Columnist Asks if “Another Gosnell” Operating in Delaware
In a column published by the Washington Post last Friday, Kirsten Powers asked whether a Planned Parenthood clinic in Delaware has been secretly operating under Kermit Gosnell-like conditions.
Powers recently helped bring media attention to Gosnell’s trial. Gosnell was convicted earlier this year of murdering babies born alive following abortion procedures. The grand jury report in his case cited horrific conditions–including blood-stained medical records, insufficiently-trained staff members, and a complete lack of organization–at Gosnell’s clinic.
Powers’ most recent column tells about three whistleblowers who came forward recently from a Delaware abortion clinic, saying,
“[T]wo former Planned Parenthood nurses – Joyce Vasikonis and Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich – have been ringing alarm bells since April about the ‘meat-market-style, assembly-line abortions,’ they witnessed at the Delaware clinic. Moreover, they have complained of lax regulation and a lack of government oversight of abortion clinics in Delaware.
“This week they were joined by Melody Meanor, a former health-care manager at Planned Parenthood of Delaware. Meanor testified that she felt compelled to come forward because she was ‘offended when Planned Parenthood of Delaware attempted to discredit the [prior] testimony’ of Mitchell-Werbrich and Vasikonis who described what she too had witnessed.”
Among other things, the three women say Planned Parenthood’s Delaware clinic was disorganized and allowed staff to perform serious medical procedures without sufficient training. Mitchell-Werbrich specifically said she saw one abortion doctor “slapping a patient,” and placing patients on unwashed operating room tables.
Many abortion advocates have claimed Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic was an outlier, and that most clinics are well-maintained. However, between the testimony of these three women; the closure of a North Carolina abortion clinic last week for some two dozen health violations; and recent stories out of Texas of an abortion doctor who allegedly killed infants born alive; one has to wonder whether Gosnell-like abortion clinics are far more common than many would have us believe.