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, Carhart, and the PBA Ban (Part 2)

In Part 1, I gave a bit of background to the whole practice of post-viability abortions, which were invented by the Supreme Court in 1973 and embraced wholeheartedly by a select group of intrepid abortion practitioners who weren't about to let a little thing like a baby thwart their ambitions.

Post-viability abortions are a subset of abortions past the midpoint in pregnancy, at which point the baby is too big and sturdy to easily dismember. It was for these abortions in general, and not post-viability abortions in particular, that a solution was sought.

Hysterotomy (delivering a baby via c-section and just letting it die) is a massively invasive procedure and can lead to unpleasant legal ramifications if somebody in the OR realizes that you're killing a viable baby and is enough of a retrograde throwback to have a problem with that.

The old-style instillation abortions (putting poison in the amniotic fluid) were, like hysterotomy, too dangerous to do outside a hospital. Not only was that prohibitively expensive, but in a hospital, the doctor didn't have as much control over who dealt with the patients, and thus he was risking the problem I mentioned before of buttinski nurses who would see a live baby and wouldn't just drop it in the bucket and stick it in the closet per instructions.

Once ultrasound machines became common, however, abortionists discovered that rather than just load the amniotic fluid down with poison and hope the baby swallows and inhales enough of it to die, they could jab a needle straight into the baby's heart or brain and deliver a lethal dose much more reliably.

Once the baby is dead, the abortionist can let it soften overnight -- "like meat in a crock pot" as LeRoy Carhart said -- and take it out in pieces the next day, or he can induce labor and let the mother deliver it into the toilet, as George Tiller preferred to do.

Some doctors, however, found the crock-put baby thing a bit troubling. Among them was Dr. James McMahon in California, who had two issues brewing.

First of all, he had a strange fascination with the idea of dilating the cervix as wide as he could. He quoted another abortionist as describing opening the cervix "like a lotus in the moonlight." Personally I find that creepy, but then I have a problem with dropping a live baby into a bucket and covering it with formaldehyde so I'm clearly an unenlightened busybody like those troublesome nurses that couldn't be trusted to deal appropriately with saline survivors.

Second of all, many of his patients were aborting wanted babies that had been diagnosed with some problem. These parents wanted to see the baby after it was dead. A macerated, mutilated fetus isn't a pretty sight.

McMahon came up with a solution, which he dubbed "intrauterine cranial decompression." He'd drag the living baby out feet-first, then stop just before delivering the head to suck out the brains, "decompressing" the "cranium." All he'd have to do was have a nurse stuff the collapsed head with cotton batting to round it out and he'd have a very presentable dead baby to show the parents.

"Intrauterine cranial decompression" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and perhaps because of this it didn't catch on very quickly. Then in 1992, Dr. Martin Haskell made a presentation to the National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar in Dallas. He tweaked McMahon's technique and dubbed it "D&X," for "dilation and extraction." With such a catchy name, how could it fail?

The method caught on, but the prolifers caught wind of it, and the proverbial shit hit the fan. The prolifers gave the procedure the name that finally stuck -- Partial Birth Abortion -- and managed to get it banned.

What a bunch of killjoys.