Testimony continued yesterday in the trial of Kermit Gosnell and his co-defendants, charged with multiple counts of murder. If we thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, well, think again. Allahpundit referenced this in his QOTD, but thi LifeNews report last night bears a closer look at the latest revelations from inside the Gosnell charnel house, where staffers tried to flush remains of late-term abortions down the toilet, which Gosnell’s brother-in-law would then have to clear:

Johnson worked as a janitor, maintenance man and plumber of sorts and he was the common-law husband of 51-year-old Elizabeth Hampton, who is herself Gosnell’s wife’s sister. He told jurors some of the morbid details that appear in the grand jury report — including how he threatened to quit working at the abortion clinic because he refused to pull any more flesh from aborted babies out of the plumbing. … He told the jury toilets backed up one-two times a week and said he opened the outside clean out pipe and fetal parts such as babies’ arms came spilling out. Johnson said he scooped up body parts with shovel and put them in a bag that was taken to rat infested basement. Johnson said a cat kept at the Gosnell clinic was there to deal with rat infestations that kept happening. He said the [cat] pooped in plants all over clinic.

Remember — this was the clinic that prompted a flurry of complaints over its practices and conditions. Now we discover that the “medical” clinic was flushing human remains down its toilets and into Philadelphia’s sewage system. One might think that local environmentalists would take an interest in this; so far, it seems that local and state government went way out of their way to ensure they wouldn’t.

Even if one isn’t inclined to consider these infants as “fully human” lives, we still have the issue of the disposal of biological waste via toilets and into the public sewage system, which in most cases tries to reclaim water for further human use. This raises another question about the lack of regulatory oversight of abortion clinics, which some states don’t classify as medical providers in the oversight sense. Regular medical clinics, such as hospitals, procedure clinics (such as liposuction, etc), and doctors’ offices presumably get significant scrutiny on how they deal with biological waste. Abortion clinics do nothing but produce this kind of material — so why aren’t they getting at least as much scrutiny, if not more?

Johnson apparently didn’t quit, however, and neither did the rest of the staff when it came to disposal. In fact, the toilet was a key part of their procedure:

The abortion could take as long as three days, one staffer admitted in it. “If … a baby was about to come out, I would take the woman to the bathroom, they would sit on the toilet and basically the baby would fall out and it would be in the toilet,” testified Latosha Lewis, who worked for Gosnell for over eight years. “I would be rubbing her back and trying to calm her down for two, three, four hours until Dr. Gosnell comes. She would not move.”

Small wonder that the media wants to ignore this story. HuffPost’s Marc Lamont Hill is just a lot more honest than some of his colleagues. There is no way to read or report these stories and not conclude that this industry requires a lot more regulation and oversight at the bare minimum, just for the sake of public health.