News

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 22, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – To many, Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his “house of horrors” represent the most repugnant aspects of the abortion industry, the embodiment of some of the worst maladies afflicting society in general. But defense attorney Jack McMahon has a different assessment.

“Dr. Gosnell was a dream client,” McMahon said during a heated exchange with Megyn Kelly on Fox News Channel this afternoon. “For two-and-a-half years, he's been nothing but a gentleman…a complete gentleman.”

McMahon, whose services narrowly avoided landing Gosnell on death row, admitted “things went a bit awry at” the abortion business located at 3801 Lancaster Avenue but he felt the blame did not lie primarily with his client.

He called Kelly's assertion that the biggest problem with the clinic was Dr. Gosnell himself “a simplistic way to look at” the crimes that unfolded at his office, instead blaming the problem on the fact that Pennsylvania did not inspect the office for 18 years.

The assertion echoes McMahon's comments shortly after the jury convicted Gosnell of three counts of first-degree murder and hundreds of other charges. “Nobody gave him a second chance,” he said.

Megyn Kelly, who is expecting her third baby with husband Doug Brunt this summer, asked emphatic questions about Gosnell's ability to kill babies “squirming” after birth. At one point, she reminded McMahon that Assistant District Attorney Ed Cameron asked Gosnell, “Are you human?” during his closing argument.

Still on defense, McMahon pointed to the fact that Gosnell was not found guilty of five murder charges and boasted that, of the 47 bodies they found stuffed away in cat food containers and milk jugs inside the bowels of his building, 45 were not determined to be beyond the state's legal limit.

Gosnell, he said, was “not just defined by the events of 2008. He's defined by 72 years of life.”

Image

Kelly shot back, “Listening to you, you sound like a guy who is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Because you seem to believe this is a swell man, notwithstanding the fact that he murdered little babies!”

After another attempted defense, Kelly forcefully replied to McMahon “the babies…were born alive as he was attempting to abort them, and then he murdered them by sticking scissors in their necks! How do you come on and defend him now?”

Click “like” if you want to end abortion!

McMahon argued that the babies actually died in utero after being injected with Digoxin, which stopped their hearts. However, inspectors who raided Gosnell's clinic found no trace of the drug on site.

Kelly, 42, stated, “The babies have rights of their own,” although the state does not recognize them until “they are past 24 weeks in the state of Pennsylvania. It's not between a woman and her doctor.”

The case may have had one salutary effect: It changed McMahon's belief in untrammeled abortion-on-demand. He told the Fox News audience he now favors moderately tighter regulations.

“I've come out of this case realizing that 24 weeks is a bad determiner” of viability, he said. “It should be like 16, 17 weeks…the law should be changed to that. I think pro-choice would have still have the right to choose, but they'd have to choose earlier.”

“I think more regulation should come out of these regulations,” he said.

Kelly correctly noted that Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America both dispute the need for additional regulations, even in the face of the Gosnell verdict.

The CEO of the National Abortion Federation blamed pro-life regulations and “stigma” for Gosnell's illegal actions. An NAF inspector turned down Gosnell's application for membership after viewing the filthy conditions of his Women's Medical Society.

However, she failed to alert state health authorities about what she saw.