VERIFIED: Gosnell Got "Snipping" Idea at NAF Seminar

In an earlier post, "Snipping" and Why the Left Must Silence Us on Gosnell, I reiterated my theory that serial murderer / abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell got the idea of killing a baby by taking scissors to the back of its neck from Martin Haskell's D&X presentation paper to the National Abortion Federation.  In that presentation, Haskell taught this prestigious group of highly reputable providers how to use his new and improved abortion method. This method, like Gosnell's preferred method, involved getting the fetus out entirely in one piece. You might have heard this procedure referred to as "partial birth abortion."

Last night I stumbled across a bombshell: Verification of my suspicion that the similarity of technique was not mere coincidence. Gosnell himself, in an interview, said that he had attended that presentation and adapted his own variation of Haskell's technique.

My discovery began on YouTube, of all places, where I'd been looking for fresh approaches to the Gosnell story. I found this video, "Steve Volk Discusses his Interview With Dr. Kermit Gosnell."

Learning that Volk, a writer for Philadelphia Magazine, had access to Gosnell was an exciting development. Learning that an e-book was available about what he had learned from speaking to Gosnell whetted my appetite. I went straightway to Amazon.com, bought Gosnell's Babies,* and read it cover to cover. In its electronic pages, I found what I'd been looking for.

Martin Haskell's presentation paper from the NAF seminar

Gosnell, then, never questioned whether he should continue providing abortions. But after The Silent Scream, he did feel obligated to reduce the pain he caused. And he carried this thought around with him until 1992, when he saw Martin Haskell deliver one of the most controversial medical presentations in history, at a Dallas conference of abortion providers.

....

.... Haskell described a procedure in which the surgeon reaches into the uterus with a grasping forceps and pulls the fetus, limb by limb, into the vagina, until only the skull has yet to pass the cervix. As Haskell wrote: "The surgeon then forces ... scissors into the base of the skill," "spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening," and uses a suction cannula to "evacuate the skull contents." In layman's terms, the doctor stabs the fetus in the back of the neck at the base of the skull and uses a Karman cannula or catheter to suck out its brains

Gosnell then took Haskell's procedure and modified it to fit his own practice.

... Gosnell looked at this procedure in 1992 and saw an opportunity for mercy. In a technique he evolved over the years, he brought the tips of the scissors together, like a knife, to puncture the base of the fetus's neck. He widened the scissors to open the wound he created, revealing the spinal cord. And he severed that cord, believing this would end every sensation of the fetus, quickly and in the most humane manner possible.

Gosnell told Volk more about his use of the "snipping" technique. Just as Gosnell's staff reported to the Grand Jury, Gosnell reported to Volk that in response to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, Gosnell tried to comply, as other abortionists were doing, by injecting digoxin into the unborn baby's heart.

But even guided by ultrasound, he often seemed to miss. Sometimes, afterward, the fetus emerged, and...

The arm just jumped. Didn't it? The leg jerked. Isn't that baby ... breathing? And sometimes, one of his assistants asked: Is that baby alive?

No, he assured them. That wasn't a real movement.

During Gosnell's trial, the prosecutor asked a reputable abortion practitioner if other late-term doctors sometimes had a mishap with the lethal injection, leading to the birth of a live baby. She testified that yes, that does happen sometimes, and when it does the baby is provided with "comfort care." It is wrapped in a blanket, she said, and kept warm until it dies.

Illustration of the logistical difference
between an extraction abortion, promoted
by the National Abortion Federation, and
Gosnell's practice of "snipping."

A reality that became clear during the trial was difficult for Volk to come to grips with.

Even with babies at the legal point of viability, 24 weeks, if Gosnell had simply provided "comfort care" instead of snipping their necks, he would have faced nothing more than third-degree felony charges, potential seven-year sentences. The scissors he used because he took them to be "more merciful" are what made him a murderer.

For him, for us, the difference between being a doctor just doing his job and first-degree homicide was, first, a matter of geography: Did he kill the baby in utero, or outside the womb? And, second, a matter of execution: a 5.5-inch-long pair of surgical scissors, or a blanket and time?

Gosnell insisted to Volk, as his lawyer had insisted during the trial, that the babies were already dead before "snipping."And try as he might, Volk never got a satisfactory answer from Gosnell as to why, if the baby was already dead, any further action on his part was necessary.

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.

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. But Gosnell put me off, saying, "It will take me some time to articulate my answer." He never could explain himself. And his answers seemed carefully couched: "I never saw anything I took as fetal movement," he said.

In the end, the rationale for anything Kermit Gosnell did strikes one less as rationale than as rationalization. Running the pill mill was, in Gosnell's mind, providing poor people in the neighborhood with the chance to earn a living as drug dealers, thus stimulating the local economy. Operating a filthy facility was simply catering to an underprivileged clientele. A law banning outpatient abortions at or beyond 24 weeks, and mandating that any abortion at or beyond 24 weeks be justified with a "health" claim, was complied with fully by charting advanced pregnancies as exactly 24.5 weeks, mentally "rounding down" to 24 weeks, and reflecting that he'd want his own daughter to be able to obtain such an abortion. As for thrusting surgical scissors into the neck of a freshly-delivered baby, that was a merciful means of preventing pain.

As crazy as Gosnell's rationalizations sound, how different are they from the rationalizations that abortion apologists make? Far from being horrified at the idea of stabbing a nearly-delivered, living, moving baby in the back of the neck with scissors, the participants who watched a video of Haskell performing the procedure responded by giving him a standing ovation. And lest there be any doubt that the baby in question was moving, Haskell even joked that the baby often "helps" by wrapping its little arms and legs around the hand of the doctor that is about to kill it.

The abortion lobby went to bat big time in favor of the National Abortion Federation and its fully endorsed and enthusiastically promoted practice of stabbing the baby in the back of the neck just prior to completing a vaginal delivery. How can any of us pretend that a man who worked at a NAF clinic was doing something entirely different when he stabbed the baby in the back of the neck just after completing a vaginal delivery?

This schizophrenic rationalization needs to be exposed. Filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney are in the process of crowdfunding a TV movie that will bring the reality of abortion in America -- as exemplified in the practice of Kermit Gosnell -- to the largest possible audience. Go to Gosnell Movie and send a message. It need only cost you $1, less than the cup of a bottle of water or a cup of coffee. Tell the world that we're tired of letting this sort of thing go on utterly unexamined. Pray and spread the word. Support the Gosnell movie. End the silence.

For more about why it's vital that this movie be made, read:

• Gosnell Clinic Even Nastier than Grand Jury Reported
• The Gosnell Patient Who Barely Escaped With Her Life 
• Kermit Gosnell and the Milgram Experiment 
• Gosnell: The One That Got Away, and Hope for Others 
• Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line? 
• Gosnell and Post-Viability Abortions 
• Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened 
• Why "Gosnell" Must be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told

*Steve Volk, Gosnell's Babies: Inside the Mind of America's Most Notorious Abortion Doctor, a Philadelphia Magazine E-Book, Metro Corp. 2013

Gosnell and Post-Viabililty Abortions

Kermit Gosnell

Last year, what had started as an FBI drug raid on a suspected pill mill ended when Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted of murder in the deaths of three of the hundreds of newborn babies he had killed by severing their spines while their mothers lay nearby, overdosed to the brink of death by his accomplices.

Whether Gosnell was guilty of murdering any of these babies didn't hinge on the question of whether Gosnell had killed them. He'd never denied that he'd killed them. That was what he'd been paid to do. Whether Gosnell was guilty of murder hinged on the question of whether he had done the killing before or after the baby had fully emerged from the birth canal.

Gosnell's attorney, Jack McMahon*, argued that these killings were perfectly ordinary abortions that accomplished what Gosnell was paid to do, which was whatever was necessary to make sure that the viable unborn baby was rendered lifeless before it left the mother's body.

All of this was so gruesome that even Gosnell's attorney walked away from the trial convinced that the legal limits for abortion should be pushed back to perhaps 16 weeks to prevent any more viable infants from being killed.

How is it that post-viability abortions are legal in the first place?

Before Roe

The Roe Court. (Click to enlarge.) Scissors mark Justices
who voted that states must allow post-viability abortions.

Post-viability abortion is at its core a nonsensical concept. Pick up any dictionary and you'll find that "abortion" is defined as the death of the fetus prior to viability.

All pregnancies end. A pregnancy with an "abortive outcome" ends before the baby could survive outside the womb. This abortive outcome could be natural (a miscarriage) or induced by deliberately killing a living fetus. Once the fetus had passed the developmental age of viability, the outcome of the pregnancy is by definition a birth -- either a live birth or a stillbirth. But in 1973, a group of non-physicians handed down a decision called Roe vs. Wade which decreed that logic be damned, language be damned,  medicine be damned: If somebody wanted to kill a fetus at any point in the pregnancy, legally that act of killing would be lumped in under "abortion" and it would be enshrined as a right.

Tinkering Around

Gosnell abandoned the lethal
injection technique when he
found it too difficult.

With this new permission to kill any fetus they wanted to kill, abortionists tinkered around. They took the two basic ways of getting a viable fetus out of the mother -- induced labor and a c-section -- and modified them to make sure that the end result would not be a live baby. Those who preferred to induce labor would do something prior to inducing labor to make sure the baby would come out dead. In the era before ultrasounds allowed an abortionist to guide a needle to the fetal heart or brain to do a lethal injection (how it's done now; see illustration), this was done by injecting poison into the amniotic fluid. If labor induction failed, or if for some reason time was of the essence, a hysterotomy would be performed -- which is just a c-section with the intent of delivering a dead baby.

The Problem

Both of these approaches to the newly-minted post-viability abortion, however, had one serious drawback. Fetuses can be remarkably tenacious of life. You can want them dead, but they can thwart your plans by failing to die. This is known as the "dreaded complication." (Interesting that the "dreaded complication" isn't a dead mother but a live baby. What other medical procedure considers life itself to be both dreaded and a complication?)

Of course, the "dreaded" part of the "dreaded complication" was summed up pretty well by Dr. William Waddill as he was strangling a 30-week abortion survivor: "This baby can't live or it will be a big mess."

Promising a patient an abortion and instead presenting her with an injured premature infant is an open invitation to a massive lawsuit. Those lawsuits can be avoided by using one of two popular approaches:

1. The Obama Approach: Declare that since you'd made the decision to go ahead with an abortion, the fetus is by definition not viable regardless of his or her actual gestational age, size, health status, and condition upon delivery. He or she is to be stashed with the more cooperative -- and hence dead -- fetuses in the utility room or in a biohazard bag or wherever you choose to put them. Just pretend the whole ugly little business with the pulse and the breathing and the movement and the gasping and the crying never happened.
2. The Gosnell Approach: "Ensure fetal demise" after the baby is delivered. This is much quicker and more certain.

To most people, the "How About We Don't Abort the Baby in the First Place?" Approach seems like an obvious solution. In fact, most abortionists decided that this is a good approach, at least for their own personal practices.** But that doesn't stop them from referring women who want post-viability abortions to late abortion specialists. And, as we can see from the plethora of referrals Gosnell got, dead baby trumps live mother.

Philadelphia DA Seth Williams

Of course, we never would have known about any of this if Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams hadn't had the courage to go after Gosnell.

One might think that the case was a slam-dunk. After all, Gosnell killed the babies in front of multiple witnesses, and the District Attorney had photographs and corpses as evidence. But consider this: William Waddill had strangled Baby W in a hospital nursery in front of several horrified nurses and a neonatologist. An autopsy showed that the baby's abortion injuries were not fatal; she had clearly and unequivocally died from manual strangulation. Waddill still managed to walk because two -- Count 'em: two -- juries bogged down over the legal definition of "death."

All it takes is one die-hard abortion supporter to tank the case. For over three decades, people had referred women to Gosnell; had declined to investigate his "house of horrors;" had turned a blind eye to the reports of near-term abortions, filthy conditions, and patient deaths. Just one person who shared that "Abortion uber alles" mindset would have left the Gosnell jury as hopelessly deadlocked as both of the Waddill juries.

Williams had the guts to buck tradition and conventional wisdom, and to risk the wrath of his own Democrat party, to prosecute an abortionist for killing live-born infants. But just putting Kermit Gosnell out of circulation and into prison isn't enough. The public needs to be awakened to the reality of post-viability abortions and the means that late-term abortionists use to "ensure fetal demise."

Filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have launched a crowdfunding effort to produce a movie about Gosnell's crimes. A contribution to GosnellMovie.com need not set you back any more than $1 -- less than the cost of a soft drink. Every contribution is a message that we will no longer allow the killing of viable babies to take place under the cover of "reproductive health care." If you can't contribute, or have already contributed funding, keep in mind that both prayer and spreading the word about the project are also vital contributions to the efforts. Together we can end the silence.

For more about why it's vital that this movie be made, read (and don't forget to tweet!):

• Verified: Gosnell Got Snipping Idea at NAF Seminar
• Gosnell Clinic Even Nastier than Grand Jury Reported
• The Gosnell Patient Who Barely Escaped With Her Life 
• Kermit Gosnell and the Milgram Experiment 
• Gosnell: The One That Got Away & Hope for Others 
• Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line? 
• Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder 
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened 
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• "Snipping" and why the Left Must Silence Us on Gosnell
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told
• Why "Gosnell" Must Be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect

* In a creepy coincidence, McMahon is also the surname of the abortionist who invented the abortion method, popularized by Martin Haskell, that was evidently Gosnell's inspiration for "snipping."

** I find it fascinating that although the abortion lobby fights to force all ob/gyns to perpetrate abortions whether they want to do them or not, there is no concerted effort to force existing abortion practitioners to do late abortions whether they want to do them or not. Bizarre, no?

"Snipping" and Why the Left MUST Silence Us on Gosnell

Why are the abortion lobby and their media lapdogs and Hollywood buddies loath to see the Gosnell movie get made? Because it hits too close to home. It makes them ask uncomfortable questions.

It's been a year since infamous Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell (pictured, left) went on trial for murdering live-born infants at his filthy abortion mill. But where did Gosnell get the idea for "snipping" the necks of live-born infants in order to "ensure fetal demise"? 

Of all the ways to kill a squirming newborn, a scissors to the back of the neck seems a bit arbitrary. It doesn't even seem like the easiest method of "ensuring fetal demise." Even sharp scissors don't just snip through bone the way they snip through paper.

I don't think Gosnell simply pulled the idea of "snipping" out of thin air. I'm guessing he got it from somewhere. I'm guessing that he got it from a highly reputable source. 

I direct your attention, gentle reader, to Martin Haskell's D&X presentation paper to the National Abortion Federation, in which Haskell (pictured, right) teaches this prestigious group of highly reputable providers how to use his new and improved abortion method. This method, like Gosnell's preferred method, involved getting the fetus out entirely in one piece. You might have heard this procedure referred to as "partial birth abortion."

I'll let Haskell explain the method himself:

"...the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors (pictured -- ed.) in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine... until he feels it contact the base of the skull.... the surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull.... Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening."

That the baby starts out alive, and that the goal of using the blunt, curved Metzenbaum scissors is to to "ensure fetal demise" is pretty clear when one listens to Haskell's presentation and the discussion afterward. He chuckled that the baby sometimes "helps" -- his word -- by wrapping its little arms and legs around the "surgeon's" hand while the scissors are being positioned.

No, the idea of jamming scissors into the back of a living, wriggling baby's neck is not one that is original to the illustrious Dr. Kermit Gosnell. He clearly sat at the feet of the master when he learned how to make sure that the abortion patient doesn't go home with a live baby.

I don't even think that Gosnell came up with the term "ensure fetal demise" on his own. Haskell made reference to two different methods used in late second-trimester abortions to ensure "fetal demise." 

I would also love to know if Gosnell attended this particular gathering of reputable abortion providers. It was held in September of 1992 in Dallas. A peek into this -- and into entire extent of the National Abortion Federation's role in the Gosnell debacle -- would certainly be a more productive use of Congressional time than taking turns carping about whether or not journalists (who should, after all, be outside Congressional influence) are giving the Gosnell story enough coverage. 

PS: Please feel free to use this image that sums up the whole matter:

Let's force them to confront reality. The Left went to bat big time in favor of the National Abortion Federation endorsed and promoted practice of stabbing the baby in the back of the neck just prior to completing a vaginal delivery. How can they pretend that a man who worked at one of their clinics was doing something entirely different when he stabbed the baby in the back of the neck just after completing a vaginal delivery?

Go to Gosnell Movie and send a message. It need only cost you $1, less than the cup of a bottle of water or a cup of coffee. Tell the world that we're tired of letting this sort of thing go on utterly unexamined. Pray and spread the word. End the silence.

For more about why it's vital that this movie be made, read:

• Verified: Gosnell Got Snipping Idea at NAF Seminar
• Gosnell Clinic Even Nastier than Grand Jury Reported
• The Gosnell Patient Who Barely Escaped With Her Life 
• Kermit Gosnell and the Milgram Experiment 
• Gosnell: The One That Got Away, and Hope for Others 
• Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line? 
• Gosnell and Post-Viability Abortions 
• Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened 
• Why "Gosnell" Must be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told