Gosnell’s clinic is an extreme version of what I call “rogue clinics,” facilities that today prey on women, primarily women of color and often immigrants, in low-income communities.

Gosnell’s clinic is an extreme version of what I call “rogue clinics,” facilities that today prey on women, primarily women of color and often immigrants, in low-income communities.

A bed sitting in a room via Shutterstock

Editor’s note: This article, being republished in April 2013, was originally published by Rewire in 2011 when the details about illegal abortions performed by Dr. Kermit Gosnell first became clear. This article is cross-posted with permission from Beacon Broadside. See all our coverage of the Kermit Gosnell case here.

Reading the Grand Jury report on Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia, the now-closed abortion clinic ran by Dr. Kermit Gosnell, is stomach turning. This was truly a chamber of horrors: a filthy facility, with blood stained blankets and furniture, unsterilized instruments, and cat feces left unattended. Most seriously, there was a jaw dropping disregard of both the law and prevailing standards of medical care. Untrained personnel undertook complex medical procedures, such as the administration of anesthesia, and the doctor in question repeatedly performed illegal (post-viability) abortions, by a unique and ghastly method of delivering live babies and then severing their spinal cord. Two women have died at this facility and numerous others have been injured. What remains baffling is how long this clinic was allowed to operate, in spite of numerous complaints made over the years to city and state agencies, and numerous malpractice suits against Dr. Gosnell. Indeed, it was only because authorities raided the clinic due to suspicion of lax practices involving prescription drugs that the conditions facing abortion patients came to law enforcement’s attention.

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As information about this clinic spread, many have understandably compared Women’s Medical Society to the notorious “back alley” facilities of the pre-Roe era, when unscrupulous and often unskilled persons (some trained physicians, some not) provided abortions to desperate women, in substandard conditions. This is an apt comparison. But Gosnell’s clinic should not only be understood as a strange throwback to the past. Women’s Medical Society represents to me an extreme version of what I have termed “rogue clinics,” facilities that today prey on women, disproportionately women of color and often immigrants, in low income communities.

In my recent book, Dispatches from the Abortion Wars, I wrote: