Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) said on Monday that the reason abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell was able to keep his Philadelphia clinic open was because of “bureaucratic incompetence,” and not “political pressure.”
According to CNSNews.com, Rendell told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, “I can guarantee you it wasn’t because of political pressure, because if you believe–if you’re pro-choice like I am, you want guys like this found, arrested, convicted. You want those clinics closed.”
Scarborough confronted the former governor with the Gosnell grand jury report, which indicated one of the reasons why his clinic was not investigated was political pressure.
“Whenever someone wants to go in and investigate an abortion clinic or do tough regulations on it, suddenly people start screaming and yelling that somebody’s trying to take away their constitutional rights,” said Scarborough. “What happened here?”
Rendell, who served as Pennsylvania’s governor from 2003 to 2010, responded, “Again, I think it was more bureaucratic incompetence than that, Joe. I never heard anything about that.”
The former governor then went on to describe how, as a district attorney, he had prosecuted another doctor “for doing exactly what Dr. Gosnell did.”
“When I was a young D.A., and I prosecuted the doctor, I picked up the phone, and I called Planned Parenthood and all those folks, and I said, ‘Get down here and support what I’m doing,'” Rendell said.
Rendell stated that while he was governor there were two or three commissioners who were in charge of oversight of clinics such as Gosnell’s, “but what happened was that Philadelphia regional office, all of them in a state as large as us–we’ve got regional offices–they just didn’t do their job.”
Rendell said the regulations regarding abortion clinics “would have been sufficient had there been oversight, had there been active oversight.”
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