Planned Parenthood’s one degree of separation from Gosnell’s 1972 “Mother’s Day Massacre”
UPDATE 4/22, 12:40p: WNET has notified me that “the October 1972 program you are interested in is very old and we do not have any records for it.” I was given the name of another lead, which I’ll pursue.
4/16, 6:31p: In 1972, International Planned Parenthood Federation was one of two groups partnering with the country of Bangladesh to bring Dr. Harvey Karman (pictured right) and a small team of “abortion experts,” which included two IPPF doctors, to the newly formed country to commit abortions and train native doctors and paramedics how to commit them.
Abortion was Karman’s “consuming passion,” according to Salon, which acknowledged Karman wasn’t really any sort of doctor whatsoever but had simply “added a Ph.D. to his name, though his degree came from a dubious Swiss diploma mill.”
Karman was, in fact, a convicted felon, having served 2-1/2 years in prison – until pardoned by then Gov. Jerry Brown – for killing a mother in 1955 while attempting to illegally abort her in a hotel room with a nutcracker.
The Bangladesh incident was over 40 years ago, less than one year before the Supreme Court would make abortion legal throughout the U.S.
But even then the mainstream media was in the tank for abortion. You would never know by the Los Angeles Times’ glowing April 5, 1972, report that Karman’s experimental use on Bangladeshi rape victims of his new late-term abortion contraption, called the “super coil,” was a disaster:
Essentially, the Karman method, which has gained wide acceptance internationally, permits abortions of pregnancies up to the seventh month – or later – without the use of either anesthetics or standard metal surgical instruments….
In advanced pregnancies up to the seventh month, Karman inserts one or more small, equally simplified plastic coils into the uterus. When exposed to moisture, the coils expand, inducing a miscarriage within 10-20 hours….
That was the spin. Here’s what the super coil actually was, explained in the grand jury report on Kermit Gosnell, who I’ll get to in a minute, taken from testimony by Dr. Randy Hutchins, who once worked for Gosnell:
[T]here was a device that he and a psychologist [Karman] were working on that was supposed to be plastic – basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. All right. They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, it would then – the gel would melt and these 97 things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus, and the fetus would be expelled.
The problem was that they never tested it. They didn’t test it on any animals. They never did any – any – any other human trials. This was not something that was sanctioned by the FDA. This was just something that he decided – he and this guy decided they were going to use on these women.
What women? On Mother’s Day 1972 Karman followed up his Bangladesh experiment in America, with the help of Kermit Gosnell (pictured right). From Philly.com (also quoted in the grand jury report):
On Mother’s Day weekend in 1972, Karman, other activists, and 15 women in their second trimester of pregnancy boarded a bus in Chicago and headed for Philadelphia, where Gosnell had agreed to give them super-coil abortions at his clinic, then at 133 S. 36th St. The women, who were poor, had been unable to get abortions in Chicago or New York.
Gosnell’s super-coil abortions – filmed and later shown on a New York City educational-TV program, thanks to Karman – turned out badly.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health subsequently did an investigation that detailed serious complications suffered by nine of the 15 women, including one who needed a hysterectomy.
The complications included a punctured uterus, hemorrhage, infections, and retained fetal remains.
The CDC researchers recommended strict controls on any future testing of the device – the beginning of “increasing regulations on the development of reproductive technologies,” Tunc wrote.
Karman spent two years in court battles in Philadelphia. He was convicted of practicing medicine without a license, but a Common Pleas Court judge overturned the conviction in 1974, saying then-District Attorney Arlen Specter had failed to show which women Karman had treated.
Gosnell – who testified that Karman had done an “innocuous” part of the procedures but not fetal extractions – was not charged with anything.
Also read this October 12, 1972, Gettysburg Times account. I contacted WNET, the public television station in New York that filmed what came to be known as the Mother’s Day Massacre. I’d love to see that archived program. I will certainly alert readers if I get a response.
Bottom line: Planned Parenthood was perfectly willing to treat impoverished women of color as guinea pigs for an experimental late-term abortion gadget, no different than Kermit Gosnell at the time. (All of Gosnell’s super-coil patients were black and poor.)
I wrote in my title that Planned Parenthood was separated by one degree from Gosnell.
Actually, not.
[HT: Ryan Bomberger at LifeNews.com]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.