April 19, 2013 – 3:43 PM
By Michael W. Chapman
(Warning: Some of the material presented in this story is graphic.)
(CNSNews.com) – A witness testified in the Gosnell abortion-murder trial that she saw one baby expelled alive into a toilet where it “was like swimming” and “trying to get out.” According to the grand jury report in the case, clinic workers testified that babies often expelled from their mothers into the toilet and that, in at least one instance, the toilet was lifted from the floor to “get the fetuses out of the pipes.”
The ongoing trial concerns abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell and the Women’s Medical Society clinic he ran in Philadelphia. He is charged with, among other crimes, the first-degree murder of seven babies who had been born alive during abortions and then killed, their spinal cords snipped.
In the grand jury report (Grand Jury Report.pdf) on the case, released in January 2011, many pregnant women were given drugs to induce labor. According to employee Latosha Lewis “one or two babies fell out of patients each night. They dropped on lounge chairs, on the floor, and often in the toilet.”
If “a baby was about to come out, I would take the woman to the bathroom, they would sit on the toilet and basically the baby would fall out and it would be in the toilet and I would be rubbing her back and trying to calm her down for two, three, four hours until Dr. Gosnell comes,” Lewis told the grand jury.
The report continues: “James Johnson, who supposedly cleaned the clinic and bagged its infectious waste, confirmed Lewis’s account. He testified that sometimes patients ‘miscarried or whatever it was’ into the toilet and clogged it.”
“He described how he had to lift the toilet so that someone else – he said it was too disgusting for him – could get the fetuses out of the pipes,” reads the grand jury report.
Johnson is the common-law husband of Elizabeth Hampton, the sister of Gosnell’s wife, Pearl.
Gosnell preferred to have the babies expel “because it made his job easier,” reads the report, which adds, “If fetuses had not precipitated, Gosnell would often have his staff physically push them out of their mothers by pressing in the mother’s abdomens.” (See Grand Jury Report.pdf)
The ongoing trial of Gosnell, 72, is occurring in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. The defense case is supposed to start on Monday, April 22. Gosnell is charged with seven counts of first-degree murder (seven babies), one count of third-degree murder of a mother, as well as infanticide, conspiracy, abortion at 24 or more weeks, abuse of a corpse, theft, corruption of minors, solicitation and other related offenses.