Dr. Kermit Gosnell practiced medicine in Phialdelphia for nearly 40 years, catering to low income and minority women and performing thousands of abortions. In 2009, he was arrested for running a pill mill. That arrest lead to subsequent police investigations that resulted in multiple charges of murder.
Here's the best article I've found about this particlar case:
http://articles.philly.com/...
I've been following this after getting in to a rather heated discussion with an acquaintance about attempts to over-regulate women's health clinics that also provide abortions. That person felt that any attempt to regulate these clinics was viewed by many as "an affront to the rights of women."
Inspections of medical facilities are often far too rarely done - unless the medical facility happens to be a women's health care clinic in an area where people with an agenda are more than happy to spend taxpayer funds disproportionately on those clinics in an effort to find anything, no matter how small, that might be used as a flimsy excuse to force that women's health clinic to close.
The clinic in this particular case, however, catered to minorities, immigrants and poor women in west Philadelphia, not an area of focus for the anti-choice forces. Why? It's so much easier to get protestors to show up in a pleasant, safe suburban area with clean streets and nice landscaping and, besides, it's a much more photogenic setting. Those color photos of the anti-choice protestors marching with their bloody fetus posters will look ever so much better on the nightly news.
The last inspection of the west Philadelpha clinic run by Dr. Gosnell was in 1993.
"State regulators ignored numerous complaints about Gosnell's clinic and his office hadn't been inspected since 1993."
"Even after the death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, on Nov. 20, 2009, of an alleged
overdose of anesthetics prescribed by Gosnell," Williams said, "the Department of
Health did not act."
http://abcnews.go.com/...
Nor was it, even after 18 years without one, a routine inspection that discovered the horrors. Instead, in 2011, the police were investigating "illegal prescription selling."
"The grand jury investigating Gosnell harshly criticized state inspectors' on-going failure to discover the problems at the clinic, calling the "complete regulatory collapse … inexcusable." http://abcnews.go.com/...
And that's actually the point. Commonsense, scientifically based regulations existed but are useless when they only dwell on paper in dusty binders. Commonsense, scientifically based regulations are not "an affront to the rights of women" but failure to enforce them is. Dr. Louis Gosnell's clinic should have been shut down years ago. But minorities, immigrants and poor women don't matter, even to anti-choicers.