With a few notable exceptions, state and local government officials had completely failed to do their jobs. Official incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, neglect, and the desire to protect abortion from a harsh spotlight whatever the cost caused needless deaths and injuries. The grand jury's conclusion was damning: Kermit Gosnell murdered and maimed with impunity for thirty years because virtually no one did his job properly.

Pennsylvania gave Gosnell carte blanche for the next seventeen years. With every license extension and slipshod inspection, state health regulators sent a message: do what you like, because no matter what you do, we won’t bother you, and we don’t care whom you kill or injure along the way.

So the incompetents in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, knew or should have known that, even by their own lax rules, Gosnell should not have been carrying out abortions—but they didn’t care.

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.—SIMONE WEIL

The prosecutors squarely confronted the grisly results of abortion. And they discovered that nobody really wanted to talk about it. In fact, they learned first hand how blinkered the medical profession could be when it came to abortion. Among the unpleasant surprises they encountered early on in the investigation was the nearly universal unwillingness of doctors to help them. Hardly anyone wanted to talk. A few were sympathetic but balked at testifying. Many more weren’t so kind. Medical professionals didn’t want to contribute to any official proceeding that might shine a negative light on abortion. The prosecutors were encountering the same reluctance to speak up and do the morally and ethically right thing that had allowed Gosnell to continue killing for years.

...for Taggart, learning the reality of abortion for the first time was shocking. “Even if it’s done right, it’s barbaric,” he told us. “I’m no holy roller, but if you see the way they actually have to do it, it’s barbaric.” The learning experience was one shared by Wechsler, Pescatore, Wood, and the rest of the team.

Gosnell turned almost no one away from the Women’s Medical Society clinic. This is not meant as a compliment. Repentant Gosnell employee Adrienne Moton testified he would perform abortions on any girls or women with no concern about the age of their babies. The only times she could recall Gosnell refusing to perform an abortion was when somebody’s Social Security number couldn’t be verified. In those cases, Gosnell was worried that the “patient” was an undercover cop.

We had, like I said before. . .we had to prevent life. We had to kill. It’s as simple as that.” —STEVE MASSOF

What courage basically comes down to as human beings is to protect the lives of others, to go out of your way to save others.” “When a baby comes out of its mother and it moves and breathes and it’s alive, you have to do the courageous . . . you have to do the right thing,” Cameron said. “You have to protect it.

But Pescatore wasn’t leading a seminar on the morality of abortion. She wanted the jury to focus on the legal requirements for abortion providers in Pennsylvania. “The number one thing is the twenty-four-hour waiting period,” she told them. “It’s not like you can walk in and say, ‘I want an abortion,’ and you get it. A woman has a right to go in and be counseled before she has an abortion.” But Gosnell had flatly ignored the twenty-four-hour waiting period. He ignored the law, Pescatore said, out of simple greed. “Money. That was the only law that Dr. Gosnell knew,” she said. “You went to 3801 Lancaster Avenue where no laws were followed. None, zero.” The facts would show that Gosnell didn’t do “normal, legal abortions” largely because it was both cheaper and easier for him to induce labor, wait for the woman to give birth, and then kill the baby outside of the womb with scissors.