On October 15, newspaper columnist J.D. Mullane spoke to a packed hall at the parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Doylestown, about his experiences at the trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell.
Gosnell was convicted in May of three murder charges, 21 felony counts of illegal late-term abortion, and 211 counts of violating the 24-hour informed consent law.
J.D. Mullane
Mullane told the crowd that his coverage of the Gosnell trial began somewhat unintentionally. He typically only covers local news stories for his newspapers, the Bucks County Courier Times, The Intelligencer, and the Burlington County (NJ) Times.
But a light schedule one day back in April prompted Mullane to attend the trial in center-city Philadelphia. He was looking for a local angle, because some of the women who sought Gosnell’s later-term abortions were from his area.
Mullane called ahead to the Philadelphia courthouse for press credentials, but was told that he could just show up. Somewhat mystified by this lack of competition for a press seat, he was later surprised to see that almost all of the courtroom seats designated for the press were empty. He snapped a cell-phone photo of the empty seats and posted it on Twitter. The picture went viral, and only then did the media begin to pay a little more attention to the trial.
Mullane told the audience that, as the testimony unfolded, it was bad enough to hear descriptions of the routine practices in Gosnell’s abortion mill, how filthy is always was, and how he discriminated against ethnic women by providing even worse than the standard “care” for them.
Additional trial testimony and images were “beyond any Hollywood horror,” including the courtroom presence of one of the bloody chairs where women in late-term pregnancy waited for lethal doses of Gosnell’s drugs to kill their babies before delivery. These drugs were sometimes injected by an untrained 15-year-old girl!
Other grisly testimony included descriptions of the horrendous techniques for murdering born-alive babies after delivery if they survived the toxic drug-brew, and gruesome answers by Gosnell’s staff. For example, a local detective testified that he asked the abortion staff why Gosnell kept jars at home containing remains from aborted babies. Staff members had replied that Gosnell owned a house at the Jersey shore and often used these babies’ remains to bait crab traps set in the nearby ocean waters.
But of course, a “good” abortionist doesn’t do those things. He kills children in a “nice environment.” One such “good” abortionist testified at the Gosnell trial that during his own 30 years of practice; he alone had performed 40,000 abortions.
Since being convicted in May, Gosnell has been interviewed by only one reporter, Steve Volk, from Philadelphia Magazine.
Mullane said he has covered many murder trials, and, in his experience, all murderers have the same empty and evil look in their eyes. He said that he would like to interview Gosnell to see if he has that same look. If Mullane could only ask one question, he said he would definitely ask, “Did Allyson Schwartz ever refer women to your facility for late-term abortions?”
Schwartz is a candidate for governor in Pennsylvania and has been very quiet about her involvement with Kermit Gosnell. Before holding office, she ran an abortion center just a few miles from Gosnell’s. Thus far, she has been unwilling to answer this question, which has been posed to her on several occasions.
Currently, Gosnell writes poetry in prison. How ironic when he is thus far blind to the evil that he and other baby killers have flagrantly inflicted upon our society since 1973 as the lives of more than 55 million infants have been ended by the legalized murder that is abortion.
Only by learning and sharing will we shine light on the evil darkness of abortion mills everywhere and end the death that always occurs there whether the conditions in these mills are filthy or sterile and regardless of when the abortion occurs.
JD Mullane’s public commitment in words and pictures helps us to share these truths; we’re grateful for his work and its impact.
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This article was written by Pat Dowling and Charol Abrams, pro-life volunteers with Bucks County Right to Life, which sponsored the event.
Pennsylvania has made incredible progress in defending innocent human life in the past three years. We’ve seen at least six abortion facilities shut their doors. Abortion totals have nosedived nearly 5 percent. We’ve also passed landmark legislation such as our abortion center regulation law, which ensures that abortion facilities follow the same safety standards as outpatient surgery centers. And we enacted a law guaranteeing that no taxpayer funding of abortion will occur in the Keystone State under the health insurance exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.
