NAF failed to report violations at Gosnell's clinic

Two months before the raid that shut Gosnell's clinic down, an inspector for the National Abortion Federation (NAF) walked into the same clinic to vet the facility for inclusion in the federation. While clinic workers testified that Gosnell cleaned up for the inspection, the NAF representative nonetheless recalled being appalled by the vastly inadequate treatment provided there. But despite witnessing numerous violations of basic standards of care, the inspector never reported Gosnell – who was arrested this week and charged with 8 murders - to authorities.

The inspector, watching a few first-trimester procedures in Gosnell’s clinic, “noticed that no one was monitoring or taking vital signs of patients who were sedated during procedures,” wrote the jurors. “She asked Gosnell about the pulse oximeter that should have been used for monitoring, but he told her it was broken. Apparently, Karnamaya Mongar’s death a month earlier had not caused Gosnell to obtain equipment that worked.”

The inspector also noticed that the clinic kept insufficient records of patients, and failed to provide patients with information of the risks of medications or of the procedure. Out-of-state patients were offered a bed to recover – unattended - overnight following an abortion in a facility where bathrooms and exits were difficult to locate.

The jurors expressed shock that these observations would not have prompted the NAF inspector to take more drastic measures. “We have to question why an evaluator from NAF, whose stated mission is to ensure safe, legal, and acceptable abortion care, and to promote health and justice for women, did not report Gosnell to authorities,” they wrote.

National Abortion Federation president Vicki Saporta said this week that Gosnell’s practice was “a total outlier” to the “very high quality care” of other abortion clinics. However, while acknowledging that Gosnell’s application was rejected in 2009, the NAF has apparently not yet provided an explanation for failing to report the facility. LifeSiteNews