Pa. Abortion Doctor Goes on Trial in 8 Deaths
Three years after drug agents searching a suspected “pill mill” at a West Philadelphia clinic instead found a medical “house of horrors,” an abortion doctor is going on trial on eight counts of murder.
Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, the clinic owner, is charged with killing a pregnant refugee and seven viable newborns. He also faces a separate federal trial on prescription drug charges.
Gosnell, who has pleaded not guilty, saw himself as a medical missionary in the blighted neighborhood where he worked and lived for 40 years. His Women’s Medical Center treated the poor, immigrants, teens and women with late-stage pregnancies who could not get abortions elsewhere.
“I feel in the long term I will be vindicated,” Gosnell told the Philadelphia Daily News in a March 2010 interview, a month after the federal drug raid. “I aspire to perfection, certainly for my patients.”
But some of those patients were left with infections, perforated bowels and other injuries after barbaric abortions were performed by untrained, unlicensed staff, according to numerous lawsuits and a lengthy 2011 grand jury report. And 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar lost her life there in 2009.