How to kill unwanted babies (and make loadsa dough)

Just delivered an unwanted baby? Kill her! Or "him"! Or "it"! Here's how... Very simple actually. Get a pair of heavy-duty scissors and snip the spine. No more baby. Just a pile of flesh and bones to be thrown out in the garbage.

That's what was done -- not just once, but many times -- at the "Women's Medical Center", a Philadelphia "clinic" run by Doctor Kermit Gosnell. So says Adrienne Morton, who used to work for the good doctor -- for $10 per hour, cash under the table -- administering drugs, helping with abortions and disposing of the remains.

Ms Morton is testifying at the trial of Dr. Gosnell for killing babies born alive -- "viable" is the term clinicians use -- following late-term abortions. So let's not split hairs about whether the beings whose spines were split were or were not "babies". Of course they were babies -- living human babies. Sometimes Ms Morton killed them. Sometimes another employee did it. And sometimes the abortionist himself took their little lives.

Of course, his lawyer says, Dr. Gosnell did it with the best of motives -- only to help the vizmin women, including refugees, who turned to him in desperation. The race card was also played in the defence's opening statement on Monday. According to his attorney, Dr. Gosnell returned to the impoverished neighbourhood after medical school, when he could have struck it rich in the suburbs. He called the prosecution of his client, who happens to be black, "a lynching".

Not that Dr. Gosnell suffered poverty himself. When authorities searched his home in 2010, they found a quarter of a million dollars in cash! But that money wasn't entirely the proceeds of baby-killing. Some of it came from running a "pill mill," where addicts and drug dealers could get prescriptions for potent painkillers.

Walt bets that the good doctor wishes he'd set up shop a bit further north. Why, in Canada, he'd have been given a medal -- the Order of Canada -- just like Dr. Henry Morgentaler. Mind you, Morgentaler wasn't black, so perhaps racism really is behind the prosecution of Dr. Gosnell.

Footnote: Unlike Kermit Gosnell, Adrienne Morton admitted that what she did was wrong. She pled guilty to murder in the fall of 2011.

See also "MD charges 2 MDs with killing unborn babies" -- another prosecution of a person of colour who was only trying to help her poor disadvantaged sisters.