This police/court room drama is based on actual information on Dr. Kermit Gosnell (played by Earl Billings) who for decades ran a Philadelphia inner-city abortion clinic. In 2010, Philadelphia Police Detectives Wood (Dean Cain) and Stark (Alfonzo Rachel), with DEA and FBI agents, raid the clinic for evidence of illegal prescription drug sales. They are shocked by the clinic's filthy conditions, bags of aborted fetuses in hallways, and fetal body parts stored in a refrigerator. Interviewing clinic workers, they learn: patients are given anesthesia by untrained assistants; one patient died on the operating table from an anesthesia overdose; abortions were performed on babies older than 24 weeks; and some babies were delivered alive, after which Dr. Gosnell cut their spinal cord with scissors. The detectives take the bagged bodies to the coroner and bring the situation to the attention of DA Dan Molinari (Michael Beach). An Assistant DA (Sara Jane Morris) agrees to prosecute the murder ...
Written by
Judith O.
Plot Synopsis:
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This police/court room drama is based on the true story of the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, an MD who for decades ran a West Philadelphia inner-city abortion clinic. The action begins in February 2010 when Philadelphia police detectives, joined by federal DEA agents (Drug Enforcement Agency) and FBI agents, make a drug raid on the Gosnell clinic looking for evidence of the sale of illegal prescriptions for controlled drugs. During the raid, the police detectives are shocked by the clinic's extremely unsanitary conditions, bags of aborted fetuses left in hallways, and fetal body parts stored in containers in a refrigerator and freezer. The detectives later learn that the State Department of Health had not inspected the clinic for years, ostensibly at the direction of the Governor so as not to interfere with women's reproductive rights. (Para) The DEA and FBI agents are concerned only about evidence of the illegal prescription sales, but the detectives refer the situation at the clinic to the District Attorney's office. An Assistant DA agrees to prosecute. Returning to the clinic crime scene, they learn that boxes of files have been removed. Obtaining a warrant to search Dr. Gosnell's home, they begin looking for the files and additional evidence. They find a large box with rolls of cash, which was likely the cash payments made by the clinic's patients. (Para) The detectives question current and former clinic workers about the clinic practices. They learn of the death of one patient on the operating table from a drug overdose and of untrained assistants giving patients anesthesia. No nurses or MD anesthetists work at the clinic. The detectives discover other violations of law, including abortions performed after the fetus/baby is 24 weeks old. Questioning clinic staff, they learn that some babies were delivered alive, after which their spinal cord was cut with scissors by Dr. Gosnell. The detectives take the stored bodies to the coroner's office, and the coroner determines that several of them had live births. (Para) A freelance investigative blogger provides additional information that helps the police and the prosecutor. She is the only journalist or member of the press in the nearly empty courtroom as the trial begins in March 2013. Dr. Gosnell has hired an experienced, forceful and effective defense attorney, who defends him for performing a service to poor and minority women seeking to terminate their pregnancies. The prosecutor obtains compelling testimony and photos from one of Gosnell's young assistants and brings in actual evidence from the clinic. (Para) After 10 days of deliberation, the jury convicts Dr. Gosnell of one count of third-degree murder in the death of one patient and three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies who were born alive then killed by cutting their spinal cord. The jury also convicts Gosnell of 21 felony counts of performing illegal late-term abortions and 211 counts of violating Pennsylvania's 24-hour consent law. The judge sentences Gosnell to three life sentences to be served consecutively with no possibility of parole.

Kermit Barron Gosnell is a former OB/GYN who was convicted of murdering three infants who were born alive during late-term abortions. He also killed at least one female patient.
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When blogger Molly Mullaney takes photos of the empty press benches in the courtroom and posts them on social media, it is a dramatization of the actions of Calkins Media columnist J. D. Mullane, a man. His posts unleashed a storm of posts, and several days later, the benches were filled with reporters.
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Social media site Facebook banned advertisements for this film on its platform in May of 2018 because it constituted as "political speech"
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According to the Grand Jury Report: "Kareema Cross and Ashley Baldwin testified about a baby who we will call "Baby Boy A," born in July 2008. According to an ultrasound, the 17-year old mother was 29.4 weeks pregnant. Gosnell induced labor and sedated the mother, who delivered a baby boy. Cross saw Baby Boy A breathe and move. Gosnell dismissed Cross's observations, telling her, "it's the baby's reflexes. It's not really moving." Cross told us that the baby was 18 to 19 inches long and nearly the size of her own newborn daughter, who was six pounds, six ounces at birth. Even Gosnell commented on Baby Boy A's size, joking "this baby is big enough to walk around with me or walk me to the bus stop." Cross testified that she saw "the doctor just slit the neck" and place the remains in a clear plastic shoebox for disposal.

Employees Adrienne Moton and Ashley Baldwin also were present. All three workers were so startled by Baby Boy A's size that they each took a photograph. .... A neonatologist viewed ... the photograph of Baby Boy A. Based on his size, hairline, muscle mass, subcutaneous tissue, well-developed scrotum, and other characteristics, the neonatologist opined that the gestational age was at least 32 weeks. The Grand Jury was able to identify this baby because Kareema Cross remembered the 17-year-old mother, who came in with her great-aunt, who testified before the Grand Jury." Gosnell had started the multi-stage abortion at a National Abortion Federation clinic in Delaware, where he worked one day a week.
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One of the reasons for the delay in removing Karnamaya Mongar from the clinic after she had stopped breathing was that the back door to the building was padlocked shut and nobody could find the key. The emergency responders needed access to the back door because the narrow halls and stairs in the building made it impossible to get a gurney in and out through the front door. They eventually had to resort to bolt cutters to open the back door.
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Detective James Wood described the raid on Gosnell's clinic, including such surrealistic moments as Gosnell casually feeding his pet turtles as three different law enforcement agencies search the place, as "our entrance into 'The Twilight Zone.'"
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The report of the Grand Jury in the Gosnell case is nearly 300 pages long and includes Karnamay Mongar's medical documents, a photo of the padlocked back door that prevented emergency medical responders from reaching her in a timely manner, and a hospital photo of a baby stillborn between 29 and 34 gestational weeks after Gosnell started an abortion on her 14-year-old mother, along with numerous other photographs documenting the conditions at Gosnell's clinic. Multiple copies of the full report are available online.
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Set designers referenced photographs taken by law enforcement inside Gosnell's clinic and home.
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To ensure accuracy, the producers put out a call for a recording of a premature baby the same gestational age as the baby Gosnell's employees reported that they'd heard crying in the clinic.
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Kermit Gosnell told Philadelphia Magazine writer Steve Volk that he came up with the idea of "snipping" the babies' necks after attending the National Abortion Federation's 1992 Risk Management Seminar in Dallas. There, Dr. Martin Haskell's gave his presentation on "dilation and extraction," or "D&X," a procedure dubbed "Partial Birth Abortion" or "PBA" by the pro-life movement. Haskell's technique involved the procedure described by "Dr. North" in the film - making a hole in the base of the skull with surgical scissors and vacuuming out the contents of the skull to collapse it. Volk wrote an e-book, "Gosnell's Babies," based on his interviews with Gosnell after his incarceration.
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The Grand Jury testimony of a Gosnell patient who reported being smacked on the legs and told not to act like a baby was taken verbatim from an interview with one of Gosnell's real patients, a young African-American rape victim.
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When Dean Cain, who plays Detective James Wood, first saw the set for Gosnell's clinic, he asked the producers if they hadn't gone a bit over the top. They responded by showing him footage of the actual raid to demonstrate that they'd gone to a lot of trouble to replicate what the real James Woods saw.
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The psychologist referred to as participating in the "Mothers' Day Massacre" was Harvey Karman, a high-profile advocate of legalized abortion. In 1955 he had performed an illegal abortion resulting in the woman's death. Governor Jerry Brown subsequently pardoned Karman, who promptly resumed practicing abortion and training others in the "menstrual extraction" method of early abortion that he had developed. This was how he met the members of the "Jane" illegal abortion syndicate in Chicago. Karman was so highly respected in abortion-rights circles that the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the government of Bangladesh invited him to train lay abortionists in the use of his new "super coil" second-trimester abortion method. Karman augmented the "super coils" with pieces of balsa wood while demonstrating his technique on women pregnant after being raped by soldiers. The results were disastrous, with a high rate of life-threatening complications. It was after this debacle that the "Jane" syndicate was raided and its lay abortionists jailed. They contacted Karman, who elected to forgo the slivers of balsa and use the "super coils" by themselves on the women "Jane" bused to Philadelphia. The experiment was filmed by a crew from a PBS station in New York. The footage is now considered lost.
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Kermit Gosnell worked one day a week at a National Abortion Federation member clinic in Delaware. Gosnell had initiated the abortion resulting in the birth and subsequent murder of "Baby Boy A" at that clinic.
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Gosnell justified the drug-trade aspects of his business by saying that he was building up the economy of a low-income neighborhood with few jobs available.
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Molly Mullaney is a composite of Mollie Z. Hemingway and JD Mullane.
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The doctor that actually testified about reputable abortion practice at Gosnell's trial was Charles David Benjamin, who works for Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia. The prosecution called for Benjamin to reviewed charts of Gosnell's patients and refute Gosnell's claim that no babies were born alive because they had all been killed in-utero with injections of Digoxin, a drug routinely used in abortions past 20 weeks to stop the fetal heart. Benjamin testified that the doses of digoxin Gosnell claimed to have administered in the charts was 500 times the recommended dose. With employees' testimony about routine practice at the clinic, it appeared that Gosnell falsified the charts, and didn't use digoxin at all.
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The City of Philadelphia cremated the 47 fetal and infant remains found at Gosnell's clinic. On September 12, 2013, the cremains were buried in an unmarked grave at Laurel Hill Cemetery.
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The Grand Jury testimony of a patient who left Gosnell's clinic and gave birth to her baby was based on a real patient. The actual Grand Jury Report summarized her testimony:

"We learned of another illegal, third-trimester abortion only because the mother changed her mind. In 2004, a 27-year-old woman went to Gosnell, pregnant with her first child. She testified that she was surprised when Gosnell told her she was 21 weeks pregnant. On the first day of what was to be a two-day procedure, Gosnell inserted dilators in the woman's cervix. After Gosnell had finished inserting the laminaria, the woman asked him what happened to the babies after they were aborted. She testified that Gosnell told her they were burned. At home, thinking over how Gosnell disposed of the fetuses, the woman had a change of heart. She called her cousin and the cousin called Gosnell to tell him that they wanted him to take the laminaria out. Gosnell said that he could not do that once the procedure was started. And he did not want to return the $1,300 that the patient had already paid. The pregnant woman ended up going to the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania to have the laminaria removed. It was determined at the hospital that she was 29 weeks pregnant. A few days later, the 27-year-old delivered a premature baby girl. She was treated at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and is today a healthy kindergartener. "

The producers were so moved by this real-life story of survival that they chose to focus their own throughts on this ray of hope to keep their spirits up during the filming, and to end the movie on the bright note of the thriving child.
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Producer Ann McElhinney told a reporter that prior to viewing the evidence against Kermit Gosnell, "I never trusted or liked pro-life activists. I thought the shocking images they showed were manipulative. I was sure they had been photoshopped."
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Producer Phelim McAleer said that he happened to be in Philadelphia while the Gosnell trial was going on, and went in to observe it. "In all my years of journalism, this was the most shocking evidence I've ever heard," he said. He decided that the story needed to be told, and convinced his wife, Ann McElhinney, to join the project.
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Karnamaya Mongar was a real patient who died after an abortion at Gosnell's clinic. The Grand Jury briefly summarized her story: "Karnamaya Mongar was not one of the privileged patients. She was a 41-yearold, refugee who had recently come to the United States from a resettlement camp in Nepal. When she arrived at the clinic, Gosnell, as usual, was not there. Office workers had her sign various forms that she could not read, and then began doping her up. She received repeated unmonitored, unrecorded intravenous injections of Demerol, a sedative seldom used in recent years because of its dangers. Gosnell liked it because it was cheap. After several hours, Mrs. Mongar simply stopped breathing. When employees finally noticed, Gosnell was called in and briefly attempted to give CPR. He couldn't use the defibrillator (it was broken); nor did he administer emergency medications that might have restarted her heart. After further crucial delay, paramedics finally arrived, but Mrs. Mongar was probably brain dead before they were even called. In the meantime, the clinic staff hooked up machinery and rearranged her body to make it look like they had been in the midst of a routine, safe abortion procedure. Even then, there might have been some slim hope of reviving Mrs. Mongar. The paramedics were able to generate a weak pulse. But, because of the cluttered hallways and the padlocked emergency door, it took them over twenty minutes just to find a way to get her out of the building. Doctors at the hospital managed to keep her heart beating, but they never knew what they were trying to treat, because Gosnell and his staff lied about how much anesthesia they had given, and who had given it. By that point, there was no way to restore any neurological activity. Life support was removed the next day. Karnamaya Mongar was pronounced dead."
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The process through which Detective James Woods came to be involved in the murder cases in the film follows what happened in real life. From the Grand Jury report: "During the drug-trafficking investigation, District Attorney's Detective James Wood learned from one of the clinic employees that a woman had died in November 2009, following an abortion procedure. Detective Wood discovered other disturbing details about Gosnell's medical practice. The premises were dirty and unsanitary. Gosnell routinely relied on unlicensed and untrained staff to treat patients, conduct medical tests, and administer medications without supervision. Even more alarmingly, Gosnell instructed unlicensed workers to sedate patients with dangerous drugs in his absence." Based on this information, Detective Wood believed that further investigation of the woman's death the previous November was warranted. The detective searched for a police report on the incident, but finding none, he went to the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office to try to identify the woman and to find out more about her death. Detective Wood learned that the dead woman was Karnamaya Mongar, and that her toxicology report revealed an extremely high level of Demerol, a drug Gosnell used at the clinic to anesthetize patients.
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According to the Grand Jury Report, the feet of Karnamaya Mongar's 19-week fetus were among the severed feet found in specimen jars in Gosnell's clinic.
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According to Grand Jury testimony from his employees, Gosnell really did feed his turtles smashed clams, as he was shown doing in the film. The tank and the clams produced, they said, a striking odor in the building.
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The "cheat sheet" for administering drugs to patients was, according to the Grand Jury, drawn up by 15-year-old Ashley Baldwin, whose mother recruited her to work at the clinic. Ashley indicated t the Grand Jury that Gosnell had showed her a section of a book to read and had "trained" her for approximately 20 minutes total.
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According to the Grand Jury Report, "Baby Boy A," the murdered infant whose photo was shown to the jury in one scene, was born after an abortion initiated by Gosnell at a National Abortion Federation member clinic in Delaware where he worked part-time. Gosnell inserted laminaria into the 17-year-old mother's cervix to start dilation, administered Cytotec to soften the cervix, and instructed the teen's relative, who was paying for the abortion, to bring her to his Philadelphia clinic at 9:00 the following morning. One of Gosnell's unqualified staff performed an ultrasound when the patient arrived and estimated her pregnancy at 29.4 weeks. The teen remained at the clinic, laboring in great pain, for over 13 hours before delivering a living baby that reminded Gosnell employee Kareema Cross of her own 6 pound 6 ounce newborn. Though Gosnell took scissors to the back of the baby's neck, he continued to move after being deposited in the plastic shoebox where he was phohtographed by two of Gosnell's employees. A neonatologist who examined the photographs estimated Baby Boy A's gestational age as at least 32 weeks. The baby's mother nearly died herself. After several days of pain and fever, the teen began vomiting. Her concerned relative took her to a hospital, where she was diagnosed with severe infection and blood clots in her lungs. She was hospitalized for over a week.
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The term the Gosnell employee used in the film - that the babies "preciptated" - was the term actually used by Gosnell and his employees to describe when the mothers gave birth. As one employee told the Grand Jury, "That's when a patient would precipitate. Usually by the Cytotec that was given to the patient and it just made the uterus so flimsy to where the baby just falls and we had a lot of patients that was second-trimester, it would just fall wherever she was at." This quasi-meteorological terminology was reinforced when Steven Massof, who worked at Gosnell's clinic and also snipped babies' necks, said in court testimony that during busy times, "it would rain fetuses."
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In the Grand Jury scene, the state official's bland assertion, "People die," as justification for not inspecting Gosnell's clinic after patient deaths was taken verbatim from the actual Grand Jury testimony given by Department of Health attorney Christine Dutton.
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Gosnell is referred to as "America's Biggest Serial Killer" because, according to testimony and evidence presented to the Grand Jury, murder of live-born viable infants was a routine practice at Gosnell's clinic. Employee Tina Baldwin testified that she had seen Gosnell kill "hundreds" of infants. Employee Steve Massof admitted that he, himself, had probably killed 100 live-born infants as part of business as usual, and other employees killed live-born infants as well because Gosnell told them that this was a normal part of abortion practice to "ensure demise." They reported having seen Gosnell do it so often that it came to seem unremarkable. The reason Gosnell was charged in only seven cases was because of the difficulty in identifying specific infants out of the unnamed multitude.
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The garbage disposal - clogged with fetal bones - really was removed from the clinic as evidence. It was eventually brought into the courtroom along with other filthy and ill-maintained equipment from Gosnell's clinic.
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The photo of "Baby Boy A" was not uncovered during the trial after pressing an employee to do the right thing. The Grand Jury report noted: "FBI Agent Huff testified that Adrienne Moton gave him consent to search her cell phone for the photograph that she took. The FBI lab was able to find the picture on cell phone; we saw this photograph, introduced as Exhibit 57. "
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The forceps held up by Gosnell's attorney were obstetric forceps rather than the Bierer or Hern forceps that would be used in an abortion.
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Though the patients in the movie were shown wearing hospital gowns, Gosnell's real patients were not given gowns. According to the Grand Jury report, they were made to strip from the waist down and given blood-stained blankets to cover themselves.
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In the film, the investigators dress in protective gear prior to entering Gosnell's basement. The real investigators first entered the basement without protective gear and retreated upon encountering the flea infestation. They donned protective gear and entered the basement a second time.
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Though the film shows Gosnell arriving at his clinic during the raid, law enforcement actually waited until Gosnell had arrived to enter the building themselves.
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The large amount of cash discovered in Gosnell's house was not found in a bin in his bedroom, but in a filing cabinet in his 12-year-old daughter's closet. The total sum was $240,000.
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When Gosnell was arrested and taken from his house wearing a T shirt on January 19 2011 the background greenery on the trees and the way the other actors were dressed doesn't correlate to Philadelphia in January.
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