Taranto: Back-Alley Abortion Never Ended

"...the claim that Roe v. Wade made America safe from back-alley abortion stands exposed as a cruel hoax, and a deadly one for women and children alike,"  writes James Taranto, drawing this little known bloody history about abortionist Kermit Gosnell from the pages of the Philadelphia murder indictment report:

It was called the Mother's Day Massacre—the brainchild of Harvey Karman, an eccentric California man without medical training who had served 2½ years in prison for performing illegal abortions in the 1950s. Karman teamed with a young Philadelphia doctor who offered to perform abortions on 15 impoverished women, each between four and six months pregnant, who were bused to the Philadelphia clinic from Chicago on Mother's Day 1972.



What the women didn't know was that they were guinea pigs for a device Karman had invented, which he called the "super coil." He had tested it only on wartime rape victims in Bangladesh, where he had traveled under the sponsorship of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Complication rates were high, and little wonder. A colleague of Karman's Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption as "basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. ... They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman's uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, ... the gel would melt and these ... things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus."

As in Bangladesh, the Philadelphia experiment was a failure. Nine of the 15 women suffered serious complications. One needed a hysterectomy.

The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried out the Mother's Day Massacre would go out of business. His name was Kermit Gosnell. [emphasis added]

Gosnell may be out of business today, but his abortion atrocities are no 'aberration', argues liberal commentator Kirsten Powers in a USA Today editorial. She cites several recent cases of serious abortion clinic infractions in Ohio, Delaware, Maryland, and Illinois. She also quotes Pennsylvania state Rep. Margo Davidson,

the only member of the Democratic black caucus to vote for the abortion-regulation bill passed there. She told me, "We don't know how many (Gosnells) there are. I'm not trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, but if a woman makes this difficult choice, she should at least be afforded the highest level of care." She said the choice community knew what was going on and did nothing.

Davidson concluded that for the choice community, "the institution was more important than the individual lives."