You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know. –William Wilberforce
Abortion makes us uncomfortable. It’s not something we like to talk about. When we think about the staggering statistics — over 50 million babies aborted in this country since 1973 — we’re tempted to become hopeless. The problem is too big. Things will never change.
And so, too many of us look the other way. We know it happens, but we just hope it happens somewhere else. Somewhere far away.
An American Tragedy
For the last five years, I’ve been working on a documentary called 3801 Lancaster: American Tragedy about the infamous Kermit Gosnell case. Gosnell was an abortion provider in West Philadelphia. In 2010, the police raided his clinic because they suspected that he was selling prescription drugs illegally. However, what they found upon entering his clinic was unthinkable. A feral cat roaming the hallways. Blood on the floors and walls. A row of jars containing severed babies’ feet.
Investigators quickly learned that Gosnell was performing late-term abortions. He called his method “snipping.” Gosnell would provide his patients with drugs that induced labor. A live baby would be born, and then Gosnell would kill the baby by snipping his or her spinal cord with scissors.
Stephen Massof, one of Gosnell’s employees who helped with the procedure, testified that it was “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” All the while, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania looked the other way while babies died and women were brutalized.
