RealChoice: April 2020

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Gloria Aponte with New Clipping

Twenty-year-old Gloria Aponte went to National Abortion Federation member Hanan Rotem in Stamford, Connecticut, for a safe and legal abortion on April 29, 1986. She was in the second trimester of her pregnancy.

A few hours after the abortion, Gloria was declared dead from hemorrhage at a nearby hospital. Gloria, wife of Carlo Aponte, had been a homemaker and mother of one.

Rotem claimed that Gloria had died from an amniotic fluid embolism. An investigation by health officials found that Rotem had failed to perform necessary blood tests, such as hematocrit and Rh factor, and had permitted a receptionist with no medical training to administer anesthesia. Rotem had no hospital privileges and no emergency patient transfer agreement in place. For his fatal treatment of Gloria, he was fined a total of $2,000.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Gosnell: The Untold Story -- Finishing Chapter Three: "Gosnell Thinks He's Innocent"

I'm still working on Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer, by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer. As I listen, I'm blogging about relevant material that I know from over 35 years of abortion research. Links to previous commentaries are at the bottom of this post.

"Gosnell Thinks He's Innocent"

This gets back to the fact that the shocking thing about the Gosnell case is that it was vigorously and successfully prosecuted. What he was doing differed from what other abortionists do primarily in degree, not existentially. Killing born alive babies, having unqualified staff, performing illegal third-trimester abortions, faking patient records, having a dirty facility, dealing drugs, stockpiling fetal remains, having no functioning emergency equipment …. The only thing that I've seen in other clinics that Gosnell wasn't doing was sexually abusing patients. Of course Gosnell must feel bewildered that he's in prison for life for doing what other people do and get away with. Thank you, Detective Jim Wood. I wish there was somebody like you holding every abortionist in this country accountable for the things they do.

Think about how big a part of the abortion establishment Gosnell was.

He attended National Abortion Federation events. These are a chance for abortion workers to really relax among their fellows and talk about things that they won't talk about in public. They're a setting where it's safe to laugh about a baby's eyeball falling into your lap. It's a place where it's safe to admit that you do dangerous things and while you might get scolded, nobody is going to rat you out. So I have little doubt that Gosnell and his buddies swapped stories and gave each other helpful hints. I remember listening to one NAF tape where a woman was telling her fellows how to deal with the media after a patient death: "You have to look compassionate. You have to sound compassionate. And that's hard, I know."

I have absolutely zero doubt that Gosnell expected to get the same treatment Bruce Steir did when he killed Sharon Hamplton. He thought his friends would rally around him. He expected to get the support George Tiller got when Phil Kline was trying to hold him accountable for perpetrating illegal third trimester abortions.

In a way, I almost feel sorry for him. I've never been able to figure out why some abortionists are thrown under the bus, others are ignored, and others are defended. And I get the feeling Gosnell is wondering the same thing.

Prior posts:

* Police Protection and the Abortionist-Protecting Judge

* Nasty Discoveries, Lost Doctors, and More

* Miscellaneous from Chapter Three

* The Visitor from the National Abortion Federation

* Experts, Resistance, and Enabling

* Desiree Hawkins: The Foot in the Jar

* Why I Want to Slap the Medical Examiner

* Politics and the SCOTUS

* Unqualified Staff and More

* Gruesome Discoveries and Drug Dealing

* The Courage of Detective Wood

* Reflections of the Preface

* Anger and Law-Breaking

* The Media and Abortion Horrors

* Why I Have Anything to Add

The Death of Diamond Williams

As I'm going through my commentaries on the book, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer, I've been catching up on things I should have been blogging. Today I'm going to do adequate posts about two of the women that have died since the release of the Grand Jury Report in the Gosnell case. Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes specified that the report must in no way implicate the abortion establishment in any way. She made a choice to withhold information that would warn women of systemic problems in the abortion establishment. I hold her partially responsible for these women's deaths.

Diamond Williams

Diamond Williams was one of those women. Diamond, an 18-year-old African-American woman with diabetes and obesity, went to Carolina Center for Women (a National Abortion Federation member clinic) to undergo an abortion at 6.5 weeks of pregnancy on Saturday, January 23, 2016. She was a high-risk patient due to her health issues.

Diamond and her mother, Sharika, arrived early in the morning. Sharika sat in the waiting room all day. Nobody told her what was happening with her daughter.

Finally the clinic staff began to turn out the lights to close the clinic. Sharika had to pound on the glass at the receptionist's station to get somebody's attention. They had her walk around to a side door to meet Diamond and take her home.

Diamond was in a lot of pain that night, so Sharika called the clinic's after-hours number. She was reassured that the pain was normal. As long as there was no bleeding or fever, there was nothing to worry about.

Diamond was still in a lot of pain on Monday, so she called the clinic asking to schedule a follow-up visit. She was told that a nurse would call her back. That call never came.

On Tuesday evening, Diamond appeared to be feeling a little bit better, but she was still in pain so her mother made plans to take her to their primary care physician in the morning. Diamond headed to her room to get ready for bed. Then Sharika heard her daughter scream. She ran to find Diamond lying face-down, foaming at the mouth and unable to speak. The family called 911, and the operator thought Diamond was probably having a seizure.

When EMS arrived, the interpreted the family's hysteria as aggression and wouldn't enter the house until police arrived and the other children and the family dog were secured in a bedroom.

Sharika said that the medics didn't seem to be doing much to help her daughter other than just trying to get her to stand up. They finally rolled her onto a body bag, dragged her to the back patio, and lifted her onto a gurney. Sharika rode to the hospital with the police officer. At the hospital she was left alone in a room. A chaplain came and prayed with her while she waited to hear from the doctor.

Finally a doctor came and told Sharika that Diamond had a pulse and was being transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. She was allowed to visit her daughter briefly and described her as "bleeding from everywhere." Diamond died on January 27.

The autopsy was performed at the hospital. Sharika had to get a lawyer and wrangle for a year to get a copy of the autopsy report, and even then she was only provided with the last four pages of a 62-page report. It didn't note a cause of death or manner of death but did note diagnoses of amniotic fluid embolism (AFE) and Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation (DIC), a disorder in which the body's clotting factors in the blood are out of whack. One form of the disorder results in the sort of bleeding Sharika saw when Diamond was in the ICU. DIC can be triggered by an amniotic fluid embolism.

It seems strange that Diamond would suffer an amniotic fluid embolism from an abortion performed that early in the pregnancy.

Strangely enough, though Diamond had been diagnosed with DIC and AFE, the provisional cause of death was bronchopneumonia.

As Sharika tried to pursue a malpractice case against the clinic -- which refused to tell her the name of the physician -- she learned that her attorney had a conflict of interest because he also represented the clinic in other cases. To make things even harder, the clinic changed its name.

I've been unable to find any further information about Diamond's death.

The Death of Shirelle H

Frank Rodriguez

On September 22, 2012, 31-year-old Shirelle went to Presidential Women's Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, for an abortion. There, Dr. Frank Rodriguez pushed a cervical dilator into Shirelle's uterus and left it there. Shirelle died five days later, on September 27.

It's interesting to note that the medical board doesn't mention Shirelle's death in the disciplinary documents. Operation Rescue discovered the death on a malpractice payout reporting form.

Evidently the insurance payout was done quietly, since I have not been able to find any newspaper coverage of Shirelle's death.

Gosnell: The Untold Story - Police Protection and Judge Caldwell Hughes Enabling of Death

Ximena Renearts

A nurse put the shivering, whimpering infant into a bedpan and put the bedpan in a closet where dead fetuses were stored. About 40 minutes later the nurse noticed that the baby was still alive and asked the nursing supervisor what to do. The supervisor cleared the baby's airway but left her on a counter unattended. Eventually a children's hospital was notified and the baby was transported, but not until after she had suffered catastrophic brain damage. She was left severely cognitively disabled and paraplegic. She was subsequently named and adopted.

The police called the case "bullshit" and made only the most cursory attempts to investigate the postnatal attempt on Ximena's life. A spokesman for the BC Minster of Health explained the reason the Ministry would not get involved: "As you know, this Ministry is very much in favor of giving women choices about their reproductive health." BC's Chief Coroner said that as far as babies who died after surviving abortions, they weren't the coroner's business because a dead baby is to be expected in an abortion. Thus, although Canadian law prohibits abandonment or exposure of a child under the age of ten "so that its life is or is likely to be endangered or its health is or is likely to be permanently injured." But if the baby is an abortion survivor, all bets are off.

Continued Frustration

Hearing about the frustration of the Grand Jury and the prosecutors and other people who care about Gosnell's victims is frustrating to me. I've been trying to get people to care about what happens to women inside abortion clinics for well over thirty years and have yet to encounter a single prochoice person who doesn't shrug it off. I guess that's because, unlike the people involved in the Gosnell case, they weren't ever forced to think about it. Since there's no way to make people think about things they don't want to think about, I'm looking forward to perhaps another thirty years of prochoicers willing to shrug off atrocities as long as they take place behind the closed doors of abortion facilities.

But then, Judge Cardwell Hughes continues to embrace the abortion lobby even after she's seen the havoc they wreak. How can she reconcile failure to alert women to dangerous practitioners with keeping women safe? It's as if somebody proposed to protect people from serial murderers by dismantling VICAP and being careful never to publicize when police suspect that a serial killer is on the loose. The blood of every woman who dies from abortion malpractice after the release of the Grand Jury Report is, as far as I'm concerned, on Judge Cardwell Hughes' hands. She deliberately made the choice not to warn women. Since the report was released on January 17, 2011, the following women have died from botched abortions: Tonya Reaves, Maria Santiago, Lakisha Wilson, Cree Erwin-Sheppherd, Jamie Morales, "Shirelle H," Diamond Williams, and Keisha Atkins. Nice work, Ms. Cardwell Hughes.

Prior posts:

* Nasty Discoveries, Lost Doctors, and More
* Miscellaneous from Chapter Three
* The Visitor from the National Abortion Federation
* Experts, Resistance, and Enabling
* Desiree Hawkins: The Foot in the Jar
* Why I Want to Slap the Medical Examiner
* Politics and the SCOTUS
* Unqualified Staff and More
* Gruesome Discoveries and Drug Dealing
* The Courage of Detective Wood
* Reflections of the Preface
* Anger and Law-Breaking
* The Media and Abortion Horrors
* Why I Have Anything to Add

Gosnell: The Untold Story - Nasty Discoveries, Contra-Indicated Drugs, Lost Doctors, and More

Lawson Akpulonu

I took a call from a nurse who told me that she'd thought stories of nasty abortion clinics were just something right-to-lifers made up, but she'd been hired off the street to work at a clinic and left the same day. She'd seen our contact information on a flier and wanted to know if we'd help her report the clinic to the medical board. While Scott was helping her to put her complaint together, we got a call from Diane Sawyer's people wanting in formation about abortion clinics selling abortions to women who weren't actually pregnant. (This was in the days before home pregnancy tests.) We asked the nurse if she'd be willing to talk to Sawyer and she said absolutely yes. We provided Sawyer's people with a real scoop -- a complaint that was about to be sent but that the medical board hadn't received yet, and a chance to talk to the woman herself. Sawyer's people got back to us to say she'd decided that it was "a non-story." This was Lawson Akpulonu, who actually had been raping his patients in addition to running a nasty abortion mill.

Contra-indicated Drugs

One patient told Gosnell that she was using Methadone, but he doped her up anyway, nearly killing her. This puts me in mind of Diane Boyd, whose mother told high-profile abortionist Robert Crist about her medications, only to have him administer drugs that interacted with them and caused her death. Kelly Morse told staff at Hillcrest that she was allergic to the "caine" drugs, but they administered them anyway with fatal results. Hillview didn't even bother to screen Debra Gray for possible drug use before having an unqualified staff administer a lethal dose of anesthesia.

The Lost Doctor

When the nurse from the children's vaccination program went to the clinic to meet with Gosnell, the staff couldn't find him. That puts me in mind of National Abortion Federation member Eastern Women's Center, where Dawn Ravenell, Dawn Mack, and Venus Ortiz underwent their fatal abortions. During a four-day state survey (which, BTW, uncovered many appalling deficiencies) the facility staff were unable to locate their medical director.

The Nasty Refrigerator

Rajanna's fridge

The vaccine program nurse was also appalled by the disgusting array of biohazardous material kept in the freezer with the vaccines. Abortion clinics are infamous for nasty refrigerators.

Inspectors found blood and food stored together in William Malcom Knarr's clinic refrigerator. The fridge at Benjamin Thamrong's clinic contained expired medications, three syringes, a dirty carving knife, a specimen envelope containing a tube of blood collected 22 days earlier, a mostly-eaten salad, a partially empty bottle each of Coca Cola and Sunkist soda, a bottle of Yoo Yoo, a half-full bottle of Riuniti peach wine, and a quarter-full bottle of Asti Spumante with a paper towel stuffed in the top. In Krishna Rajanna's clinic fridge, police found Styrofoam cups containing fetal remains in the same refrigerator where the employees kept their food. (More than one employee told police that they had seen Rajanna heat the contents of the Styrofoam cups and dump them into his lunch.)

Refusing Reversal

"Sandy" changed her mind about going through with the abortion after Gosnell had inserted the laminaria. He refused to remove them and told her she would not get a refund. This is another common theme.

In one National Abortion Federation tape, I heard NAF member Douglas "The Texas Gosnell" Karpen complain that prolifers were stealing his patients by taking them to have the laminaria removed after they'd changed their minds. One patient, Nicolette C., was taken to a hospital by her mother after Karpen and another doctor at his clinic insisted that removing the laminaria would kill her; Nicolette had the laminaria removed but the damage had been done; she gave birth to a baby that subsequently died due to prematurity.

A woman named Nikki said that she asked doctors at NAF member Mayfair Women's Clinic (where Christi Stile's eventually fatal abortion was performed) to remove the laminaria. They not only refused, she said, but physically restrained her and threatened to have her hospitalized for being suicidal if she didn't go through with the abortion. They eventually released her and she was able to have her baby.

Tamiia Russell bled to death after NAF member Alberto "Licensed to Lie" Hodari refused to remove the laminaria after she had changed her mind.

Prior posts:

* Miscellaneous from Chapter Three
* The Visitor from the National Abortion Federation
* Experts, Resistance, and Enabling
* Desiree Hawkins: The Foot in the Jar
* Why I Want to Slap the Medical Examiner
* Politics and the SCOTUS
* Unqualified Staff and More
* Gruesome Discoveries and Drug Dealing
* The Courage of Detective Wood
* Reflections of the Preface
* Anger and Law-Breaking
* The Media and Abortion Horrors
* Why I Have Anything to Add

Monday, April 13, 2020

Gosnell: The Untold Story - Miscelaneous from Chapter Three

"How He Accomplished the Demise"

Gosnell's language about "ensuring fetal demise" put me right in mind of the terminology used in Martin Haskell's D&X presentation at the National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar in Dallas in 1992. I later got verification that this was where Gosnell got the idea. This explains the use of scissors at the back of the neck, the term "ensuring fetal demise," and the fact that Gosnell told his staff that he was just modifying D&X.

This is part of why I don't think Gosnell is delusional when he insists that he was just a normal part of American abortion practice. I think Gosnell's divergence from standard practice was a matter of degree, not any existential difference. I do think he's delusional for thinking that his fellows are going to step forward and vindicate him. They threw him under the bus and they're not going to back down on the "outlier" claim.

Unfettered Access vs Real Live Women

The prosecutors discovered that the abortion community would circle the wagons if somebody got caught doing atrocious things. I've dubbed this "the Compton-Carr Effect." If you can't say something nice about abortion, don't say anything at all. And above all, keep outsiders out of the clinic. That especially includes state health inspectors. Of course, with Gosnell they stayed out of their own volition.

Feces in the Building

Josephine Guy, an assistant to attorney Ted Amshoff, brought us some photos at Life Dynamics. Josephine had gone to Ronachai Banchongmanie's abortion clinic to collect patient files. She spotted human feces on the stairwell landing. When she went back a week later, she told us, the pile of feces was still there.

Stretcher Access

Lakisha Wilson

The abortion lobby consistently insists that it's absurd to require that abortion clinics have stretcher access so that patients can be safely transferred to an ambulance in case of an emergency.

The fact that emergency workers had to stop CPR on Lakisha Wilson while extricating her from Preterm contributed to her death. The clinic was on the third floor and the elevator was too small to accommodate the gurney with the patient lying flat. Of course, Preterm also failed to summon emergency workers in a timely manner in the first place, just as Gosnell did with Karnamaya Mongar. Their resuscitation efforts had been amateurish, as had been the case with Christin Gilbert in Kansas, Patricia King in Oklahoma, and Elise Kalat in Massachusetts. But at least somebody attempted to resuscitate Christin. When Erna Fisher stopped breathing, abortionist Dennis Miller was found just cradling her in his arms. Your typical shopping mall is probably better qualified to deal with a cardio-respiratory emergency than a typical abortion clinic. At least malls have functioning defibrillators and staff trained in CPR.

Expired Clinic License

Ann and Phelim marvel that nobody took notice of the expiration of Gosnell's clinic license. I think that it's pretty much always the prolifers pointing out expired licenses to state officials -- whereupon legal wrangling keeps the place open. I just did a Bing search on "abortion clinic operating with expired license" and found:

- a report that Hagerstown Reproductive, the same NAF member that referred Desiree Hawkins to Gosnell, had abortionist Delhi Thweatt practicing there without a valid medical license (Read the report; Hagerstown Reproductive is nasty and Thweatt is a quack.)
- a report that EMW clinic in Kentucky, a NAF member clinic whose security guard had been caught using the premises as a rape site, was operating without a license
- an update on Planned Parenthood / Reproductive Health Services, a clinic with two dead patients to its discredit, continuing to operate without a license (This is also the clinic where Dean Alberty observed born-alive babies being killed to harvest their organs.)
- a story about an Alabama clinic finally closing after having been operating without a license
- a report of a Louisiana clinic continuing to operate after its license had been revoked
- a report noting that not a since abortion clinic in Ohio was properly licensed

And that was just the first two pages of results.

Prior posts:

* The Visitor from the National Abortion Federation
* Experts, Resistance, and Enabling
* Desiree Hawkins: The Foot in the Jar
* Why I Want to Slap the Medical Examiner
* Politics and the SCOTUS
* Unqualified Staff and More
* Gruesome Discoveries and Drug Dealing
* The Courage of Detective Wood
* Reflections of the Preface
* Anger and Law-Breaking
* The Media and Abortion Horrors
* Why I Have Anything to Add

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Gosnell: The Untold Story - Chapter Three, the Visitor from the National Abortion Federation

The Visitor from the National Abortion Federation

One person who testified before the Grand Jury was a National Abortion Federation representative who visited Gosnell's clinic when he had applied for membership. Ann and Phelim point out an interesting fact: She seems to be the only witness who wasn't a patient and wasn't identified by name in the Grand Jury Report.

Singing Praises

It's also interesting that the Grand Jury report takes time to praise the National Abortion Federation:

NAF is an association of abortion providers that upholds the strictest health and legal standards for its members.

[NAF is] a professional association of 400 abortion providers nationwide that offers referrals and services to member providers. Membership is contingent on meeting NAF’s quality assurance
standards and is based on an on-site inspection.

To be certified by NAF, a provider must submit to an on-site inspection and complete a detailed questionnaire designed to determine whether the provider complies with NAF’s standards. After the initial approval and certification, members must complete questionnaires annually. NAF re-inspects members every five to seven years, or more often if there is a complication or a serious event with a patient.

They uncritically noted that the NAF representative said:

NAF’s mission is to ensure safe, legal, and acceptable abortion care, and to promote health and justice for women. To that end, NAF publishes clinical standards, called Clinical Policy Guidelines that members must follow. These guidelines are drawn from a review of evidenced-based medical literature and patient outcomes.

The Grand Jury also named NAF as one of the groups that would "conduct inspections of
abortion facilities before approving them or referring women to them."

There was absolutely no need to spout all these glowing words about the National Abortion Federation. The Grand Jury could have simple described them as an association of abortion providers who require that applicants be approved for membership.

Contradictions in Their Own Report

In spite of all the laudatory verbiage lavished on NAF, the Grand Jury noted that a member clinic had Gosnell initiating illegal third-trimester abortions there -- including the abortion that culminated in the murder of Baby Boy A.

No Censure Here

The Grand Jury Report vigorously castigated officials up and down the line. It pointed out culpability at every turn. But when it came to NAF, it was time for the kid gloves. The report gently chided NAF because their inspector failed to report Gosnell to the authorities. It made a tepid recommendation "that the National Abortion Federation reconsider the inclusion of Atlantic Women’s Medical Services in Delaware in its membership."

Why did the report not ream out NAF for allowing a member clinic to have Gosnell working on site? Why no harsh words when NAF failed to forbid their members to refer women to him? Why so gentle on NAF, while pulling no punches with anybody else?

Ann and Phelim say that somebody close to the case told them that Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes specifically insisted that the NAF representative's name be omitted. She did not want the case to criticize the abortion establishment, despite their obvious culpability.

I guess this is another case of having friends in high places.

Aside from Gosnell

Though Gosnell's clinic was so bad that NAF rejected him, it's not like they're all that picky. Some notable members of the National Abortion Federation include:

- Abu "The Butcher of Avenue A" Hayat, who ripped the arm off a 32-week baby in an attempted an abortion, sexually abused patients, and performed the fatal abortion on Sophie McCoy

- Hanan Rotem, who got caught having his receptionist administer anesthesia after the death of Gloria Aponte

- Family Planning Associates Medical Group, which was founded by the man "who did for abortions what Ray Kroc did for hamburgers" and where at least 16 women have lost their lives

- Summit Medical Center of Alabama, where the wife-killing abortionist Malachy DeHenry performed the fatal abortion on Leigh Ann Alford

- Alberto "Licensed to Lie" Hodari, who ran the shoddy clinic where Regina Johnson died and performed the fatal abortions on Tamiia Russell and Chivon Williams

- Atlanta Women's Pavilion, where staff managed to fatally injure two teenage girls in a single day

- Midtown Hospital, a filthy facility that was caught performing illegal late abortions and performed the fatal abortion on Sara Niebel

- Douglas Karpen, the "Texas Gosnell" who performed the fatal abortion on Denise Montoya

These examples tell you how bad Gosnell must have been to be the worst a NAF inspector has ever seen.

Prior posts:

* Experts, Resistance, and Enabling

* Desiree Hawkins: The Foot in the Jar

* Why I Want to Slap the Medical Examiner

* Politics and the SCOTUS

* Unqualified Staff and More

* Gruesome Discoveries and Drug Dealing

* The Courage of Detective Wood

* Reflections of the Preface

* Anger and Law-Breaking

* The Media and Abortion Horrors

* Why I Have Anything to Add

Gosnell: The Untold Story - Chapter Two: Experts, Resistance, and Enabling

The continued quarantine read of of Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer, by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, has prompted me to add relevant material that I know from over 35 years of abortion research. Links to previous commentaries are at the bottom of this post.

Getting Someone to Testify

The Gosnell prosecutors had a hard time getting medical professionals willing to testify. It's very frustrating to learn of their frustration because if they had contacted Life Dynamics they would have been provided with a list of abortionists willing to testify in abortion cases. Life Dynamics provides litigation support for lawyers representing injured women and the families of dead women, and these names are one of the services provided free of charge.

Life Dynamics also helps law enforcement. When Nabil Ghali was arrested in Ohio for sexually assaulting patients in an abortion clinic he was operating without a license, law enforcement contacted us and I prepared a dossier that helped the prosecutors to get his bail set at $6 million. Alas, he plea bargained and was released on time served, but we managed to keep him locked up for a while. There was some satisfaction in that.

No Negative Light

While I was at Life Dynamics I listened to years and years of tapes of National Abortion Federation meetings and seminars. One year they were in a tizzy about the help Life Dynamics was providing to medical malpractice attorneys. I got to hear Kathryn "Kitty" Kolbert of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project tell the members to stop botching abortions because she was sick of "beating the shit out of" women to get them to drop their lawsuits. The abortionists circle their wagons. They get nasty.

That's a huge part of why Life Dynamics put together the list of abortionists willing to testify in court. We did a massive mailing and replied to those who responded, choosing ones that were reputable and rejecting ones like P. Scott Ricke, the guy who got his hand stuck in a patient.

"They Warned Each Other"

Christine Wexler told Ann and Phelim that everybody in the abortion community knew how quacktastic Gosnell was and warned each other about him. Nevertheless reputable clinics -- including National Abortion Federation member clinics -- referred women to him. A NAF member clinic in Delaware had him starting abortions at their facility and finishing them at his. This goes past being appalling into the real of criminal. So is it any great mystery why they didn't want anybody to learn about what was going on at 3801 Lancaster? They were afraid of being exposed for their culpability.

Prior posts:

* Desiree Hawkins: The Foot in the Jar

* Why I Want to Slap the Medical Examiner

* Politics and the SCOTUS

* Unqualified Staff and More

* Gruesome Discoveries and Drug Dealing

* The Courage of Detective Wood

* Reflections of the Preface

* Anger and Law-Breaking

* The Media and Abortion Horrors

* Why I Have Anything to Add