes one late-term abortion like this:
"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 6 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.
This is my point.I believe this affects me -- not just the story, but the media's attitude toward it.
I am a pro-choice Republican. In the conservative world I live in, my argument for Roe v. Wade is often challenged. That's OK, I have very firm convictions on this issue, I can defend them and the Kermit Gosnell horror story does nothing to alter them.
But I think that all of us who are profoundly pro-choice -- particularly those of us in the media -- have a greater obligation to show the world we're not going to blur the boundaries of heart and human decency, we're not going to cling to a political argument when it doesn't fit the circumstance, and we're not going to huddle in a corner and laugh at pro-life advocates who are justifiably sickened by the Gosnell case.
As USA Today's Kristen Powers said of the Associated Press's headline on the Gosnell story ("Staffer describes chaos at PA abortion clinic"), "'Chaos' isn't really the story here. Butchering babies that were already born and were older than the state's 24-week limit for abortions is the story."
For heaven's sake, by his own testimony, Kermit Gosnell killed a 41-year-old patient, and it appears close to 100 babies delivered after he attempted a late-term abortion. This is a story that should be told in every news medium in this country -- in fact, should have been since 2010. I apologize to readers for just finding out about it now.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.
