By Dave Andrusko
Hard to believe, after years and years and obstacle after obstacle, “Gosnell – The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer” will premier tomorrow in many theatres around the nation. As happy as all pro-lifers are that many more Americans will learn about Kermit Gosnell and his “House of Horrors,” I cannot help but think back at the contrast between how this film was treated by the crowdfunding site Kickstarter and the “After Tiller” late-term abortionist documentary.
Newsbuster’s Katie Yoder wrote the following way back in 2013:
Talk about blatant bias. Although crowdfunded site Kickstarter refused the makers of the new Gosnell movie permission to fundraise, the same company hosted the recent “After Tiller” late-term abortionist documentary.
Filmmaker Phelim McAleer along with wife Ann McElhinney and Magdalena Segieda aimed to raise $2.1 million in 45 days via Kickstarter for their Gosnell project, a scripted drama based on abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s trial and the grand jury report. When Kickstarter complained about the project’s description of Gosnell, the team turned instead to site Indiegogo.
In the past, Kickstarter also made news for hosting the controversial “After Tiller” abortionist documentary. The McAleer team reacted to the irony, telling MRC [Media Research Center], “It’s clear Kickstarter is a site for narrow ideas where no diversity of opinion is tolerated.”
“After Tiller,” a Sundance-praised film in theaters last fall, followed the last four third-trimester abortionists in the U.S.
We wrote about this film and the four abortionists on several occasions. “After Tiller” was a documentary by two young female filmmakers which garnered uniformly laudatory reviews from the usual sources, succeeding (we’re told) at “humanizing” the “four public, clinic-based providers of third-trimester abortions remaining in the United States.”
I obviously don’t know the four abortionists whose specialty is third trimester abortion, or their hearts, or what motivates them. But for all the praise the reviewers gave them for frankly facing what they doing, in fact their ability to shroud from themselves what they are doing is remarkable. Writing on Slate.com, Amanda Marcotte tells us
“As Dr. Shelley Sella of Southwestern Women’s Options in Albuquerque, New Mexico, explains, these very late abortions really are much more like delivering a stillborn baby than performing an abortion. For the doctors and the patients, the experience is much more like having to take a dying family member off life support than it is a failsafe for when the contraception didn’t work.”
What could you possibly add to that?
Just two things.
First, as Kristen Powers wrote
“What type of movie on late-term abortion do our meddling gatekeepers want? Kickstarter accepted ‘After Tiller’, a hagiography of the abortionists who took over when Wichita doctor George Tiller was murdered. The film presumably doesn’t belabor the process of late-term abortion, where babies are often stabbed in the neck with scissors and the contents of their skulls suctioned out. One wouldn’t want to violate Kickstarter’s culture of respect and consideration. Or provide factual information.”
Second, a movie like “Gosnell – The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer” gives us a much truer profile of the face of late-term abortions and abortionists and is in a real sense a public service.
For a moment, put aside the hundreds of nearly full-term babies Gosnell delivered alive and then murdered by slicing their spinal cords or the thousands and thousands of babies Gosnell aborted well past the 24 week limit in Pennsylvania. Or the two women (that we know of) who died at his abortion clinic in West Philadelphia.
Instead, for now, ask yourself what does this, taken from the Grand Jury report, say?
“There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets.”
That Gosnell and his woefully undertrained staff aborted women in filthy and disgusting conditions and treated these women—almost all of whom were poor and women of color—like cattle.
This the real face of the Abortion Industry.
Be sure to see “Gosnell – The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer.”