Douglas Karpen, A.K.A. The Texas Gosnell, is a bad man. While we at this site strongly are against abortion in general, what Karpen has done over the course of his career far exceeds anything one would consider as “just abortion”. He has manipulated patients, many of which involved illegal activities, and all of this has led to terrible circumstances not just for the countless babies that he has killed under his watch, but also to some of the mothers as well.
Many of his crimes start even before the abortions take place. For example, Karpen was known to coach underage women to cross state lines out of Texas to avoid laws that required parents to be notified of any abortion that a girl was deciding to undergo. And in many cases, once the woman arrived for an appointment, he manipulated ultrasound images in two distinct ways – he would either make the images look younger so that they would appear to be under the legal limit for which abortions could still take place, or he would make the images look older as well as a means of getting women to pay more for his abortions.
Karpen’s facilities were also just a downright mess, with unsterilized equipment that was used on his patients time and time again, along with simply having an inadequate staff meaning poorer coverage for the women who came to his clinics (presumably this was done to save money). To make matters worse, Karpen explicitly hired workers through a temp agency to work on scheduled inspection days, to give off the appearance that his facility was well-maintained, which only goes to show just how immoral this man was.
Mothers who came to his facilities were also very often mistreated. If a woman was overweight, he would mistreat them simply because of their weight, and if a woman was attractive, he would even go so far as to touch them while they were under sedation. And all of this sexual harassment is just the cherry on top of all the fraudulent practices Karpen took part in to manipulate the women from a business perspective.
Babies who were ultimately aborted by Karpen received inarguably the worst treatment, not just by virtue of them dying by the hands of an evil man, but because of how they died. As stated above, many babies were secretly aborted over the legal age limit, meaning many of them had sentience and could actually feel themselves being killed by Karpen. Plus, many babies ultimately survived “botched” abortions, which led to Karpen doing the unthinkable and killing such live babies outside the womb. This man has committed many heinous crimes, but none of them are as bad as the outright killing of babies. While abortions are essentially killing babies who have not yet exited the womb yet, doing so to a baby who has actually exited the mother and entered the world is downright disgusting and evil, and of all things, this is the disgraceful legacy that Karpen will leave behind forever.