Review
Doctored Malevolence
Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer
by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer
Regnery Publishing, 2017
(347 pages, $27.99, hardcover)
reviewed by Howard Isaac Williams
In this book, Ann McElhinney and her husband Phelim McAleer give readers the first comprehensive look at the atrocities committed for over forty years by abortionist Kermit Gosnell and the arrest and trial that finally put him in prison for life. Their account should be read because it goes beyond Gosnell's murders themselves to uncover the bureaucratic sloth and media neglect that enabled him to commit his brutalities and because it provokes other troubling questions about abortion and infanticide.
On February 18, 2010, law enforcement officers raided Gosnell's clinic with a search warrant related to illegal sales of prescription drugs. Only when they stepped inside did they discover garbage-filled rooms packed with jars containing the remains of fetuses and newborns. Having expected only a drug case, the Philadelphia County grand jury and district attorney's office had to scramble to investigate infanticide, fatally botched abortions, and other crimes. McElhinney and McAleer take the reader through the investigation in which prosecutors tried to determine whether the 47 tiny human corpses found at the clinic were fetuses or newborns. If any of the victims had been newborns, first-degree murder could be charged. If they were all fetuses, no murder or even manslaughter charges could be made. Despite the near certainty that Gosnell would be convicted of lesser charges, prosecutors were concerned that the abortionist might actually be acquitted of any murder or manslaughter charges they could bring. And without a major felony conviction, he might even walk free.
The authors devote a forty-page chapter to examining the failure of state authorities to rein in Gosnell. Equally damning is their description of the news media's head-in-the-sand response to the story once it finally broke. The authors show that in America's fifth-largest city, a case involving abortion, infanticide, drug infractions, bureaucratic incompetence, and other issues somehow could not garner significant media attention. Not until local journalist J. D. Mullane risked jail (reporters were prohibited from photographing the trial) to stealthily snap a shot of the courtroom's nearly empty media gallery did attention to Gosnell manage to reach beyond Philadelphia.
The authors credit Mullane and USA Today writer Kirsten Powers for shaming the national media into slightly increasing their trial coverage. What emerges as the likely explanation for the media's indifference has less to do with conspiracy than conformity. A few journalists faced up to this. The authors note that Slate's David Weigel and The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf wrote that most reporters are pro-choice and their bias makes them less likely to cover stories like the Gosnell case.
Questions & Witnesses
As more and more longstanding social mores are redefined by media, the courts, and other unrepresentative institutions, will America actually come to accept infanticide? Some secular ethicists, such as Princeton's Peter Singer, already advocate killing babies. In Roe v. Wade, Associate Justice Harry Blackmun evaded the issue of fetal personhood when he wrote for the majority that "we need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins." If the question of when life begins is irrelevant even up to the final minutes before birth, will it someday be seen as irrelevant in the first minutes after a child's birth? Will Blackmun's evasion someday provide a legal wedge into infanticide? If so, will Gosnell someday be pardoned and even acclaimed for having been on the right side of history?
What might help make the answers to those questions remain "No" are the authors' descriptions of Gosnell's infant victims who summoned enough strength to witness against their killer—for example, the child identified only as Baby Boy Abrams, who was photographed moving in the shoebox that would become his coffin; and Baby D, who was murdered after attempting to swim in the toilet where he had been delivered.
Howard Isaac Williams lives in San Francisco, where he attends St. Sergius Orthodox Church. He is semi-retired from the messenger and pest control industries.
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