Two employees at the notorious Philadelphia “House of Horrors” clinic operated by late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell (left) have pleaded guilty to murder in the deaths of a baby born at the clinic and a woman who had come for an abortion. As reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, 34-year-old Adrienne Moton admitted that she killed a baby who had been born alive at the abortion facility, while Sherry West, 52, pleaded guilty to administering a lethal dose of painkillers and anesthesia to a 41-year-old woman who had come for an abortion.
The guilty pleas leave seven additional individuals to be tried in a case that has stunned even abortion supporters because of the evidence of the murders of both live-born babies and adults at Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society. “Gosnell, 70, could face the death penalty if convicted,” reported the Boston Herald. “He is accused of cutting the spinal cords of seven babies born alive at his clinic.” He also faces a third-degree murder charge in the death of Karnamaya Mongar, the immigrant woman who died as a result of the drugs he directed West to administer.
According to the Inquirer, a 260-page grand jury report into the goings-on at the clinic — which was closed down nearly a year before the January 2011 arrests of Gosnell, his wife, and eight employees — “said that Moton and West, like the rest of Gosnell’s medical staff, were not formally trained or licensed for their jobs. Moton, who knew Gosnell through his niece, assisted with abortions and followed Gosnell’s practice of using scissors to cut the spinal cords of late-term fetuses, the report said.”
The report described the plight of one victim, a newborn identified as “Baby D,” whose mother spent several hours in labor before delivering the infant into a clinic toilet, testified Kareema Cross, a clinic employee who has not been charged. “The baby was moving and looked like it was swimming,” Cross told the grand jury. “Moton reached into the toilet, got the baby out, and cut its neck.”
The report noted that West, a long-time patient of Gosnell, was hired by the abortionist in 2008 “after being diagnosed with hepatitis C” — for which she had been terminated from her job at Philadelphia’s VA Medical Center. West allegedly performed ultrasound examinations, administered anesthesia, and attended to women in the recovery room — all without providing ample protection for the women against exposure to hepatitis C.
The Inquirer reported that the woman who died at the clinic “had come to the United States from a refugee camp in Nepal only four months earlier. After she was overdosed with sedatives and lost consciousness, she spent more than three hours in the recovery room before an ambulance was called, the grand jury concluded.”
It took paramedics an additional 20 minutes to maneuver a stretcher with the woman’s body through the narrow, cluttered hallways of the clinic and out an emergency exit they found padlocked.
Defense attorney Michael Wallace said that West was “very sorry about the death of that young lady. She got caught up in a series of things that probably she did not realize the significance of.” West, who is reportedly prepared to testify against Gosnell, faces up to 140 years in prison, but will likely receive a far less severe sentence for her cooperation. Meanwhile, Moton faces up to 120 years.
As reported by The New American in January, shortly after the arrests in the case, over his 30 years in the business Gosnell made millions of dollars performing illegal late-term abortions while state regulators ignored complaints against him and had not inspected his clinic in over 15 years.
According to Seth Williams, district attorney at the time of the arrests, Gosnell “induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, [and] eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord.”
Reported The New American: “Most of the patients were unaware that their babies were born alive and then murdered. Many of the women were told that they were 24 weeks pregnant, even when they were further along.”
Shockingly, Gosnell had never completed a residency in obstetrics-gynecology and so was not even board certified. His specialty was family practice. “He does not know how to do an abortion,” said Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore. “Once he got them there, he saw dollar signs and did abortions that other people wouldn’t do.”
Another report by The New American noted that in their initial raid on Gosnell’s clinic, “federal agents discovered, among other horrors, the remains of 45 infants dumped in milk jugs, juice cartons, and pet food containers — all stored in a refrigerator and freezer on the premises. Agents also found jars containing the severed limbs of babies, and conditions they called ‘by far, the worst’ they had ever seen, with blood on the clinic floors, ‘filthy and unsanitary’ surgeries, broken and dirty medical instruments and equipment, along with a ‘stench of urine’ and even cat excrement.”
Following the release of the grand jury report detailing how much Gosnell was able to get away with for so many years, seven state health department employees, charged with oversight of the clinic, either quit or were fired as Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett announced sweeping changes in how the state supervises the industry — including subjecting abortionists and their clinics to both annual and random inspections.
As for the pair of guilty pleas in the case, Maria Vitale of the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation said they were a good beginning to assuring that justice was served. “We need to see those who committed murder prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” she told OneNewsNow.com. “The cries of those unborn babies need to be heard. The cries of those newborns need to be heard by people. It’s just outrageous what was happening at this abortion facility.”
But pro-life leaders emphasize that “what was happening” in Gosnell’s abortion clinic is what happens in hundreds of organized, sanitary, legally operating clinics across the nation: the murder of thousands of pre-born babies every year.
Jeffrey Kuhner, a Washington Times columnist and president of the conservative Edmund Burke Institute, pointed out that, even when performed in the most pristine and sanitary of settings, abortion is still nothing less than “state-sanctioned infanticide. It encodes in law the pernicious principle that there is an entire category of people — the unborn — who are less than fully human.”
Noting that nearly 50 million babies (some experts place the estimate at more than 53 million) have been slaughtered in America since 1973 — more than the number of people killed by either Hitler or Stalin — Kuhner wrote that abortion represents the natural progression of an increasingly godless liberal culture, where self is god and where “individual gratification and personal liberation” are the highest good.
“Abortion clinics constitute the ‘gulag archipelago’ of liberalism,” he reflected, “a vast internal network where innocent lives are sacrificed in the service of a fanatical worldview. They are the forgotten victims of the cultural Marxism imposed by the 1960s intelligentsia.”
Challenged Kuhner: “The liberal regime depends upon countless Dr. Gosnells to function. His crimes are liberalism’s crimes. Conscientious Americans must work tirelessly to end this abortion abomination.”
Photo: This undated photo released by the Philadelphia District Attorney's office shows Dr. Kermit Gosnell: AP Images
