I wrote the other day that aside from a U.S. Senate resolution introduced May 6 to “investigate and correct abusive, unsanitary, and illegal abortion practices” in the wake of the Kermit Gosnell scandal, other efforts were in the works to reign in dangerous abortion clinics and abortionists nationwide.

Two of those efforts were revealed today. Susan B. Anthony List writes:

In the wake of the Kermit Gosnell trial, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Congressman Fred Upton (R-MI), announced today that they have sent a letter to public health officials in each state demanding answers as to how they regulate abortion facilities.

Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), sent a similar letter to state attorneys general.

Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ), Civil Justice Subcommittee Chairman, joined in calling for responses to questions about endorsement of late term abortion restrictions and “born alive” statutes.

SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser praised these efforts and further called for Congress to take action to address the inhumanity revealed in the late-term abortion industry.

The SBA List has compiled an initial fact sheet on abortion industry negligence and brutality occurring nationwide.

The letters reveal plans for sweeping investigations of not only abortion clinics and doctors but of state statutes and regulations and the state agencies that are supposed to administer those statutes and regulations.

The letters further ask state attorneys general and departments of public health to outline procedures for discovering and investigating newborn homicides as a result of botched abortions, this, of course, in light of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which was signed into law in 2002.

This is so overdue. I pray these committee leaders have the fortitude to stick with this investigation despite the stalls and roadblocks we all expect.

You might think that the stunning lack of oversight in this case – multiple government agencies failed to put an end to his illegal practices over the years – would prompt calls for new legislation to make it harder for criminals like [Kermit] Gosnell to do what he did for as long as he did. But Planned Parenthood has opposed the idea. It insists that no new regulations can stop a physician who has decided to disregard the law.

It isn’t intellectually honest to say that these consequences are horrors when perpetrated by a monster like Gosnell but acceptable when the result of well-meaning and well-trained physicians.

~ MSNBC’s S. E. Cupp, as quoted by Real Clear Politics, May 7

Video at link.

[Photo via woody.typepad.com]

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Why is it that people who know next to nothing about the Gosnell case seem to think their incredibly ignorant opinions are worthy putting into print? Forbes embarrasses itself by publishing a commentary by Amesh Adalja, who seems to think that if Pennsylvania’s unenforced abortion restrictions were removed, someone like Gosnell would “instantly evaporate.” Adalja clearly hasn’t read the Gosnell Grand Jury report and likely has no clue that Gosnell’s clinic wasn’t inspected for 17 years:
  

  I believe it is no coincidence that Pennsylvania, a state with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation (and hence the potential for a lucrative black market), was where an individual like Kermit Gosnell decided to operate his alleged infanticide operation.

  Advocates of freedom in medicine would do well to include all aspects of medical care, irrespective of faith-based opposition, in the quest to allow for capitalism’s return to healthcare. Not only will the removal of such restrictions enhance liberty, but also instantly evaporate any nascent back-alley black markets.

• Congressman Marlin Stutzman shares how he was almost aborted:
  

  On a cold December night in 1975, a 17-year-old girl sobbed on the bedroom floor of a neighbor’s house. Her own home had just burned to the ground, destroying everything she had. But that wasn’t the only weight she carried that night. She had just discovered that she was a few weeks pregnant with her first child. In the dark, alone and terrified, she decided to find a way to Kalamazoo, Michigan, 40 miles away, to “take care of her situation.”

  That young girl was my mother, and if she had gone to Kalamazoo that night, you wouldn’t be reading this today. I would have been aborted.

• Jillian Kay Melchior has a long exposé on a chain of abortion clinics in Florida which are still in operation despite their numerous run-ins with the law and the killing of a child who was thrown in a garbage bag after being born alive (the Sycloria Williams case):
  

  … Ralph Gracia, a homicide detective who helped hunt for the body, tells me that the clinic “had boxes with all the [aborted fetuses] in the recovery room sitting there, resting behind the chairs where the patients would sit after their abortion. In some of them, I actually saw some small flies just hovering around the boxes.” The smell was terrible, he adds. He had to sort through each of the biomedical bags, searching among the aborted fetuses for the body of the baby who had been born alive….

  “I think [Belkis Gonzalez, pictured right] got away with murder, yes,” [homicide detective Anthony] Rodriguez continues, “especially in the cold way she disposed of the body. I mean the fact that the baby landed on the recliner, the mother’s sitting in this room, and she’s witnessing the baby breathing, she’s witnessing the baby moving, and according to [patient] Sycloria, Belkis comes and tilts the recliner with the baby on the recliner, dropping the baby to the floor. And then she sweeps the baby into a bag and closes the bag and throws it away. That’s pretty cold for a human being to be able to do something like that. Yeah, I think she got away with murder.”

[Photo via indianapublicmedia.org]

Today, Live Action released the fourth video in its new investigative series, “Inhuman: Undercover in America’s late-term abortion industry.”

This video features one of the stars of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart.

Today’s video begins a shift in the “Inhuman” conversation from the atrocity of illegal infanticide to the atrocity of legal late-term abortions. As pro-life Democrat Kirsten Powers wrote at The Daily Beast on May 6:

What we need to learn from the Gosnell case is that late-term abortion is infanticide. Legal infanticide. That so many people in the media seem untroubled by the idea that 12 inches in one direction is a “private medical decision” and 12 inches in the other direction causes people to react in horror, should be troubling….

Gosnell is accused of aborting infants past the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania. But those same deaths – if done in utero – would have been perfectly legal in many states….

But medical advances since Roe v. Wade have made it clear to me that late-term abortion is not a moral gray area, and we need to stop pretending it is. No six-months-pregnant woman is picking out names for her “fetus.” It’s a baby. Let’s stop playing Orwellian word games. We are talking about human beings here.

Indeed, the investigator in the Carhart video was 26 weeks pregnant. Carhart told her he couldn’t legally commit her abortion in Nebraska but to head over to his Maryland clinic, where he could. Was it unusual that she was aborting a perfectly healthy 6-mo-old, she asked? No, said Carhart, she was his fourth that week.

Carhart, pictured top left, is infamous for several reasons, most recently in the death of one of his patients, Jennifer Morbelli.
 

Morbelli’s death amazingly coincidental

 
In LA’s video Carhart lies to say Morbelli’s death was coincidental (at 8:59 on the video). She may have died the morning after the abortion of her 33-wk-old baby, but her death had nothing to do with the abortion.

The coroner would beg to differ, citing Morbelli’s abortion as a cause of death.
 

Crock pots, pickaxes, and drill bits

 
In LA’s video Carhart describes the late-term dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion procedure in the most vulgar of ways. Explaining that the investigator’s 26-wk-old baby would be “mushy” at the time of delivery due to the fact s/he had been dead for 2 to 3 days, Carhart graphically expounds (beginning at 4:45):

Carhart: It’s like putting meat in a crock pot, okay? It gets softer. It doesn’t get infected or–

Woman: OK, so the dead baby in me is like meat in a crock pot.

Dr. Carhart: Pretty much, yeah, kind of much – in a slow cooker….

Woman: But if we run into trouble … for some reason, I’m not able to deliver, you’ll be able to get it out in pieces.

Carhart: Take it out in pieces…..

Woman: What do you use to break it up? Just–

Dr. Carhart: A whole bunch of–

Woman: You’ve got a toolkit.

Dr. Carhart: A pickaxe, a drill bit, yeah (laughs).

Fingers, friends, and fruit

 
The classy doctor on sexual activity following an abortion (at 2:15)…

Carhart: And there are no restrictions afterwards. Except for nothing in your vagina for three weeks. As I tell everybody, that includes fingers, friends, and fruit, ok? [laughs]

Do-it-yourself hotel room abortions

 
If this isn’t cause for an investigation by state regulators in Maryland, I don’t know what is.

After warning the investigator not to call 911 if she senses something amiss in her hotel room, Carhart incredibly states he sets mothers up with self-delivery packs. Completing late-term abortions in hotel rooms must certainly violate all sorts of OSHA and state health and safety laws. And how would hotels like the thought of abortions being completed on their premises? Blood in the bed, babies in toilets, really? Beginning at 7:04 on LA’s video:

Woman: What happens if I deliver at the hotel?

Carhart: Well, we came and helped her clean up the mess, and took the sheets to the clinic, and washed them, and sent her back to the hotel, and she was fine.

Woman: OK, just stay there, or come, we’ll figure this out, OK. But if I do end up going into labor like this woman, you come help clean it up.

Carhart: We’ll come get, yeah, yeah but–

Woman: You’ll take the baby away.

Carhart: Yeah, we’ll come and help.

Woman: OK.

Carhart: We’ll give you, we’ll give everybody a little pack to put stuff in in case it does happen, but as I said–

Woman: A pack?

Carhart: A pack of little drapes and sheets and gloves and all those things, that if you had to do something then you could.

Woman: OK, so if for any reason I did, you’ve given me–

Carhart: You’ve already got the stuff to take care of it.

Woman: A bag to put the baby in, OK.

And so we’ve come full circle, back to the days when women underwent abortions in hotel rooms. How far toward “safe” has abortion come? Not far. This Washington Post photo is of Carhart in a Maryland hotel room with his wife, but it works well with the concept that he is prepared to complete abortions in hotels…

Throwing Tiller under the bus

 
Another abortion death not Carhart’s fault, he says, was Christin Gilbert’s.

Gilbert (pictured right) was a 19-yr-old pregnant mother with Down syndrome who died on January 13, 2005, after a 28-week abortion at George Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, Kansas. In the edited LA video (at 2:35), Carhart says she was not his patient. In LA’s raw footage Carhart expounds (at 1:24:25):

Carhart: And the Christin Gilbert thing on the internet was not my patient. I ended up seeing her in the h–

Woman: Who’s Christin Gilbert?

Carhart: Oh if you go on the Internet eventually you’ll find it, she was a 19 year old mentally handicapped girl from Texas that Dr. Tiller had operated on, and she happened to come back to the clinic on a day that I was covering for him, but it was four days after, she had what’s called post-partum HELLP syndrome, which happens very, very–you’ve heard of eclampsia with women–

Woman: Yeah.

Carhart: Pre-eclampsia, eclampsia, well if it happens before delivery the cure is delivery, and it usually is never a problem, but if it happens after delivery, nobody has been cured from it…. But the “Anti’s” just deciding to blame me for it, because Tillers’ dead, why blame him. [laughs]

Tiller was murdered on May 31, 2009. Nice of Carhart to throw his dead friend under the bus. And also to lie about the cause of Gilbert’s death, which the coroner concluded was, “Complications of therapeutic abortion.” Furthermore, to state no mother who develops HELLP syndrome  after delivery “has ever been cured” is ludicrous. In fact, the mortality rate is 1%.

Operation Rescue has much more on the death of Christin Gilbert.

Will America be repulsed by these revelations about Crock Pot Carhart and late-term abortions? Previous “Inhuman” releases showed willingness by personnel at abortion clinics in New York =, in Washington, D.C., and Phoenix, Arizona, to either kill abortion survivors outright, or let them asphyxiate. Can we begin the road back to decency and sanity?

by LauraLoo

A pro-choice “Christian” security guard at the Norman Music Festival attempted to block pro-lifers from exercising their First Amendment rights by displaying graphic images of abortion, claiming they were “offensive to children” – until a child stepped in:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSFWP9dRQrg[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: Jill]

As horrible as this might sound, we found ourselves wishing these twins away.

We considered a reduction for about 30 seconds. (That’s essentially an abortion of one twin, not both.) If you thought that IVF involved playing God, a reduction felt beyond brazen — Machiavellian, even. Give us a reason, we thought, as we had the twins tested for genetic anomalies. None came….

With four months left to go, I’m not sure what stage we’re in at the moment — but it’s not acceptance. My wife and I even both privately admitted that we don’t like the new children, which is of course insane. Excited? We’re not there yet. Terrified? Yes, when we’re not practicing denial.

They say the most important thing is the kids’ health — but what about ours?

~ Expectant father under the pen name “Albert Garland,” just beside himself over the horrific prospect of life with twin boys, as quoted by Babble via Legal Insurrection, May 6

[Photo via Jen Prouty]

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• America isn’t the only place with shady abortionists. An abortionist in China has been accused of taking a nude photo of a patient and blackmailing her with it.:
  

  … [T]he patient claims that the doctor took pictures of her while she was changing clothes and tried to use the photo as blackmail so that they would pay.

  The hospital later returned the extra money the couple had been charged and issued an apology after police were called to investigate the situation.

• An Orange County hospital has announced that it will no longer provide abortions. Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian provided less than 100 abortions a year:
  

  Noting a correlation between low volume and low quality of care, …the board had decided to eliminate “direct” abortions because the hospital performs such a low volume of them — fewer than 100 per year.

  Direct abortions are those procedures whose sole purpose is to terminate pregnancy before the fetus is considered medically viable.

• The Hill has an article on Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards (pictured left) which is largely complimentary. The article does note the prevalence of abortion at Planned Parenthood but unfortunately doesn’t ask Richards what her thoughts are on the troubles with the Delaware Planned Parenthood:
  

  Planned Parenthood is at the center of the abortion debate, as one of the most powerful abortion-rights lobbies and also as a leading abortion provider.

  Planned Parenthood provides roughly 27 percent of the 1.2 million abortions performed each year in the U.S. — more than any other single provider.

• In the Baltimore Sun, Marta Mossberg argues that the Gosnell case should make Maryland rethink their permissiveness of late-term abortion:
  

  Abortion supporters argue Dr. Gosnell, whose trial is garnering national media coverage, is a fringe outlier. In Maryland alone, there is much evidence to prove that assertion false. What about Steven Chase Brigham, for example? He was charged with murder for the deaths of viable babies at an abortion clinic he operated illegally in Elkton.

  Or what about the death of 29-year-old Jennifer [] Morbelli in February after undergoing an abortion at 33 weeks at a Germantown clinic? In March, Maryland officials suspended abortions at three clinics, including one in Baltimore where a patient had a heart attack and later died. According to a report in this paper, “The physician who performed the abortion at Associates in OB/GYN Care LLC on North Calvert Street wasn’t certified in CPR and a defibrillator at the facility did not work.”

[Photo via zimbio.com]

by Kelli

We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.

• At Live Action News, Kristen Hatten reacts to a very disturbing Huffington Post article written by a man who says he is “not happy about” finding out his wife is expecting twin boys after they pursued IVF hoping for a (single) girl.
• Michael New has two great posts at National Review Online addressing emergency contraception, the Pill, and whether or not these methods of attempting to prevent unintended pregnancy actually work. New argues that what is truly needed is a more chaste culture.

• Clinic Quotes shares a startling admission from late-term abortionist Warren Hern (pictured left), who claims that “abortion, almost more than any other operation, demands experience to develop skill.” Despite this, CQ points out that “Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice organizations have push[ed] for laws allowing nurses and other non-doctors to perform them.”
• Culture Campaign shares the discovery of a deadly new strain of rapidly-progressing gonorrhea which is considered to be even more lethal than AIDS/HIV.
• Ethika Politika comments on a Wall Street Journal article by Sarah Elizabeth Richards, who believes that egg freezing is a good, no-strings-attached way of becoming a mother, without any need for a man:
  

  The importance of Sarah’s story is to listen to Sarah herself. Sarah isn’t someone just “using” frozen eggs because it is the only way for her to have a baby. She is using it to fulfill her calling as a woman, to be a mother and to have children. These are the ideals that society and nature have always held up for women; it is very normative and correct. Yet, she seems to embrace this reproductive technology as a means to detach herself further from obligations to men (and to society) and to anything beyond her career.

• Big Blue Wave shares a video created to oppose Quebec’s campaign to legalize euthanasia:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/0giQwjORpN8[/youtube]

[Photo via dailymail.co.uk]