PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – Dr Kermit Gosnell ran a “house of horrors” in a West Philadelphia health clinic where women went for late-term abortions, a prosecutor said in his opening statement yesterday in a trial that will decide if the doctor is guilty of murder in the deaths of seven infants and a woman.
The district attorney’s office contends Gosnell, 72, delivered live babies and then deliberately severed their spinal cords, killing them. “This is not a case about abortion,” Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore told the jury. “This is a case about murder.”
Gosnell’s defence lawyer, John McMahon, characterised the prosecution of his client, who is black, as “elitist, racist” and said, “They (prosecutors) want to put a Mayo Clinic standard on a West Philadelphia clinic.”
The charges against Gosnell and nine of his employees have rekindled the debate in the United States about late-term abortions. Abortions are banned in Pennsylvania after 24 weeks of pregnancy.
McMahon tried to cast doubt on whether the deaths of the infants constituted homicide. “The first rule of homicide is someone has to be alive,” he told the jury. He said the gestational age of infants is plus or minus three weeks. “The estimates here are nothing more than guesses,” he said.
At the time his office filed the charges in 2011, District Attorney and chief prosecutor Seth Williams, who is also black, said he knew abortion was a hot-button issue but that “a doctor who cuts into the necks severing the spinal cords of living, breathing babies who would survive with proper medical attention, is committing murder under the law.”
Gosnell, who has been in jail since his January 2011 arrest, ran a clinic called the Women’s Medical Society.
He faces 26 charges, including murder for the deaths of the seven infants and a woman who visited his office.
The prosecution contends the woman died of a drug overdose administered by the clinic. If found guilty of this charge, Gosnell could face the death penalty.
Dressed in a dark business suit, Gosnell displayed no emotion during the opening statements of the trial, which is expected to last several weeks.
