Gosnell Associate Pulled Babies' Body Parts from Clogged Toilets

In the trial of Kermit Gosnell, horrifying testimony was offered Tuesday from Gosnell’s sister-in-law’s common law husband, James Johnson, who worked as a janitor, maintenance man, and “plumber” at Gosnell’s clinic. 

Johnson testified he had threatened to quit because he would not retrieve babies’ body parts from the toilets where they had been stuffed. Johnson said he would lift the toilet so that someone else could get the babies out of the pipes.

Johnson was supposed to collect the body parts, including babies’ arms, from the toilets, which backed up at least once a week. He was supposed to shovel the body parts into bags and then put the bags in a rat-infested basement. 

The rat infestation was so bad that a cat was kept in the clinic to deal with them, which defecated in plants all around the facility. But Johnson claimed the quantity of body parts was so great the bags started piling up.

Latosha Lewis, who worked for Gosnell for over eight years, testified:

If… a baby was about to come out, I would take the woman to the bathroom, they would sit on the toilet and basically the baby would fall out and it would be in the toilet. I would be rubbing her back and trying to calm her down for two, three, four hours until Dr. Gosnell comes. She would not move.

In some cases, the abortion procedure could take up to three days.

The grand jury report stated:

Patients did not know inducing the labor and severing the spinal cords of live babies was going to happen… All afternoon and evening, as patients woke and complained of pain, workers would continue to medicate them with injections of sedatives. Between doses, the staff would leave the patients largely unattended. This would go on until the doctor arrived, some six or more hours after the patient did, or until the woman delivered… By maximizing the pain and danger for his patients, [Gosnell] minimized the work, and cost, for himself and his staff.The policy, in effect, was labor without labor.

If the baby didn’t emerge from the woman on the toilet, staffers would push and shove on the women’s abdomen. After the baby was delivered, Gosnell or a staffer would slice through the baby’s spinal cord and then crush its skull.