The Horror Movie That Will Never Be in Theaters

It could be called The Abominable Dr. Gosnell. Or perhaps Nightmare on Lancaster Avenue. Or maybe something as provocative as Scissors.

The plot might resemble a movie in the bloody Saw franchise. In the opening scene, a frightened teenage girl wanders into a dank, smelly clinic. Muted cries of women can be heard in a nearby room. Creepy violin music plays in the background.

A cat walks down a dark corridor, startling the girl. She sits down nervously on a sofa in the waiting room and sees a blood-stained blanket. The girl decides she doesn’t want an abortion—but when the doctor comes to take her to the procedure room, he gets angry when she protests. (Shouting is heard off-camera, followed by more of the Psycho-esque score.) The girl wakes up several hours later with severe cramps and realizes she has had an abortion.

This is not a clip from an Alfred Hitchcock film. The scene I described resembles what happened to a 15-year-old patient of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the infamous Philadelphia abortionist whose trial ended Monday. Yes, there was a cat wandering in his clinic. (Observers testified that it had fleas.) Yes, there were bloodstained blankets in the waiting room. And witnesses testified that the girl was forced to have an abortion even though she decided not to go through with the procedure after arriving at Gosnell’s filthy office.

If that’s not enough R-rated horror for you, consider these facts:

• The mother of “Baby Boy D” said her child was born alive in a clinic toilet before anyone could attend to her. The baby made swimming motions in the water, but a doctor’s assistant arrived and cut the infant’s neck. Witnesses in the Gosnell trial said many infants were born in toilets while waiting for the doctor to return to his office to complete procedures.
• Gosnell allegedly examined “Baby Boy A” after an abortion procedure and remarked that the fetus was “big enough to walk me home.” One clinic worker, Steven Massof, testified that Gosnell “snipped” the spines of more than 100 babies after they had been born alive. He called this “standard procedure.”
• Gosnell was on trial for first-degree murder in the case of seven infants allegedly born alive, as well as third-degree murder in the case of a woman who died after the abortionist gave her a toxic mixture of anesthesia and painkillers.
• The clinic itself was compared to a horror movie set by people who worked there and by crime scene investigators. They described finding jars and jugs containing month-old fetal remains. They also told of locked exit doors, broken medical equipment, reused disposable supplies and untrained personnel.

All this would seem the perfect material for a remake of the old Boris Karloff movie Corridors of Blood. But my suspicion is that Hollywood will stay as far away as possible from Gosnell’s story. It’s just too politically incorrect for anybody to suggest that unborn babies—even third-trimester ones—have a God-given right to life.

When I learned about the “snipping” of tiny spines at the Women’s Medical Society clinic in Philadelphia, I realized how heartless our nation has become. Lawyers who defended Dr. Gosnell in court told the judge that when fetuses moved after being aborted, they were simply exhibiting “involuntary spasms.” We’ve become so drunk on sexual freedom that we can’t recognize when a baby is reaching out to us for justice.

When the apostle Paul described the condition of people’s hearts before the return of Jesus, he said, “In the last days difficult times will come. For men will be … brutal, haters of good … lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim. 3:1-4, NASB, emphasis added). That brutality is never more blatant than in an abortionist’s office. Yet we cover the bloodshed with smooth American doublespeak.

How can we, as a nation, pride ourselves on providing rights for women, minorities or gay people when we ignore the crime of abortion? We protest puppy mills because of inhumane treatment, but we look the other way when the unborn are at risk. We self-righteously fight for the rights of seals and sea turtles, yet we allow 7-month-old fetuses to be decapitated. We call ourselves champions of women’s rights, yet many international abortions are performed to selectively kill infant girls.

We are sick with sin. Our hearts are hard. Our national conscience has been seared so that we can’t even feel the pain we’ve legalized. May God forgive us for creating this horror movie.

J. Lee Grady is the former editor of Charisma and the director of The Mordecai Project (themordecaiproject.org). You can follow him on Twitter at @leegrady. He is the author of Fearless Daughters of the Bible and other books