Christine+Dutton

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.

= = =Christine Dutton, DOH's head lawyer, chief counsel;= her first mention in the Grand Jury Report was that she "defended the department’s indifference": “People die,” she said.

"Appallingly, the chief counsel for the department of health, Christine Dutton, defended Staloski’s inaction following Mrs. Mongar’s death. Dutton testified that she had reviewed the emails and documents showing that Staloski and her staff were communicating with Gosnell’s office to get him to file the MCARE form. Based on these very minimal efforts, Dutton insisted: “we were responsive.” Pushed as to whether the death of a woman following an abortion should have prompted more action – perhaps an investigation or a report to law enforcement – Dutton argued there was no reason to think the death was suspicious. “People die,” she said."

Two DOH attorneys, Kenneth Brody and James Steele, "both testified that they believe that abortion clinics such as Gosnell’s fit within the law’s definition of an ambulatory surgical facility. Their boss, Chief Counsel Christine Dutton, refused to acknowledge that the ASF definition would cover abortion clinics, but could not explain why it did not. She said she “would have to research that to determine if that were the case.”

Dutton, however, before becoming chief counsel, was assigned to advise the DOH division that licenses ambulatory surgical facilities. As such, she had to be very familiar with what constitutes an ambulatory surgical facility. In fact, she was senior counsel to the division when DOH was dealing with the aftermath of the death, in 2001, of a 19-year-old girl following liposuction performed in a plastic surgeon’s office. When the girl’s parents complained to DOH, an immediate investigation revealed that the office of the surgeon, Dr. Richard Glunk, should have been licensed as an ASF, but was not.

As a result of the Glunk case, DOH initiated a campaign to encourage compliance with ASF licensure requirements. Chief Counsel Dutton would have been in the middle of that effort in 2002 when she was senior counsel. Yet she testified that she never considered treating abortion clinics – facilities where, according to the abortion regulations, “ambulatory gynecological surgery” is performed – as ambulatory surgical facilities."

 Dutton admitted in her testimony that the decision not to inspect was a policy decision, not one grounded in the law:

>> Q: Does it surprise you to know that some of the reasons cited for the failure to go out and do these inspections is that they believed that they didn’t have the legal authority to do so? >> A: That would surprise me, yes. . . . To me, I would believe that they didn’t go out to do them because some policy had been set in the department at some point in time in the past that we were not going to do regular inspections of abortion facilities. >>  Dutton’s failure to recognize and treat abortion clinics as ASFs, and her silence as DOH shirked its duty to protect women and infants at abortion clinics, reflect a blatant refusal to enforce the law."

 Along with two other lawyers, Brody and Steele, Dutton "asserted that a provision of the abortion regulations – one that gives DOH the authority to approve facilities as abortion providers – somehow precludes any other health care law from applying to abortion clinics. " The Grand Jury said "this explanation is nonsensical. "