Unlikely bestseller, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, holds a surprise for those who still believe that murdered abortionist George Tiller was performing a useful public service in his Wichita clinic.
As meticulously documented by Irish authors Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAllen, Tiller and Kermit Gosnell were long times friends who met up regularly at the annual abortionist convention in–where else?–Las Vegas.
In 2013, Gosnell was convicted of killing four people, including three babies. Pennsylvania authorities believe, however, that he may have killed hundreds of babies who survived a botched abortion at his Philadelphia clinic.
Gosnell offered a telling defense against that accusation. As proof that he would not have provided abortions for women whose babies were viable, Gosnell gave a shout out to his Kansas pal. The authors sum his defense up as follows:
“he could refer those cases to his friend who did legal late term abortions in Kansas–where the law was different.”
In fact, however, the abortions that Tiller performed were, for the most part, no more legal than the ones Gosnell did. If there was any real difference between the two, it was hygiene.
Tiller had a largely white, middle-class clientele. They came to him from all over the world. Before his murder in 2009, he had boasted on his website of having “more experience in late abortion services with fetuses over 24 weeks than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, more than 60,000 since 1973.”
Like Gosnell, Tiller routinely took the life of healthy, viable babies eager to be born, but given the expectations of his clients, Tiller kept a neater shop and, to ease the conscience of his supporters, almost always performed his mayhem, out of sight, within the womb.
Those who argue that the media turned their back on Gosnell’s patients because of their color miss the larger point. The media routinely turn their back on these cases because of their nearly monolithic support of the abortion industry. In a red state like Kansas, with patients like Tiller’s, the media had to work much harder to suppress the truth.
In fact, roughly 95 percent of the late-term abortions performed by Tiller were done in flagrant violation of state law for the convenience of the mother and/or the statutory rapist who impregnated her.
“Horses are my life and having kids would mess that up for barrel racing,” said one confused 15 year-old cowgirl who hoped to abort the healthy, viable baby that she had already carried for more than six months. For Tiller, this was cause enough to claim the “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” exemption to the state ban on late term abortions.
In Pennsylvania, state officials from the governor on down conspired to protect abortionists like Gosnell. In Kansas, if anything, the political interference was more direct.
When former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline attempted to secure the records that would prove the obvious, Governor Kathleen Sebelius’s bureaucrats and her pals in the media turned on him viciously. Tiller, after all, was a major contributor to Sibelius and the Democratic Party. They labeled the AG “Snoop Dog Kline.” They called him a “panty sniffer,” a “zealot,” a “theocrat.”
The Kansas City Star’s support for “reproductive justice” in the battle against the “anti-choice extremist” Kline was so passionate, in fact, that Planned Parenthood honored the Star with the “Maggie,” its top national prize for editorial writing.
To be sure, it is possible that Gosnell lied in saying he sent his tougher cases to Kansas, but in an industry built on lies, seeking the truth often comes at a cost. Phill Kline learned this the hard way, but Kansas has yet to acknowledge his sacrifice.
