

Gosnell botched another abortion in a similar fashion years later, state officials again looked the other way. State Health Department officials decided that no investigation was warranted. Gosnell had mistakenly left the baby’s arm and leg inside the mother. A woman who received an abortion at his clinic in 1999 later became ill and was admitted to the hospital. Gosnell, they were reluctant to follow up. After Tom Ridge, a pro-abortion Republican, became governor in 1994, the state Department of Health stopped all routine inspections of abortion clinics.Įven when state officials received complaints about Dr.Each time they discovered that no registered nurses were on staff, as the law requires, yet permitted him to continue providing abortions.State inspectors visited the clinic three times between 19.Gosnell’s story becomes even more upsetting when you realize how much sooner he should have been caught: Gosnell employed “assistants”-who had no medical training and were paid under the table-to sedate patients, conduct ultrasounds and administer labor-inducing drugs.ĭr. Later, authorities would discover that Dr. McAleer write that the Gosnell raid unveiled “a house of horrors.” … After law-enforcement officials raided his clinic in 2010, however, busting up one of Pennsylvania’s largest pill mills was no longer the most pressing concern. Gosnell would write some 200 prescriptions. It turned out he was selling prescriptions for Ox圜ontin, Percocet and Xanax to anyone who could afford his $150 fee. In 2009 a detective investigating prescription-drug dealing in Philadelphia received a tip about Dr. Gosnell had been performing illegal abortions for decades before law-enforcement officials stumbled upon him, and when they did, it was for reasons that had nothing to do with his abortion practice. They offer a better understanding of what “abortion rights” mean in practice and a renewed appreciation of the tragic consequences that can result when politicians, public-health officials and the media put blind ideology ahead of basic human decency.ĭr.
Screenit the blackout movie#
Gosnell’s story may not change a single mind about abortion, yet the movie and book make an important contribution to a debate that continues to rage 45 years after Roe v. “It is nearly impossible to find an adult person who does not have an opinion on the issue of abortion,” he wrote in National Review, “and yet how little we all know about it-how it is done, what the laws are surrounding it, how it is regulated, legislated, and practiced. Searcy explained why he was drawn to the subject: Nick Searcy directed the film, based on a book of the same title by a married couple of investigative journalists from Ireland, Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer.
