Kenneth+Brody

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.

=Kenneth Brody, senior legal counsel for the DOH=

In 1996, discussed with the Home Health director a patient whose attorney complained to the DOH about Gosnell, after she suffered at his hands a perforated uterus requiring a radical hysterectomy.

Senior legal counsel Kenneth Brody insisted that the department had no legal obligation to monitor abortion clinics, even though it exercised such a duty until the Ridge administration, and exercised it again as soon as Gosnell became big news.

Brody was one of several DOH employees who spoke to a medical examiner investigator about the stillbirth of a 30-week-old baby girl, born to a 14-year-old girl as the result of an induction-abortion started by Gosnell.

Brody correctly referred the M.E. to the District Attorney's Office, because it was a crime to perform an abortion beyond 24 weeks, and did ask the investigator to keep him informed; yet the Grand Jury said that this information should have been received as a complaint to DOH, and the department should have initiated an investigation.

Brody... described a meeting of high-level government officials in 1999 at which a decision was made not to accept a recommendation to reinstitute regular inspections of abortion clinics. The reasoning, as Brody recalled, was: “there was a concern that if they did routine inspections, that they may find a lot of these facilities didn’t meet [the standards for getting patients out by stretcher or wheelchair in an emergency], and then there would be less abortion facilities, less access to women to have an abortion.

Brody testified that he did not consider the “access issue” a legal one. The Abortion Control Act, he told the Grand Jurors, charges DOH with protecting the health and safety of women having abortions and premature infants aborted alive. To carry out this responsibility, he said, DOH should regularly inspect the facilities.

Senior Counsel Kenneth Brody, who advises the Division of Home Health, which currently oversees abortion clinics... testified that they believe that abortion clinics such as Gosnell’s fit within the law’s definition of an ambulatory surgical facility.

Finally, Dutton, Brody, and Steele 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.....

 If one were to accept DOH’s interpretation of its duties with respect to overseeing the quality of care in abortion facilities, those duties would be limited to granting or denying approval based on a single piece of paper – the “Abortion Facility Registration Form,” which contains the name and mailing address of a facility and a couple of check marks. Brody said that it is DOH practice to conduct an on-site survey of facilities before granting approval, but acknowledged that even that feeble effort at oversight is discretionary under the regulations. Then, once the initial approval is given, DOH – according to the rules that it wrote and interprets – never has to do anything else to monitor what happens in the abortion clinic.

The DOH attorneys all complained similarly about how little authority the Abortion Control Act, and the accompanying regulations that DOH wrote, gives to the department to inspect, license, or monitor abortion clinics. But it is these lawyers who are responsible for allowing their department to ignore the plain language of the Health Care Facilities Act.

 That act gives DOH all the power it needs to assure safe abortion clinics. Yet, instead of applying the law as it is written, and counseling DOH to license abortion clinics as ASFs, these lawyers have used illogical arguments to evade the Health Care Facilities Act. They have insisted that a criminal statute, the Abortion Control Act, provides DOH’s only authority to protect the health and safety of women and premature infants aborted alive within abortion clinics. Essentially, they have tied their own hands and now complain that they are powerless.

 Darlene Augustine testified that she was instructed by senior attorneys for DOH, Kenneth Brody and James Steele, that she should not reveal anything about Karnamaya Mongar’s death to law enforcement when she accompanied them on the raid in February 2010....