DA: Missed chances to shut Philly clinic abounded

PHILADELPHIA — A lack of follow-up on reports of venereal disease, political sensitivities and unfulfilled promises made to health inspectors all added up to missed chances to stop a doctor from performing illegal abortions that killed at least two patients and hundreds of newborns, prosecutors said.

The indictment of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69 — a family practice physician not certified to perform abortions — details allegations of a litany of failures in upholding even the most basic public health guidelines. Gosnell was arraigned Thursday on charges of murdering eight babies and one patient.

Authorities allege that Gosnell and a fleet of undertrained — sometimes untrained — workers ran a ghoulish operation in Philadelphia in which labor was induced in very late-term pregnancies with unsanitary equipment, the viable babies born alive and killed with scissors to the spine, and their body parts left in jars — or clogging plumbing into which unattended women had given birth.

Nearly a decade ago, according to legal documents, a former Gosnell employee gave the state's Board of Medicine a complaint that "laid out the whole scope of his operation: the unclean, unsterile conditions; the unlicensed workers; the unsupervised sedation; the underage abortion patients; even the over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street."

Nothing was done.

In its report, the grand jury said failures of the Pennsylvania Department of Health and other agencies — including the Department of State, under which the Board of Medicine falls — allowed the clinic to operate nearly unimpeded since the late '70s. It hadn't been inspected since 1993 and wasn't closed until it was finally raided as part of a drug bust early last year.

"We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities and because the subject was the political football of abortion," the grand jury wrote.

A spokeswoman for Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who was inaugurated this week, said Thursday that Corbett held a morning meeting about the matter with his new nominees for secretaries of health and state

"He called it horrific, and certainly public safety is one of his major concerns," said administration spokeswoman Janet Kelley. Officials are reviewing the grand jury report and working on a response, she said.

"It's essentially looking at information gathering and certainly changing things for the better," she said.

The Health Department has not commented despite repeated requests from The Associated Press. Lawyer William J. Brennan, who represented Gosnell during the investigation, has declined to comment.

Former Health Department official Janice Staloski personally inspected the clinic in 1992, but "let Gosnell slide on the violations that were already evident then," the grand jury said. A decade later, when she headed the division that was supposed to regulate abortion providers, Staloski failed to order an investigation of the clinic despite having received several complaints about Gosnell, the report said.

Staloski, who retired last year, declined to comment Thursday. Her lawyer, Arthur Donato, said Staloski acknowledged to the grand jury that she made mistakes.

"I think the grand jury report speaks to an institutional and systemic problem, and I think a lot of people were responsible for the fact that these clinics were not surveyed annually," he said. "She did receive some complaints (about Gosnell) and she did not cause a survey or an inspection to occur, and I think she testified truthfully that she should have."

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, called the allegations "monstrous an

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