Marcella+Choung

I am using the  Grand Jury Report on the crimes of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell as the basis of this Wiki. I will add material to support my contention that though Gosnell is beyond the pale, this is mainly in the way he combined and refined aspects of the ghoulish and callous disregard for humanity often seen in abortionists. He was hardly a pioneer.

In order to distinguish between my own writings, and those of the Grand Jury, I will use a different font that makes the Grand Jury Report appear to be typed.

=Marcella Stanley Choung, former employee of Gosnell's clinic=

who complained to the Department of State about Gosnell's practices, but was ultimately ignored
She testified before the Grand Jury that,  her “training” for anesthesia consisted of a 15-minute description by Gosnell and reading a chart he had posted in a cabinet. She was so uncomfortable medicating patients, she said, that she “didn’t sleep at night.” She knew that if she made even a small error, “I can kill this lady, and I’m not jail material.” One night in 2002, when she found herself alone with 15 patients, she refused Gosnell’s directives to medicate them. She made an excuse, went to her car, and drove away, never to return.

Choung immediately filed a complaint with the Department of State, but the department never acted on it. She later told Sherilyn Gillespie, a Department of State investigator who participated in the February raid, that she has worked at seven different abortion clinics and “she has never experienced an illegally run, unsanitary, and unethical facility such as the Women’s Medical Society operated by Dr. Gosnell.” She has never reported any other provider or facility to state authorities.

Her complaint to the Department of State was turned over to lawyer Mark Greenwald who, along with his supervisor Charles J. Hartwell, was also in charge of deciding whether to investigate Semika Shaw's death. On the same day that he decided, with Hartwell's approval, against investigating Shaw's death, he closed the investigation into the complaint brought two years earlier by Choung.

In December 2001, Marcella Stanley Choung had filed a detailed, written complaint with the Pennsylvania Department of State. Although she wanted to remain anonymous, she provided her name and her phone number, and participated in a follow up interview on March 4, 2002. She informed the department investigator that Gosnell was using unlicensed workers (including herself) to give IV anesthesia to patients when he was not at the clinic; that his facility was filthy; that two sick, flea-infested cats roamed freely in the procedure rooms, vomiting throughout; that Gosnell ate in the procedure rooms; that the autoclave used to sterilize instruments was broken; that he reused single-use curettes; that there were no licensed nurses at the facility when IV anesthesia was administered; that Gosnell allowed one patient to use her cousin’s insurance card to pay for an abortion; that Gosnell performed abortions on “underage children” against their will if their mothers asked him to; and that he performed other abortions without consent forms.  Choung told the Department of State investigator that she thought a second-trimester patient had died at a hospital after Gosnell performed an abortion on her. And she said that she had seen patient files in which he prescribed 90 Percocet tablets (a narcotic combining oxycodone and acetaminophen) for a patient one week and then, again, 90 more tablets the next week. She gave very detailed information about the files, what she saw, and when. She provided the name of at least one patient, and suggested that the investigator look at her file. Choung wrote that any of the other clinic workers – except one named Jonathan – would be willing to confirm her information.

But the investigator did not do much investigating; he made three phone calls, did not interview any of the unlicensed workers, did not request to see any of the files, and did not even enter the clinic building. He still recommended that the DOH be notified of Choung's complaint, but did not take it upon himself to do so. Greenwald concluded that the allegations were not confirmed, and recommended no prosecution.

~*~ It is incomprehensible to us how state officials could decide not to investigate the 22-year-old’s death after having heard Choung’s complaints...

...Marcella Choung, who had no monetary interest, had spelled out essentially all of Gosnell’s criminal practices to the department....

~*~

We saw this in the way the Department of State handled Marcella Choung’s complaint. While it contained significant allegations that the Department of State could and should have prosecuted – for example, Gosnell’s practice of allowing unlicensed workers to administer anesthesia, and his routine failure to counsel or obtain consent from abortion patients – the prosecuting attorney instead recommended referring the case to the Department of Health, which apparently he did not actually do....

...Indeed, it was the Department of State that possessed the crucial information, provided by Marcella Choung in 2001, that could have been used to stop Gosnell’s illegal practice years ago – long before Karnamaya Mongar was killed...

The Department of State prosecutors did not even need to go looking for reasons to revoke Gosnell’s medical license. Complaints came to them. Marcella Choung, the former Gosnell employee, spelled out his entire criminal operation for them....