This comes as no great shock, considering the number and nature of the charges filed against Kermit Gosnell by prosecutors.  The man who ran the most infamous abortion center in America will remain in prison until his trial, a judge decided at his arraignment on murder, infanticide, fraud, and conspiracy charges:

Kermit Gosnell was arraigned without bail late Thursday afternoon after charged with eight counts of murder in the death of a woman from a botched abortion and seven babies purposefully born so they could be killed in infanticides shortly thereafter.

Gosnell several staffers were arrested overnight on Tuesday after a grand jury indicted them on multiple charges after officials raided his abortion business following the woman’s death and discovered a “shop of horrors” filled with bags of bodies and body parts of deceased unborn children and babies killed in infanticides.

Authorities searching the facility last year found bags and bottles holding aborted babies scattered around the building, jars containing babies’ severed feet lining a shelf, as well as filthy, unsanitary furniture and equipment.

Gosnell, who used a method of live birth abortion to birth babies and snap their spinal cords with scissors, was arraigned and held without bail and two of Gosnell’s unlicensed and untrained staff, Adrienne Moton and Lynda Williams, who allegedly assisted him in the gruesome killings at his  Women’s Medical Society abortion business were also arraigned and held without bail.

In this case, the denial of bail may serve everyone’s interests, as well as being appropriate considering the charges involved.  Gosnell made a fortune over the years in butchering women and babies as well as allegedly selling prescriptions, so he’s a serious flight risk, especially from multiple counts of murder.  The city and state don’t want Gosnell out defending himself on television over the next several weeks and months, and the witnesses certainly don’t want to deal with him or his co-conspirators.  Gosnell himself may want to stay in police protection anyway; the grand jury report might make his old neighborhood a very unpleasant place for him to stay.

On the other hand, perhaps it would have been poetic justice for the judge to impose house arrest on Gosnell — at the filthy, unsanitary, and ghoulish charnel house he called a clinic.  That would have been cruel to the police officers who would have had to guard him there, however.

The Boss Emeritus has a powerful column on this case that must be read in its entirety, but here’s a taste of it:

Already, left-wing journalists and activists have rushed to explain that these abortion atrocities ignored for four decades by abortion radicals and rationalizers are not really about abortion. A Time magazine writer argued that the Philadelphia Horror was “about poverty, not Roe V. Wade.” A University of Minnesota professor declared: “This is not about abortion.”

But the grand jury itself pointed out that loosened oversight of abortion clinics enacted under pro-choice former GOP governor Tom Ridge enabled Gosnell’s criminal enterprise – and led to the heartless execution of hundreds of babies. Mass murder got a pass in the name of expanding “access” and appeasing abortion lobbyists. As the report made clear: “With the change of administration from [pro-life Democrat] Governor Casey to Governor Ridge,” government health officials “concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”

Deadly indifference to protecting life isn’t tangential to the abortion industry’s existence – it’s at the core of it. The Philadelphia Horror is no anomaly. It’s the logical, blood-curdling consequence of an evil, eugenics-rooted enterprise wrapped in feminist clothing.

If the grand jury’s report is accurate, Gosnell is a serial killer, right down to the trophy-keeping.  He only got away with it for so long because of the political reluctance to enforce the law on abortion clinics, at least in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, even after a multitude of warnings and more than one death.  That grand jury report exposed the fact that regulation of abortion clinics is a joke protected by political correctness, at least in the Keystone State, and now we have to ask ourselves how many other Gosnells are still in operation.

The Anchoress writes today that the political correctness continues in the media coverage of Gosnell’s abbatoir:

The press is not going giving a full sense of the scope of this horrorshow, because they will want this story minimized and shoved down the memory hole as fast as possible. There are a few weak lines of spin being bandied about, but do not be fooled; this is about abortion in America, and about a mindset that will excuse a great deal for its sake. Steel yourself to it and try to read the report. Become educated about Gosnell; it is very likely there are more like him — exploiting the poor, cutting every corner and confident that local authorities and regulators will not care. …

The Gosnell story would be repellent enough, even if he had been charged ten or fifteen years ago. The horror is compounded by the fact that people in authority looked the other way, for decades, rather than stop him.

And curiously, given the brevity of these articles I’m linking to, the U.S. press seems to want to look away, too. But they shouldn’t. In 2002 the media quite rightly delved deeply into the cover-ups of priestly abuse in the Catholic Church; they helped to shine a light into vast darkness, raising awareness and making sure there was no more room to hide; they helped precipitate a painful but necessary, and ongoing, cleansing. They need to do that again, here, because it is very likely that — as with those abuse stories — these horrors are not isolated to one town, or one practice or one state.

There are really two stories here.  The first is Gosnell and his clinic, and all of the damage and death he caused over a decades-long run.  The second is the utter lack of concern over it by government authorities that supposedly exist to protect public health and women.  The grand jury report could not possibly be more damning of the failure of public oversight in the Gosnell case.  The media is covering the first and doing their best to ignore the second, and especially the reasons for the failure, which the grand jury showed more courage in defining than news organization have done in reporting.