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Tuesday 14 May 2013

US abortion doctor guilty of murdering babies with scissors




A US abortion doctor could face the death penalty after being found guilty of murdering three babies with scissors after they were born alive in his filthy Philadelphia clinic.

Kermit Gosnell, 72, was said to work out of a facility resembling a house of horrors, a place that smelled of animal urine and had fetal remains scattered about in jars and jugs.

He was convicted by a jury in a Philadelphia court, the district attorney's office said. Judge Jeffrey Minehart set Tuesday of next week as the day for starting the death-penalty hearing for Gosnell.
The other possible penalty for first degree murder in Pennsylvania is life in prison with no chance of parole, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The jury returned guilty verdicts on the three babies, an acquittal in the alleged murder of a fourth, and a guilty verdict in the involuntary manslaughter of a woman on whom he was performing an abortion, DA's spokeswoman Tasha Jamerson said.
The jury, which had earlier Monday declared itself unable to decide on two counts before going back to try again, had been deliberating for 10 days.
Gosnell's crimes horrified Americans on either side of the intense national debate on abortion.
Prosecutors said he performed late-term abortions in a state where the limit is set at 24 weeks and that when babies emerged still alive, he used scissors to sever their spines.
However, he denied this, insisting that all babies were already dead as a result of the drug he was using in the abortion.
Gosnell appeared "as enigmatically placid as ever" as the 12-member jury filed back into court after reaching a decision and the verdict was read out, reports said.
Defense Attorney Jack McMahon, limited by a gag order from commenting on the case, said Gosnell was upset by the verdict.
"Obviously, the jury has spoken. The prosecution should be commended," McMahon said, according to the Inquirer.
During one operation in the clinic, a woman who'd come in for an abortion died from a heart attack after an overdose of anesthesia.
Gosnell's business, called the Women's Medical Society, was "decrepit and unsanitary," prosecutors said, staffed with unlicensed personnel who would "practice medicine on unsuspecting patients, unsupervised, and directed them to heavily drug patients in his absence."
The grand jury report indicting Gosnell described the outwardly professional looking brick building where he worked as a house of horrors.
"The clinic reeked of animal urine, courtesy of the cats that were allowed to roam (and defecate) freely. Furniture and blankets were stained with blood. Instruments were not properly sterilized. Disposable medical supplies were not disposed of; they were reused, over and over again," the report said.
"Scattered throughout, in cabinets, in the basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags and plastic jugs, were fetal remains. It was a baby charnel house."
The grand jury itself noted that the story would be "used" by both sides in the abortion debate.
Opponents have raised the case as evidence of abortion's fundamentally violent, criminal nature, while backers of abortion see the main lesson as the need to provide women -- especially the uneducated poor -- access to reliable, safe services.
John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, called it "a sad and horrific case -- one that reminds us there is no one more defenseless, or more in need of our protection, than the unborn."

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