Abortion’s dangerous euphemisms

By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist
January 26, 2011

GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRACIES and legal bodies are not usually known for their vivid writing style. But “vivid’’ doesn’t come close to conveying the driving force of the grand jury report released last week by the Philadelphia district attorney in connection with the Women’s Medical Society, a long-established abortion clinic operated by Dr. Kermit Gosnell. The report was issued on the same day that Gosnell and nine of his employees were arrested on charges including murder, infanticide, and abuse of a corpse. In 261 pages of shatteringly clear prose, the grand jurors laid out their findings.

"This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women,’’ the report begins. “He regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels — and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.’’

The report goes on to describe a squalid operation in which hygiene was ignored, equipment was broken, and late-term abortions were routine. Pregnant women were treated with callous disdain, often left for hours, semi-conscious and in pain, on dirty recliners covered with bloodstained blankets. Untrained employees administered powerful drugs to induce labor, and heavy sedatives to keep women from screaming.

Time and again, the grand jury says, late-term babies were delivered alive — fully intact and breathing — and then killed. Gosnell “called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’ The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ’snipping.’ Over the years, there were hundreds of ‘snippings.’ ’’ the rest

Practitioner Loses License, Killed Woman in Failed Abortion
Andrew Rutland, a southern California abortion practitioner, has agreed to give up his medical license a second time over a case involving his killing a woman in a botched abortion. Rutland killed an Asian woman in a failed abortion — as the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office ruled the death of Ying Chen a homicide.
The botched abortion was done in July 2009 at a filthy and ill-equipped acupuncture clinic in San Gabriel that Rutland ran where he also did abortions...