Planned Parenthood Pink: Mother’s Day Massacre and Beyond

Abortion’s underbelly is raw and oozing filth. Festering in that underbelly are a host of unacceptable, even squalid facilities, that one former abortion center worker says “even the demons in hell are not exposed to”. Like others in America’s elite community, abortionists have no qualms in experimenting on women of color – subjecting them to the same hazardous and squalid conditions some claim were eradicated when abortion moved out of the back alley and into the centers that dot Black and Latino neighborhoods.

One such experiment was the "Mother’s Day Massacre” .  Harvey Karman, an abortionist who faked his medical credentials, created a device called the supercoil that International Planned Parenthood paid him to test in Bangladesh. The experiment went awry and women were injured.  In 1972, Karman joined Kermit Gosnell, who later ran Philadelphia’s house of horror  , to try the device on American women. They bussed fifteen Black women in their second trimester of pregnancy from Chicago to Philadelphia. Once there, the ‘super coil’ was placed inside their wombs and nine of the fifteen were seriously injured. The supercoil, according to testimony to the grand jury in Gosnell’s 2013 murder trial, “…was a device that he and [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.”

Gosnell fled the country for a while, vacationing in the Bahamas. Karman was prosecuted and did a short stint in jail for practicing medicine without a license. In 2008 when he died, one Planned Parenthood director celebrated him stating he did “more for safe abortion around the world than practically any other person in the world.” The fact that so many Black and Bangladeshi women were injured by his “invention” was of no concern to the purveyors of abortion. As America ‘s elite has done in most experiments on people of color (Tuskegee Syphilis Study 1932-1972; Puerto Rican Cancer Study – 1931), they quietly pushed  the story to the back burner and abortionists continued plying their wares in squalid, unclean environments.

Planned Parenthood is one of those purveyors of abortion in unclean, sometimes squalid conditions. They target women of color. Like Gosnell, Planned Parenthood lures women of color into their facilities and their shoddy healthcare has resulted in the deaths and serious injury of women who trusted them with their “reproductive healthcare”. Once every few weeks, sidewalk counselors and prayer warriors report the increasing numbers of patients evacuated from a Planned Parenthood by ambulance: New York, Connecticut, Missouri, California, Illinois, Michigan, to name a few. When states dare to inspect Planned Parenthood facilities, many are cited for unsafe medical conditions including failure to wash hands between procedures and failure to sterilize instruments.

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards spins a narrative that women of color will be denied access to reproductive healthcare if her organization loses the more than half billion dollars of taxpayer money they receive each and every year. She repeatedly ignores the fact that 79% or more of her surgical abortion facilities are located in the very neighborhoods where these women live and many of them do not provide the healthcare she claims these women will lose if taxpayer  funds  are reallocated. She ignores her own records that reveal Planned Parenthood: reached a half million fewer clients in the past six years; completed 60% fewer breast exams- less than 2% of America’s breast exams; and completed 77% fewer pap tests – less than 1% of America’s pap tests.

The only area where services increased have been in abortion - they perform almost 35% of them. Planned Parenthood has masqueraded in the cloak of women’s rights for far too long. Their services are steeped in abortion’s underbelly, and many of them operate in conditions just as squalid as those found in Kermit Gosnells’ house of horror. As the mother’s day massacre continues in Planned Parenthood abortion chambers across the nation, Black and Latino women must beware – their very lives and reproductive health depends on it. 

Finding Justice in an Unjust Law

Thursday marked the forty second year of legalized abortion in the United States. Forty two years ago, the  Supreme Court ruled little human beings inside the wombs of their mothers are not persons as defined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. As they had done in the Dred Scott (http://bit.ly/1xsaurA) , and Plessy v. Ferguson (http://bit.ly/1CDHhhN) decisions, they ignored what they could see with their own eyes and instead objectified babies just as they had Blacks by removing them from the spectrum of humanity. They gave the mother a right to abort by placing the fictitious right of privacy above the constitutionally defined right to life of the child. Now forty two years later, very few remember the humanity of the child. Instead the culture has embroiled itself in the politics of the matter and almost  fifty eight  million lives later the nation is no closer to ending the slaughter of babies than it was when this battle began.

Until 2003, politics allowed abortionists to partially birth babies  then plunge instruments into their brains to kill them before pulling them completely out of the womb. Instead of protecting the lives of the innocents, politics  allows some babies to be pulled apart limb by limb each and every day in one of America’s 549 surgical abortion centers. Ask the mothers who heard the nurses count the baby's body parts whether they were human persons. Politics has allowed some babies to be birthed alive and then killed as was the case in Kermit Gosnell’s Pennsylvania house of horror. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania did nothing to stop him until 2010 and then only after the DEA forced their hand.  Each and everyday politics allows abortionists to inject digoxin into the hearts of babies to stop its beating so their moms can deliver a dead child. The politics of abortion allowed the Oakland California police to stand idly by while white feminists disrupted a memorial led by Black Pastors for the millions of babies lost to abortion. These women demand abortion without apology and they defy you and I to stop them from killing the innocents.

Abortion politics has allowed the violation of state laws even when the outcome is the death of the woman. This was evident in the case of LaKisha Wilson in Ohio. LaKisha, 22, suffered heavy blood loss that resulted in cardiac arrest. We have now learned that Lakisha’s pregnancy was beyond the legal limit for abortions in Ohio. We have also learned the center where the operation occurred was non-compliant with facility codes and the broken elevator delayed the EMT squad getting her out and to the nearest hospital. LaKisha is not alone in the death roll call and we mourn the deaths of  Tonya Reaves, Semika Shaw, Sherika Mayo, Edrica Goode, Denise Crowe, Laura Hope Smith, Tamiia Russell, Antonesha Ross and the many other women who died at the hands of substandard abortionists that fuel the multi-billion dollar  industry.

The politics of abortion allows America’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, to use taxpayer dollars to deny Black babies and their mothers, the civil and inalienable right to life as they target them for execution when they locate the lion share of their abortion centers within a two mile walking radius of a Black and/or Latina neighborhood. The politics of abortion allows population control enthusiasts to give millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood to deprive Black and Latina babies the right to life. Many of these enthusiasts are supporters of eugenics and they have no qualms about targeting Black women and babies with their dollars to get “rid of the populations we have too many of” as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed in 2009. The politics of abortion allows Planned Parenthood to disguise their racist roots in the Negro Project, designed to control the birthrate of those their founder deemed undesirable.

America may not have the political will to end abortion, but I believe America has the moral will to end the destruction of our innocents. Abortion takes the lives of babies who are persons indeed and justice will be served when we recognize they are entitled to the protection of the 14^th amendment. Justice will be served when states are no longer allowed to violate their own laws by turning a blind eye to the havoc abortionists are wreaking on women and babies in the womb. Justice will be served when abortionists can no longer steal taxpayer money as they destroy the lives of the babies and more and more frequently their mothers.  Justice and righteousness will again meet to end this scourge that has devastated men, women and families across the nation. May justice come now.

Enough!!!

I have to confess, I have not fought as hard as I could for the women that choose abortion. My focus has been mostly on the babies in the womb, fighting to give them a chance at life, a chance to join us living, breathing beings on the journey set before us. While some might view the fight for the baby as the fight for women, that is not always the case and today I declare it is time to fight equally for both the mother and the child. The spin and the lies used to entice women to seek abortions have crippled many women reproductively. The Gosnell trial is proof positive of that. I am angry that those who support abortion are using the trial to continue the spin that in urban communities, reproductive health is a matter of black and poor women’s lack of access. I am angry that they are using the trial as a commercial for Planned Parenthood, still seeking to drive women towards the abortionists’ knife. So today I am upping the ante and fighting equally for the women and their babies, especially black women since they are the target of the abortion giants. I hereby put Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the National Abortion Federation and all the other rabid abortion supporters on notice - Black women are not dumb, nor are we stupid. We are not some monolithic group of imbeciles that will continue drinking from the potion concocted to control the black birth rate. Enough is enough.

As the trial of late term abortionist Kermit Gosnell progresses the testimony is appalling, revealing a base mind that subjected women and babies to such horrors that they are almost unbelievable. Here we are in the twenty-first century reading about an abortionist that practiced segregation, separate but equal waiting rooms for people of his own race. He thought so little of black women that he allowed unlicensed personnel to medicate and treat them during abortion process, but ‘treated’ white women himself. The center was so filthy that it reeked of cat urine, blood and a variety of other unidentifiable odors. His practice was so demonic that he and the workers in his center thought it not strange that baby feet lined the shelves encased in specimen jars while many other baby body parts were ‘bagged’ and thrown into the basement where rats waited to feast. It was not thought strange that labor was induced and babies were “delivered” to then have their spinal cords “snipped” by the unlicensed personnel including one that said it was “raining fetuses and blood” at times. They thought it not strange that baby body parts so filled the pipes they had to be unclogged two to three times a week.

Adding insult to injury, it is clear that Planned Parenthood knew of the issues with Gosnell’s center long before the February 18, 2010 FBI/DEA raid: “Steinberg said that when Gosnell was in practice, women would sometimes come to Parenthood for services after first visiting Gosnell's West Philadelphia clinic, and would complain to staff about the conditions there. We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health," Steinberg said as she sat with Steinem before Tuesday's events” http://bit.ly/Z9nIKQ

The Commonwealth of PA, the National Abortion Federation nor Planned Parenthood did anything to warn women about the condition of Gosnell’s abortion center: “Despite his various efforts to fool her, the evaluator from NAF readily noted that records were not properly kept, that risks were not explained, that patients were not monitored, that equipment was not available, that anesthesia was misused. It was the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected.” (page16, PA Grand Jury Report). Instead they have used this tale as a commercial for Planned Parenthood: “Of the Gosnell trial, Steinem added: "It makes more clear why you need Planned Parenthood."

Also, they have used this case to advocate for access to Medicaid while blaming the prolife community: “The evidence suggests a number of factors led women to Gosnell: Medicaid's refusal to cover most abortions; the scarcity of providers in Pennsylvania; fear of violent protesters; and a right-wing culture that has stigmatized abortion.”

Pro-abortion forces are working overtime to push America toward the belief that Gosnell is an aberration, an exception to the standard of providing quality medical care. But the facts reveal that belief is the furthest from the truth. There are many more abortionists that are applying Gosnellian tactics: unlicensed personnel fudging ultrasounds to disguise the age of the baby, unlicensed personnel administering anesthesia (including propofol – the drug that killed Michael Jackson); lack of licensed personnel to monitor patients during recovery; reuse of instruments designed for one use only; numerous botched abortions that have left baby parts in the woman and most distressing perforating the uterus of the patient resulting in a complete hysterectomy and sometimes death.

Planned Parenthood surgical centers along with others all have many of these same conditions. In fact, two Planned Parenthood nurses in Delaware quit recently because they feared their licenses were being jeopardized. Another Planned Parenthood spokesperson, in Florida acknowledged there are as many as 1200 abortions that end in the baby being born alive. Alisa LaPolt Snow, went on to say "We believe that any decision that's made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician" suggesting they might not find the snipping procedure to be horrible at all since they would do nothing to aid the infant born alive. And just last year, Planned Parenthood’s idea of following “standard medical procedures and the law” resulted in the death of young Tonya Reaves after they perforated her uterus and left her laying in their center for more than five hours before seeking emergency care. By the time they sought medical help for her (which clearly their “doctor” failed to provide) it was too late and Tonya died a tortuous death because they did not care enough about her to get help immediately.

Enough! Women beware! Black women especially beware! It is time we sound the alarm and help women to know their health is at risk in these abortion chambers around the country. It is time we sound the alarm and let women know they may not come home from their “safe and legal” abortion. Remember Tonya Reaves, remember Janet Morbelli, remember Shirika Mayo, remember Semika Shaw, remember Laura Hope Smith. . . Remember the other 395 women that have died because they sought a safe, legal abortion. Sound the alarm! Women beware! Black women especially – beware!

Honesty, Kermit Gosnell and the Abortion Industry

This morning I came across an article (Yes, let's be honest about Kermit Gosnell's abortion 'house of horrors') that quite frankly took my breath away and not because it was good. In fact I could not decide which emotion would win the day - anger, outrage, or disbelief. Using a picture of the Endangered Species billboard that I was involved with three years ago, the author wrote to persuade the reader that Gosnell was an exception, an aberration that people like me would use to create more laws to restrict abortion in America. She went on to make a series of outrageous statements, painting pro-lifers as terrorists while stating “The goal of "pro-life" activists isn't to draw attention to an illegal butcher in order to protect women and babies. The braying about Gosnell is a ploy to shame the media into covering the issue from the anti-abortion perspective, conflating the illegal procedures performed by Gosnell with safe, legal abortion”.

Jill Filipovic’s idea of honesty is to dismiss the mainstream media’s lack of coverage of one of the most horrific serial murder cases of this and the last century, suggesting that before the pro-life tweet fest that forced coverage,there was extensive coverage of his murderous ways. It does not matter to her that there was not. In fact, Gosnell's House of Horrors did not make the nightly news or page one until a week ago, the fifth week of his trial. Ms. Filipovic like many other abortion supporters, worships at the altar of abortion and at that altar it is easy to dismiss the reality that Gosnell took deliberate steps to destroy the lives of viable children while collecting their body parts as trophies he openly displayed throughout his shop of horrors. What has become clear through his trial is that he cared nothing for the women that paid a thousand or more dollars for his services or for the lives of the children he decapitated.

Jill’s type of honesty allows her to join Gosnell’s defense attorney in suggesting that poor, black and brown women should not expect mayo clinic standards in an urban area. As she brushes aside the reality that the medical standards of many abortionists leave women over-medicated, infected with various STD’s, and even dead, she chooses to spin the indoctrination that the issue faced by these poor, black and brown women was due to a lack of access to abortion and their inability to use Medicaid to pay for it. The last I looked, Gosnell made millions of dollars off of these poor, black and brown women, some paying almost two thousand dollars for the procedure. And there are many other abortionists across the country who are making millions such as the wife and daughter of an Atlanta abortionist that flaunt their wealth in every episode of Big Rich Atlanta. Much of what occurred at 3801 Lancaster is the standard of the abortion industry. Ms. Filipovic like the others that blindly support abortion at all costs, wants America to allow women to continue to be reproductively maimed, keeping abortionists free to shred babies into unholy confetti while providing substandard medical care.

I for one reject the idea that abortion is safe. Ms. Filipovic, on the other hand, believes that “Legal abortion in the United States is today one of the safest medical procedures around”. This, I say, is a lie that has been perpetuated by abortion supporters. I remember Tonya Reaves, who at the hands of Planned Parenthood’s Title X abortionist, was left to hemorrhage to death after her uterus was perforated. They did not seek emergency care for her for more than five hours - she did not have to die. I remember Shirika Mayo whose iron blood count was so low she should have been transfused instead of being given a second trimester abortion by a Planned Parenthood preferred provider, who punctured her uterus and took her life. I remember Jennifer Morbelli who was abandoned by her Title X abortionist when her amniotic fluid seeped into her blood sream. I remember Laura Hope Smith whose abortionist did not know CPR or have oxygen nearby to help resuscitate her after the procedure. These ladies deaths are the tip of the mountain of substandard care provided by many if not most of the abortionists in America.

The idea that abortion is “inaccessible … for low-income women, who are disproportionately women of color, and for rural women” is yet another lie that is being spun on the altar of abortion. Low-income women of color have long been targeted by the abortion industry. In fact, most of the surgical abortion centers of Planned Parenthood are located within a two mile walking radius of a Black or Latino neighborhood as documented by Protect Black Life's 2012 study. This is the same Planned Parenthood that wants America to believe their primary service gives “women the tools to both prevent unintended pregnancy and care for wanted children”.If she could find the abortion center to terminate the life of her child, she could find that same center to get the so called tools.

The Gosnell Case is the rule rather than the exception. The Gosnell case proves that the coat hanger of the past has put on a suit and can be found in abortion chambers around the country and that Ms. Filipovic is newsworthy. Pro-life laws did not create Gosnell, lack of enforcement of the laws did. May that never happen again.

The Two G’s: Gosnell and Georgia and Tales of Horror

Since the third week in March, there has been riveting, ghoulish and ghastly testimony about a Philadelphia abortionist named Kermit Gosnell, on trial for eight counts of murder. It is alleged he killed more than 100 babies by “snipping” their spinal cord to ensure “fetal demise” (his words). Despite a mainstream media blackout, the articles that can be found on the internet are chronicling testimony in terms that can only be deemed horrifying. Phrases like “It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.”, “Literally, it is a beheading, it is separating the brain from the body”, “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” “she called aborted fetuses “specimens” because “it was easier to deal with mentally” are just a sampling of what the jury has heard since the trial began. As the prosecution and defense are weaving this tale, much of what is being heard is so ghoulish that it defies the imagination to believe this has been happening in any state in this nation. Yet, the Pennsylvania grand jury, legislators of the Commonwealth and the prosecuting attorney have documented evidence found at 3801 Lancaster that verifies it was happening and was only stopped when Gosnell was arrested. In fact, the arresting agents had to wait until he completed two or three abortions before they could take him into custody.

In addition testimony of staff of the center discloses tales of dirty instruments being used repeatedly without sanitation in between each use. There are tales of unlicensed staff not only performing abortions, but administering anesthesia to knock the woman out. They described incidences of fudging ultra sounds to disguise the gestational age of the baby and storage of aborted babies body parts on shelves and in refrigerators where staff kept their meals. Pictures from the “house of horrors” as Gosnell’s facility has been dubbed, showed operating tables with tears in them, rusted in part, surrounded by blood caked medical instruments. These reports are particularly disturbing because they are eerily similar to reports we are hearing in Georgia. However, we cannot tell you for sure what is true because the state of Georgia has taken no steps to enforce the laws on the books with regard to ambulatory surgical centers in this state. Nor has the state taken steps to shut down abortion centers when reported violations are found in one of only six licensed abortion facilities (the remaining twelve centers are unlicensed).

In Georgia, former staff of one abortion center described the reuse of instruments that had been soaked in a solution so many times that they were now straight rather than curved as they were when taken out if its packaging. These instruments, they report, should have only been used one time and the abortion center experienced a rash of staph infections that disappeared when the practice was stopped for a short period of time. They described tables that were duct taped and sometimes blood caked because they were not sanitized. Another center acknowledged to the state they were not sterilizing instruments according to their own protocol, much less to a medical standard that ensured sterilization. This facility in a follow up visit by the state, documented they performed thirty-five procedures in one six hour period, again demonstrating a failure to sterilize the operating arena between each procedure. State documents cite building code violations, including lack of a sprinkler system in a building where abortions are performed on the second floor.

Some unlicensed staff explained though they were only trained as medical technicians, they performed sonograms. Unlicensed staff routinely administered anesthesia, including propfol (the drug that killed Michael Jackson) to patients. Another report is that linen used during the surgical procedure usually are re-used and only laundered at the end of the week when staff took them home. Two abortionists were cited by the state - one for failing to meet normal standards of medical care when performing an abortion on a woman whose blood iron count was so low she should have received transfusions, and the other for performing second trimester abortions in an unlicensed facility. Both these abortionists only paid a nominal fine that in no way measured up to the harm inflicted.

The horror in Georgia is that twelve abortion centers have almost no government oversight and do not meet the Department of Community Health published regulations for ambulatory surgical centers (the Department of Community Health’s Rule 290-5-33-01 defines an “ambulatory surgical treatment centers” in this way: any institution, building or facility or part thereof devoted primarily to the provision of surgical treatment to patients not requiring hospitalization, as provided under provisions of GA Code Section 88-1901). These centers have not been inspected nor provided standards to minimize injuries to patients. The six that are licensed are not inspected routinely and when the Department of Community Health does inspect and finds violations, there are no legal ramifications for the violators.

A Pennsylvania employee, when testifying reported that “ Under Governor Robert Casey, … the department inspected abortion facilities annually. Yet, when Governor Tom Ridge came in, the attorneys interpreted the same regulations that had permitted annual inspections for years to no longer authorize those inspections. Then, only complaint driven inspections supposedly were authorized. Staloski said that DOH’s policy during Governor Ridge’s administration was motivated by a desire not to be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions” http://bit.ly/10p91Dh. With all my heart I hope that this is not the stance of Governor Deal. I have reported before that Governor Deal’s spokesperson stated he is fully aware of our concerns. Yet he has taken no visible action to bring Georgia’s abortion centers into compliance with the laws that have been on the books for decades. I can only pray that he will soon be spurred into action so that none of the abortion centers here will grow to the level of horror of that center in Pennsylvania.

The Nightmare Continues

And I am still in in. I cannot let go of the images that were painted in my mind as I listened to the horror that young woman experienced. I cannot imagine how she felt when she learned her baby, now dead, was left inside her and she could not reach the doctor. I wonder what it will take to shake things up enough in Georgia so that the government will begin enforcing the laws on the books. Abortion centers throughout the state are subjected to less inspection and regulation enforcement than nail salons! And when violations are found, our government refuses to take action that will move the state toward the standard of care most women expect. You may recall that the Atlanta Women's Medical Center was cited for failing to sterilize instruments according to policy and failing to properly chart patient records. If one abortion center that is licensed is this reckless in its standards of care, I am sure the other abortion centers, especially those that are not licensed, are putting patients at risk because they fail to properly sterilize the instruments and properly monitor and document patient care. 

According to the Georgia Department of Human Services, Division of Public Health, Georgia ranks among the top 10 states in the United States with high case rates for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis¹. It is not hard to imagine that some of these cases of sexually transmitted diseases are caused by the unregulated abortion centers and doctors' offices (whose primary business is abortion) that do not properly sterilize equipment. I can imagine that some of these doctors and centers do not have an AUTOCLAVE, the equipment most physicians use to sterilize instruments. Without that piece of equipment, the doctor must rely on some antiseptic that I cannot imagine is strong enough to thoroughly clean the instruments, particularly those that have been contaminated with blood.

 

I am reminded of the abortionist that was arrested in Philadelphia, PA after he murdered a woman and seven babies. His facility and practice was described as a filthy fraud². The Pennsylvania District Attorney rightly categorized the case as a disregard of the law and disdain for the lives and health of mothers and infants. Yesterday I wrote about just such a case here in the state of Georgia. Clearly the doctor in that case cared less about the mother and her health than he did about rushing through her procedure – so much so that he left the baby behind. I wonder if the inside of his facility is as squalid as the one described by the PA attorney general. Has he patched equipment together with duct tape as Gosnell did (see pictures in the Pennsylvania DA report – warning, they are graphic and disturbing). Is there blood in and on the instruments as they reused the equipment time and again without sterilizing it?. Because Georgia is failing to hold abortionists accountable for the surgical care they provide every day, there is no way to know how many women have come away from this abortion center and others infected or harmed in some way. Perhaps we should ask those women to come forward and tell their stories. It is time to force our Governor, Legislators, and even ourselves to face the horror that is abortion in Georgia.

 

1. http://health.state.ga.us/pdfs/epi/gers/Nov08GER.pdf
   
2. http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/PDFs/GrandJuryWomensMedical.pdf