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

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.

Police Protection

The story of how "Jalil" was unable to get the police to investigate the illegal third-trimester abortion Gosnell had perpetrated on his estranged wife reminds me of the police response to the attempted murder of Ximena Renearts. Ximena was delivered into a toilet in a Vancouver hospital after her mother had undergone an abortion at a Planned Parenthood in Washington state. The little girl weighed about three pounds, and appeared to be of about 30 or 31 weeks gestation -- well into viability. 

 

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