Say “Kermit Gosnell” to someone outside of Philadelphia, and they will look at you with the puzzled expression of someone whose only familiarity with that name comes from a cute little frog singing about rainbows.
They will have no idea about the man who has taken his place in the annals of evil alongside of Adolf Hitler and Stalin.
Gosnell was an abortionist who operated for more than two decades out of a filthy West Philadelphia clinic that was cited numerous times for health violations.
And yet, for reasons I will get to, he was able to continue killing babies, and women, until he was finally arrested, prosecuted and convicted of first degree murder in the deaths of three infants and involuntary manslaughter in the death of a pregnant woman.
He was also convicted of 21 felony counts of illegal late term abortion.
These were not back-alley horrors, the kind that Planned Parenthood uses to defend abortion like a Hamas terrorist uses Gazans for human shields to cover their evil deeds. They were performed while Roe was still the law of the land.
You would think that a villain of that magnitude would be much more widely known. In fact, just a few weeks ago in Idaho, I was in a coffee shop and happened to mention Gosnell to a young barista who had a big Planned Parenthood button on her T-shirt.
She looked at me as if I’d just asked for my latte in Aramaic. The evil man, who finally did us all a favor by dying this week and fumigating the air, is notorious only in Philly and perhaps among the national pro-life community.
And the reason why we are the fortunate ones is still, to be honest, a societal problem.
Eight years ago, after the movie “Gosnell” had a very limited release in theaters, I wrote the following in a column about it:
“One of the reasons that Gosnell was able to continue his murderous spree for so many years was because pro-choice politicians like Tom Ridge, a good man who will forever bear this disgusting stain on his otherwise exemplary record, refused to allow the state to close the clinic.
“It was acquiescence to a powerful lobby, the abortion lobby, that couldn’t tolerate the possibility that the “right to an abortion” would be curtailed by the government.
They looked away, including men and women who should have known better.”
I wrote this four years before the Supreme Court finally struck down Roe in the Dobbs decision, one that galvanized an already hysterical abortion rights lobby.
In the years leading up to Dobbs, Planned Parenthood and its associated acolytes started mobilizing for the coming “war on women” and became Cassandras of doom.
Every other column from every other female columnist was about how the Trump administration was going to destroy our rights, even though Trump was already out of office by the time the landmark decision was decided.
They pressured Congress, and were completely and totally apoplectic at the prospect that this “right” they’d gaslighted society into believing actually had constitutional grounding might evaporate into those penumbras beloved of Justice Harry Blackmum.
You can understand, then, why politicians in so-called “red” Pennsylvania were always intimidated by the abortion lobby, and decided that even though they knew about Gosnell, and even though they had received numerous reports about his commercial butchery, they did nothing.
In fact, when Republican state legislators tried to pass reasonable abortion restrictions like requiring that abortion clinics adhere to the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers, they went crazy, calling this an assault on a woman’s right to choose.
Fortunately, another governor named Tom, Tom Corbett, signed it into law.
To be honest, any time Pennsylvania tried to regulate abortion, the pro-choice lobbyists pushed back, and it became obvious that none of this was about women’s health.
It was about unlimited access to abortion, including the red herrings of “rape and incest” which are loopholes so large that the Trojan Horse — pun absolutely intended — could fit through.
I write this now, a few days after the death of the Butcher of West Philadelphia, to remind all the people who are upset that Roe is no longer around to guarantee “safe” abortions, that Gosnell operated with impunity for over two decades while Roe was still the law of the land.
I write this to remind everyone that even though Roe is gone, they are still trying to whitewash the horrors of the abortion industry.
I write this to remind you, my dear reader, that the reason Gosnell was prosecuted in the first place was despite, and not because of, media attention. There was, in fact, very little attention given to this tragedy.
I write this, most of all, to remind every person with a conscience that silence means consent, and that unless we continue to speak out about the barbarities done in the name of “women’s health,” Kermit Gosnell will just be replaced with other monsters.
This article was originally published in the Delco Times.
