Movie-producer partners Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer are based in Los Angeles these days, but both them were born in Ireland. On Nov 10, they co-wrote an op-ed for The Irish Times about a campaign there to relax the Republic of Ireland’s tough abortion restrictions (one last vestige of its rapidly fading Catholic identity).
Right now, with few exceptions, women in Ireland have to go to a foreign country in order to end their unborn children’s lives legally.
Apparently, some in Ireland think that talking more openly about abortion will make people more amenable to the notion, but McElhinney and McAleer caution them about getting what they wish for.
The duo’s current project is “Gosnell,” a film based on the courtroom testimony that wound up convicting Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell of multiple counts of murder, including for killing infants delivered alive after late-term abortions by cutting into their necks and severing their spinal cords.
As the press was slowly shamed into paying attention, America learned of the filth and squalor of Gosnell’s clinic, his cavalier slaughter of the innocent and equally callous treatment of women, and his general indifference to the suffering he caused.
In their op-ed, McElhinney and McAleer were unsparing with the details of the horrors the investigation and trial uncovered. For example, there was the practice that, when a child was too large to be ripped apart in the uterus, it would be killed by an injection of poison into its heart, so it could then be removed intact (something with which Planned Parenthood is familiar):
Dr Feisullin was asked what would happen if she missed the heart and the baby was born alive.
She explained that the live baby would be covered with a blanket and given “comfort care”.
You could see the genuine puzzlement of people in the court about what “comfort care” was until Dr Feisullin cleared up any confusion.
“You . . . really just keep it warm, you know. It will eventually pass,” she said.
Steve Volk, a Philadelphia-based journalist for an alternative newspaper who described himself as comfortably pro-choice before the trial, said that, as Dr Feisullin spoke, his fellow reporters all checked if they had heard correctly.
Was it really standard medical practice to let a baby die of dehydration and neglect if an error was made during an abortion? It was and they were shocked.
Local journalist JD Mullane, who interviewed many of the key players, confirmed our research that the trial changed many minds and shook assumptions.
“Almost everyone . . . who spent significant time at the Gosnell trial was less pro-choice at the end. This change was probably because they were for the first time hearing about the reality of abortion from experts under oath . . .
“They had to tell the truth and they had to tell it in detail,” he said.
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We can pray that Ireland spares itself the holocaust the United States has experienced since Roe v. Wade, but the island nation seems hell-bent on shedding any remnants of her faithful past.
Image: “Gosnell” key art, courtesy Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney, Magdalena Segieda
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