Philadelphia (CNN) -- Allegedly running what the prosecutor calls "a house of horrors," a Philadelphia physician, Kermit Barron Gosnell, was charged Wednesday with murder and other offenses related to illegal, late-term abortions.
The doctor is accused of causing the death of one of his female patients and killing seven viable babies in illegal abortions, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said.
The babies were born alive in the sixth, seventh and eighth months of pregnancy, but their spinal cords were allegedly severed with scissors, Williams said in a statement.
Nine other people who worked in the west Philadelphia medical office, including Gosnell's wife and sister-in-law, also were charged, Williams said. The practice, called the Women's Medical Society, served mostly low-income minority women for years, he said.
Williams provided a grisly scenario of the shuttered abortion clinic: A search of the office last year by authorities found bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses scattered throughout the building. Jars containing the severed feet of babies lined a shelf. Furniture and equipment was blood-stained, dusty and broken.
In an interview with CNN, Williams described the abortion clinic as "horrific" and providing "botched and illegal abortions."
"It was a house of horrors beyond any type of definition or explanation I can humbly try to give," Williams told CNN. "And it's very sad for the women that were there, that were subjected to such horrific and barbaric -- I would say medical treatment but it wasn't medical -- treatment.
"My grasp of the English language doesn't really allow me to fully describe how horrific this clinic was -- rotting bodies, fetal remains, the smell of urine throughout, blood-stained," Williams continued.
He said women patients were often "very poor."
"The doctor gained a reputation. People far and wide knew that he performed abortions at any time," Williams said.
Williams described one of the alleged infant deaths.
"The baby had been born and was on a cold steel table and murdered by using -- there's no medical basis for snipping or taking scissors and putting them into the neck and cutting, severing the spinal cord. It's just homicide. It's just murder," Williams told CNN.
Gosnell's attorney, William J. Brennan of Philadelphia, told CNN he was surprised at the "length and breadth" of the grand jury's presentment and report against Gosnell and the nine other defendants. Gosnell is facing hundreds of counts, including charges for seven first-degree murders charges and a third-degree murder, according to Williams and the grand jury's 62-page presentment.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/01/19/...ion=cnn_latest
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