If you happen to be reading this column at breakfast, I’d recommend you skip to something more agreeable like Dear Mary and save mine till a bit later. It concerns the ugly details of one of the most revolting mass murderers in US history.
His name is Kermit Gosnell — a doctor who ran a particularly dodgy clinic in Philadelphia specialising in late-term abortions for mostly poor black women. When police raided it in 2010, they encountered a scene of quite appalling horror. In a flea-ridden, blood- and faeces-stained basement, Gosnell had been operating on women using unsterilised equipment, killing babies well over the legal term limit, sometimes by sucking out their brains with a machine. In jars, milk jugs, even cat-food containers, Gosnell stored his grisly trophies: bits of old foetus, including, for some bizarre reason, a row of jars containing just the feet. Gosnell, who had no training in either gynaecology or obstetrics, and whose practice made around $10,000 to $15,000 a night from abortions and prescriptions, is now serving life in prison.
The Irish-born, US-based filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney thought this modern true-life horror story deserved much wider coverage than it had garnered in the US media. But they knew they were in for a struggle because of the subject matter.
It wasn’t the violence that was going to be tricky but the politics. In the US, much more than in Europe, abortion is a hot-button issue — one responsible for some of the most bitter divisions between left and right. Nor did it exactly help that the villain of this particular story is black. So — just as they had done with their previous politically incorrect projects (Not Evil, Just Wrong — presenting a sceptical view of climate change; Frack-Nation — a film in praise of shale gas) — they decided that rather than seek production money from the usual congenitally liberal Hollywood suspects, they would do so via internet crowdfunding.
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