PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia doctor charged with killing full-term babies by cutting their spinal cords with scissors, was denied bail Thursday.
Gosnell, charged with killing a patient and seven newborns, was arraigned Thursday with several employees of his clinic and held without bail, WCAU-TV, Philadelphia, reported.
A grand jury said Gosnell ran an abortion clinic for more than 40 years where many women seeking illegal late-term abortions or people wanting no-questions-asked prescription drugs went, the Philadelphia Daily News reported Thursday.
Gosnell's medical license was revoked last year after health officials said his clinic posed "a clear danger to the public," The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Wednesday.
The seven infants were born alive and killed with scissors, District Attorney Seth Williams said. Gosnell's wife and eight employees of his clinic, Women's Medical Society in Philadelphia, were also arrested.
The grand jury said Gosnell performed thousands of abortions, sometimes losing patients, even though he was a family practitioner and not certified as a gynecologist or obstetrician, and he permitted his untrained, unlicensed employees to perform procedures and administer medications.
The grand jury found Gosnell often induced labor in women in their second and third trimesters, which sometimes resulted in live births. He and his employees are alleged to have killed the newborns by using scissors to stab the babies' necks to cut their spinal cords.
As a baby writhed in pain, Gosnell allegedly joked to an employee, "That's what you call a chicken with its head cut off," the report said.
The grand jury detailed deplorably unsanitary and dangerous conditions at the clinic, along with numerous other allegations, the Daily News reported.
