Kermit Gosnell was a Philadelphia physician who, for more than 30 years, ran a medical practice and abortion clinic called the Women's Medical Society at 38th Street and Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia. In May 2013 a Philadelphia jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of three infants who, prosecutors proved, had been born alive at the clinic and then killed. The same jury convicted him of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old refugee from Bhutan who died after being given repeated doses of sedatives by untrained staff. To avoid a possible death sentence he gave up his right to appeal and was sentenced to life without parole. He died in state custody on March 1, 2026, aged 85.
The case came to light by an indirect route. Federal agents raided the clinic in February 2010 as part of an investigation into illegal prescriptions for painkillers. What they found inside led to a Philadelphia County grand jury investigation, whose report, released in January 2011, described the clinic's practices in detail and concluded that state and city regulators had failed for years to act on complaints. The case changed how Pennsylvania oversees abortion facilities, cost several state officials their jobs, and became the subject of intense national argument during and after the trial.
Gosnell grew up in West Philadelphia as an only child, according to a 2011 Philadelphia Inquirer profile. As a boy he worked at a grocery store at 52nd and Market Streets with a childhood friend, Walter Edmonds. He attended Central High School, the city's selective public high school, and graduated from Jefferson Medical College in 1966. He was licensed to practice in Pennsylvania in 1967 and in New York in 1970.
After medical school he spent time in New York City working at an abortion clinic, where he learned early-term techniques before the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Back in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, while a resident at Jefferson, he was involved in drug treatment work. A community group, the Young Great Society, asked him to open an office in Mantua, a West Philadelphia neighborhood that had no doctor. With Edmonds he started the Mantua Halfway House, a methadone clinic on 38th Street, and he opened an abortion practice nearby.
People who knew him in those years described a young doctor with a strong reputation in the neighborhood, partly because he made house calls. Sidney Schnoll, a doctor Gosnell had recruited to volunteer at a drug clinic, told the Inquirer in 2011 that Gosnell had wanted to give back to the community. Edmonds remembered the early work as exciting and pioneering, and described his friend as dynamic and charming, with an inclination to make money.
In 1972 Gosnell took part in a trial of an experimental device for second-trimester abortions, the "super coil," developed by a California psychologist, Harvey Karman. It was used at Gosnell's practice on 15 women who had traveled by bus from Chicago. Federal and city officials later found that nine of them had suffered serious complications, and one needed a hysterectomy. Gosnell was not charged. Karman spent two years in legal proceedings with the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, then led by Arlen Specter, before he was cleared.
Gosnell became board certified in family practice in 1978, according to a 2010 Philadelphia Daily News profile, and opened the Women's Medical Society at 38th Street and Lancaster Avenue. Press accounts based on the grand jury report give the clinic's opening year as 1979, when the state Department of Health issued it a one-year license. The building, at 3801 to 3805 Lancaster Avenue, housed both a general family practice and the abortion clinic. Abortions made up roughly 30 to 40 percent of his work, the 2010 profile reported.
To many longtime patients of his family practice he was a caring, old-fashioned doctor. Several told the Daily News in 2010 that he let patients who could not pay settle up later, and one credited him with helping him through drug problems at the Mantua Halfway House.
Gosnell married three times and had six children. His first wife was a nurse. By the time of the investigation he was married to Pearl Gosnell, a cosmetologist who worked at the clinic. His methadone clinic, which once employed 25 people, closed after years of state tax liens in the 1980s and 1990s.
Over the decades, former patients reported serious injuries. Some patients were as young as 13, the Daily News reported, and some were five months pregnant. In 1996 state officials fined him 1,000 dollars after an uncertified assistant treated a patient. A woman named Marie Smith, who was 20 at the time, became ill after a 1999 abortion at the clinic and needed surgery to remove remaining fetal tissue; she sued in 2001 and received a small settlement. In March 2002 a 22-year-old patient, Semika Shaw, died of sepsis at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania two days after a procedure at the clinic in which her uterus had been perforated; her family's lawsuit was settled. Another woman sued in 2008 over injuries to her uterus, cervix and bowel. In all, the grand jury counted 46 lawsuits against him.
Complaints to the agencies responsible for oversight produced little. A former employee's 2001 complaint to the Pennsylvania Department of State went nowhere. Between 2002 and 2009, lawyers for the state medical board reviewed five cases involving Gosnell; three were closed without investigation and two without action. In the mid-1990s a pediatrician, Donald Schwarz, who later became Philadelphia's health commissioner, had also raised a complaint, which the Department of Health's senior counsel did not tell the grand jury about.
The Department of Health's inspection history was thin. According to the grand jury findings reported by the AP, the department licensed the clinic for one year in 1979, did not review it again until 1989, and visited in 1992, when inspectors noted that it had no nurses and no obstetrician-gynecologist but recorded "no deficiencies." The last inspection, in April 1993, again found no nurses and cited expired medications and missing lab work. There was no follow-up. The state did not set foot in the clinic again until February 2010.
In December 2009 the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, visited the clinic after Gosnell applied for membership. It turned him down. Its president, Vicki Saporta, later said the visit had found 19 areas of noncompliance with its guidelines.
Karnamaya Mongar was born in Bhutan. She spent about 20 years living in a refugee camp in Nepal, in huts with tin roofs, before resettling in the United States with her family. In the fall of 2009 they had been in the country for about four months and were living in Woodbridge, Virginia, south of Washington. Her husband was Ash Mongar. Her daughter, Yashoda Gurung, later testified that her mother had insisted on ending her pregnancy.
She first went to a clinic near her home, which did not perform abortions past 14 weeks. A clinic in Fredericksburg, Virginia, also declined, and referred her to one in Washington, D.C., which in turn referred her to Gosnell in Philadelphia. On November 19, 2009, her uncle, Damber Ghalley, drove her, her daughter and her mother-in-law about five hours to Lancaster Avenue.
At the clinic, staff without medical training gave her repeated doses of Demerol and other powerful drugs to sedate her and induce labor while she waited for Gosnell to arrive. She went into cardiac arrest. Firefighters responding to the emergency had to use bolt cutters to open the clinic's emergency exit, her uncle testified. The family's lawyer said staff had no equipment to resuscitate her, and inspectors later found that the clinic's only suction device doubled as its resuscitation equipment. She was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in a coma and died the next day, November 20, 2009. Gosnell told her uncle that the procedure had been done but that her heart had stopped.
The Department of Health did not investigate her death. Its chief counsel, Christine Dutton, told the grand jury that there was nothing suspicious about it because "people die," a remark that was widely quoted after the report came out. Federal prosecutors said in 2013 that Gosnell wrote 18 prescriptions for controlled drugs on the night she was dying.
When the trial came, her daughter testified for about two hours through an interpreter. When the prosecutor showed her a photograph of her parents on a visit to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, she wept.
By 2008 the volume of prescriptions for controlled drugs coming out of the clinic's family practice was rising fast. Federal prosecutors later said the number filled each month went from several hundred in 2008 to more than 2,300 in January 2010. Gosnell was among the top prescribers of OxyContin in the state, and blank prescription pads were left for staff to fill out for patients paying cash.
On February 18, 2010, agents of the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, with Philadelphia police, executed a search warrant at the clinic as part of the drug investigation, while patients were waiting to be seen. State health investigators followed four days later. Investigators described blood-stained furniture, unsterile instruments, disposable supplies that had been reused, and medical waste that had piled up because bills for its removal had not been paid. The remains of 47 fetuses were recovered, according to the Inquirer (an NBC News report gave 45). Investigators also found a large sum of cash hidden in his home.
On February 22, 2010, Pennsylvania temporarily suspended his medical license, calling the clinic a danger to the public and saying unlicensed employees were medicating and examining patients. Delaware suspended his license there on March 2. Gosnell, then 69 and not yet charged, told the Daily News that the raid had been traumatic and unexpected and that he believed that in the long term he would be vindicated.
The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, led by R. Seth Williams, took the case to a county investigating grand jury. Its report, released on January 19, 2011, ran to about 280 pages (281, according to the Inquirer; other reports said nearly 300). It was the basis for the charges, and much of what is publicly known about the clinic comes from it.
The grand jury found that Gosnell routinely performed abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy, the legal limit in Pennsylvania, and that some of these procedures ended in live births. It found that in those cases the infants were killed by cutting the spinal cord at the back of the neck with scissors, a practice Gosnell called "snipping." It reported that he falsified ultrasound results to make pregnancies appear earlier than they were. Prosecutors said they believed hundreds of infants had died this way over the years, but that they could prosecute only a handful of cases because Gosnell had destroyed patient files.
The report described a clinic run largely by people without medical licenses. Staff with no training gave anesthesia and sedatives. A teenage girl, the daughter of a clinic employee, Tina Baldwin, began working there at 15 and at times was left in charge at night. The report found that patients were treated differently by race, and that the clinic charged about 325 dollars for a first-trimester abortion and between 1,600 and 3,000 dollars for later procedures, bringing in as much as 10,000 to 15,000 dollars a night.
The grand jury was equally direct about the regulators. It called what had happened a complete regulatory collapse, wrote that "Pennsylvania is not a Third World country," and said that if officials had done their jobs the clinic would have been closed decades earlier. It concluded that the failure to act was due in part to race, class and politics, saying the women affected were poor women of color. Williams accused the Department of Health of "utter disregard" for patients. The grand jury found no chargeable offense by state officials, partly because so much time had passed.
On January 19, 2011, Gosnell, then 69, was arrested and charged with eight counts of murder: seven counts of first-degree murder concerning infants the grand jury said had been born alive (Baby A through Baby G), and one count of third-degree murder in the death of Karnamaya Mongar. He was also charged with infanticide, conspiracy, corrupt organizations and other offenses. At his arraignment he was denied bail. He would stay in custody for the rest of his life.
Nine people who had worked at the clinic were charged with him. The main charges, as listed by 6abc at the time, were:
Lynda Williams, an unlicensed worker who gave sedatives: third-degree murder (Mongar), murder of a live-born infant, and related counts.
Sherry West, an unlicensed worker: third-degree murder (Mongar), tampering with records, hindering prosecution and related counts.
Adrienne Moton, an unlicensed worker: murder of a live-born infant, conspiracy and racketeering.
Steven Massof, a medical school graduate without a license to practice: murder of two live-born infants, theft by deception and related counts.
Eileen O'Neill, a medical school graduate without a license who worked in the family practice: theft by deception, conspiracy, racketeering and perjury.
Pearl Gosnell, his wife: performing an abortion at 24 or more weeks, conspiracy and related counts.
Tina Baldwin, an employee: racketeering, conspiracy and corruption of a minor, for allowing her teenage daughter to work at the clinic and give anesthesia.
Elizabeth Hampton, Gosnell's sister-in-law: obstruction, hindering prosecution, perjury and false swearing.
Madeline Joe, the office manager: conspiracy.
Eight of the nine pleaded guilty before the trial; only O'Neill went to trial with Gosnell. Six of those who pleaded guilty, among them Massof, Moton, Williams and West, testified for the prosecution.
Less than a month after the report, on February 15, 2011, Governor Tom Corbett announced that he had fired six senior employees of the Departments of State and Health, including the former acting secretary of state, Basil Merenda, the Department of Health's chief counsel, Christine Dutton, and a deputy secretary of health, Stacy Mitchell. Three others named in the investigation had already resigned. "This happened because people weren't doing their jobs, plain and simple," Corbett said. He ordered annual inspections of abortion clinics with additional unannounced visits, a computer system to track complaints, and corrective plans within 10 days of any problem found.
The legislature went further. On December 22, 2011, Corbett signed what became Act 122 of 2011, passed as Senate Bill 732 (a companion House bill, House Bill 574, was introduced by Representative Matt Baker). The law required freestanding clinics that perform abortions to meet the same standards as outpatient surgical centers, covering staffing, infection control, emergency procedures and building requirements such as wider hallways, and it required at least one unannounced Department of Health inspection a year. It took effect 180 days after signing. Supporters cited the conditions found at Gosnell's clinic and at a clinic in Allentown. Some clinic operators said they could not afford the changes, and Planned Parenthood called the law politically motivated. By November 2012, four of the state's 22 freestanding abortion clinics had closed, PublicSource reported.
Commonwealth v. Gosnell went to trial before Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas on March 18, 2013. Gosnell was 72. The prosecution was led by Assistant District Attorneys Joanne Pescatore and Edward Cameron; the defense by Jack McMahon. The prosecution sought the death penalty. The jury had seven women and five men.
Over five weeks the prosecution called 36 witnesses, many of them former employees. Massof, who had worked at the clinic from 2003 until 2008 for 300 dollars a week paid under the table, testified that Gosnell taught him the "snipping" procedure, that he had done it at least 100 times, and that he "felt like a fireman in hell." Moton testified about the infant the court record calls Baby A, an infant nearly 30 weeks along whose teenage mother also testified, saying, "I just felt he could have had a chance." A former employee who was not charged, Kareema Cross, testified that she saw infants breathing and moving before they were killed, and gave evidence about Baby C and Baby D. Williams admitted that she had cut the neck of Baby C, who prosecutors said had been alive for about 20 minutes. Prosecutors said Baby D had been delivered into a toilet and was moving before staff cut the spinal cord. Tina Baldwin's daughter, by then an adult, testified about Baby E, who the jury was told made a soft sound before Gosnell cut its neck. Mrs. Mongar's daughter and uncle described her final day.
The defense case rested on medicine. McMahon argued that none of the infants had been born alive, that Gosnell had given an injection of the drug digoxin to end each pregnancy before delivery, and that any movement seen afterward was involuntary twitching. The city's medical examiner testified that he could not say with certainty that any of the infants had been born alive. McMahon also described Mrs. Mongar's death as the result of unforeseen complications, and told the jury the prosecution was "elitist" and "racist." Gosnell is Black; the grand jury had described many of his patients as poor women of color. McMahon also said Gosnell had performed up to 1,000 abortions a year and at least 16,000 in his career.
When the prosecution rested in late April, McMahon asked the judge to acquit on the murder counts for lack of scientific proof that the infants had been born alive. On April 23, 2013, Minehart dismissed three of the seven first-degree murder counts. The next day he clarified the ruling: the counts dismissed concerned Baby B, Baby F and Baby G, while the count concerning Baby C, which he had first appeared to dismiss, stood. He also acquitted Gosnell of one count of infanticide and five counts of abuse of a corpse, and let the third-degree murder charge in Mrs. Mongar's death go to the jury. He did not explain his reasoning on each count. The defense then rested without calling a single witness, and Gosnell did not testify.
Instructing the jury, Minehart explained that under Pennsylvania law an infant is born alive if fully expelled from the mother and showing signs of life, such as breathing, a heartbeat or movement, and that such an infant is a human being in the eyes of the law.
The jury deliberated for 10 days. On May 13, 2013, with the courtroom locked while the verdicts were read and each juror polled, it found Gosnell guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of Baby A, Baby C and Baby D, and not guilty of murder in the death of Baby E. According to 6abc, Baby E was the only one of the four whose killing no witness had testified to seeing. In the death of Karnamaya Mongar, the jury found him not guilty of third-degree murder and guilty of the lesser offense of involuntary manslaughter.
He was also convicted of infanticide concerning Baby A, conspiracy concerning Babies C and D, corrupt organizations and conspiracy, 21 of 24 counts of performing abortions at 24 weeks or later, and more than 200 counts of violating the state's 24-hour informed-consent requirement. Gosnell showed no visible reaction. O'Neill was convicted of conspiracy and theft by deception for billing as if she were a licensed doctor.
The jury foreman, David Misko, later told reporters that Gosnell appeared to see himself as a martyr. The Mongar family's lawyer, Bernard Smalley, said he hoped the verdict would bring the family some sense of justice and quiet.
The same jury was due to return on May 21 to decide between death and life without parole. It never had to. On May 14, Gosnell agreed to give up his right to appeal the verdict in exchange for the prosecution dropping its request for the death penalty. Minehart immediately sentenced him to two consecutive terms of life without parole. On May 15 he imposed a third life sentence for the remaining murder count and 2 and a half to 5 years for involuntary manslaughter; according to the docket as reported by The Daily Pennsylvanian, no further penalty was imposed on the abortion-law counts.
McMahon said Gosnell accepted the verdict, was not sorry he had gone to trial, and had turned down a somewhat better offer earlier because he wanted the issues aired in court. The deal also spared his family from having to plead for his life in front of the jury. Because the waiver was part of the agreement, there was no appeal, and the convictions became final.
The investigation that had started it all was still pending. On July 9, 2013, Gosnell pleaded guilty in federal court in Philadelphia to 12 counts, including conspiracy to distribute oxycodone, alprazolam and codeine, distribution of oxycodone, and maintaining a place for illegal drug distribution. The government said that from June 2008 until the raid on February 18, 2010, prescriptions written at the clinic, often without a medical examination, accounted for more than 600,000 oxycodone pills, more than 800,000 alprazolam pills and more than 27,000 ounces of codeine syrup. Cash patients paid 115 to 150 dollars for a visit and 20 dollars for a refill.
On December 16, 2013, U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe sentenced him to 30 years in prison, to run concurrently with his life sentences, along with a 50,000 dollar fine and 200,000 dollars in forfeiture. In court Gosnell defended his prescribing as an effort to help people with addictions and compared his practice to concierge medicine. He denied the judge's suggestion that money had been his motive. "This was not a doctor treating people for pain," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Natali told the court.
Most of the staff cases ended before Judge Benjamin Lerner of the Court of Common Pleas, who said at one sentencing that Gosnell "didn't do this alone."
Pearl Gosnell pleaded guilty to corrupt organizations and to taking part in an illegal abortion at 24 or more weeks. On May 29, 2013, she was sentenced to 7 to 23 months in county prison followed by two years of probation. She told the court she was sorry for having trusted her husband.
Adrienne Moton pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and testified that she had cut the necks of about 10 infants. On May 29, 2013, she was sentenced to 11 and a half to 23 months, which she had already served, plus three years of probation, and was released.
Eileen O'Neill was sentenced by Judge Minehart on July 15, 2013, to home confinement and probation. In January 2015 the Pennsylvania Superior Court granted her a new trial, finding that she should have been tried separately because evidence about the infants' deaths had unfairly prejudiced her. No outcome of a retrial has been reported.
Steven Massof pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree murder and was sentenced on February 12, 2014, to 6 to 12 years.
Sherry West pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, admitting that she gave part of the overdose that killed Mrs. Mongar and that she lied and altered Mrs. Mongar's records afterward. On March 13, 2014, she was sentenced to 5 to 10 years, concurrent with a four-year federal sentence for her part in the drug operation.
Lynda Williams was sentenced on June 26, 2014, to 5 to 10 years on two counts of third-degree murder, after her federal case was resolved.
Tina Baldwin pleaded guilty to corrupt organizations and other offenses and was sentenced on June 26, 2014, to 30 months of probation.
Elizabeth Hampton pleaded guilty to perjury and Madeline Joe to conspiracy; what sentences they received was never made public in the coverage of the case.
Gosnell served his sentence in the Pennsylvania state prison system. He was most recently held at the State Correctional Institution at Smithfield, in Huntingdon County. In late March 2026 the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections confirmed that he had died on March 1, 2026, at a hospital outside the prison system, where he had been taken from the prison. He was 85. A department spokesperson, Maria Bivens, confirmed the death to the AP. Officials did not disclose the cause of death or details of his condition before he was moved to the hospital. The death became public on March 23, 2026, when it was first reported by the authors of a 2017 book about the case, and was confirmed to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the AP by corrections officials.
He had spent the 15 years since his arrest in January 2011 in custody. Because he had waived his appeal rights, no court ever reviewed the 2013 convictions on appeal.
The clinic never reopened. Gosnell still owned the property, five connected buildings at 3801 to 3805 Lancaster Avenue, when he died. It had stood empty for more than a decade, and the city was owed more than 100,000 dollars in liens. In November 2025, under Pennsylvania's blight law, Judge Ann Butchart of the Court of Common Pleas named a nonprofit, reBuilding Blocks, as conservator, with power to repair the buildings and eventually seek court approval to sell them. Gosnell's son, who held his power of attorney, did not object. A neighborhood group said residents hoped something positive could finally happen with the property.
The case was argued over from the start, and both sides of the abortion debate drew lessons from it. After the verdict, David O'Steen of the National Right to Life Committee said the case had helped people understand what abortion involved, and called for bans after the point at which, in his view, a fetus can feel pain. Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America said Gosnell would get what he deserved and called for wider access to abortion care. Carol Tracy of the Women's Law Project argued that his patients had gone to him because they felt they had no other choice, and her organization wrote in 2011 that the case showed the harm caused by the stigma surrounding abortion. Lila Rose, founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action, said in 2026 that he was not an outlier in the abortion industry. These are advocates' views and are attributed to them here.
During the trial, critics including Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia accused national news organizations of giving the case too little coverage. Asked about the trial, the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said President Barack Obama could not take a position on an ongoing trial.
Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, described by the Inquirer as conservative journalists and filmmakers, wrote Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer (Regnery, 2017). A feature film based on their book, Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer, directed by Nick Searcy, with Earl Billings as Gosnell and Dean Cain as a detective, was released in October 2018. Reviews divided along familiar lines; TheWrap's critic called it an anti-abortion argument presented as drama. The titles of both reflect the authors' view; the court record establishes three murders.
Proven by verdict, and final: the first-degree murders of Baby A, Baby C and Baby D; the involuntary manslaughter of Karnamaya Mongar; 21 illegal abortions at 24 weeks or later; infanticide, conspiracy and corrupt organizations counts; and more than 200 violations of the informed-consent law. Proven by his guilty plea in federal court: the drug distribution counts.
Not proven: the murder of Baby E, of which the jury acquitted him. The murder counts concerning Baby B, Baby F and Baby G were dismissed by the judge for insufficient evidence; they were never put to the jury.
Alleged but never charged: that hundreds of infants were born alive and killed at the clinic over the years. This rests on the testimony of former staff (Massof said he had done it at least 100 times; Moton about 10 times) and on the grand jury's conclusions. Prosecutors said they could not bring more charges because records had been destroyed. Labels such as "America's biggest serial killer" come from the authors of the book and film, not from any court.
Disputed at trial: whether any of the infants was born alive. The defense said the injections given before delivery had ended each pregnancy and that movements were reflexes; the medical examiner said he could not be certain. The jury accepted the prosecution's evidence on three of the four counts it decided.
Details that vary between sources: the year the clinic opened (1978 in the 2010 Daily News profile, 1979 in grand jury summaries); the number of fetal remains recovered in the raid (47 or 45); the amount of cash found in his home (about 240,000 or 250,000 dollars) and where it was hidden; the number of informed-consent counts on which he was convicted (211 in most reports, 219 of 227 in a docket summary); the settlement in Semika Shaw's death (900,000 dollars in an AP report, 400,000 in an Inquirer profile); the length of the grand jury report (281 pages, or nearly 300); and the length of Eileen O'Neill's home-confinement term (6 to 23 months at sentencing, 3 to 23 months in a later AP report). The exact dates on which Babies A, C and D died have not been made public.
1941: Kermit Barron Gosnell is born; he grows up in West Philadelphia.
1966: graduates from Jefferson Medical College; licensed in Pennsylvania in 1967 and New York in 1970.
Late 1960s to early 1970s: works at an abortion clinic in New York; opens the Mantua Halfway House methadone clinic and an abortion practice in West Philadelphia.
1972: the "super coil" procedures; nine of 15 women suffer serious complications; he is not charged.
1978 to 1979: opens the Women's Medical Society at 38th Street and Lancaster Avenue; the Department of Health issues a one-year license in 1979.
1989, 1992, April 1993: the only later state site visits; no further inspections until 2010.
1996: fined 1,000 dollars after an uncertified assistant treats a patient.
March 2002: Semika Shaw, 22, dies of sepsis after a procedure at the clinic.
2002 to 2009: five cases reviewed by state medical board lawyers; none acted on.
November 19 to 20, 2009: Karnamaya Mongar is sedated at the clinic and dies at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
December 2009: the National Abortion Federation rejects his membership application.
February 18, 2010: FBI, DEA and police raid the clinic in a drug investigation.
February 22, 2010: state suspends his medical license.
January 19, 2011: grand jury report released; Gosnell and nine employees charged; he is held without bail.
February 15, 2011: Governor Corbett fires six state officials.
December 22, 2011: Corbett signs the abortion facility law (Act 122 of 2011).
March 18, 2013: trial begins before Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart.
April 23 to 24, 2013: murder counts concerning Babies B, F and G dismissed.
May 13, 2013: convicted of first-degree murder (Babies A, C and D) and involuntary manslaughter (Karnamaya Mongar); acquitted of murder of Baby E.
May 14 to 15, 2013: gives up appeal rights; sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole.
May 29, 2013: Pearl Gosnell and Adrienne Moton sentenced.
July 9, 2013: pleads guilty to federal drug charges.
July 15, 2013: Eileen O'Neill sentenced.
December 16, 2013: sentenced to 30 years on the federal charges, concurrent.
February to June 2014: Massof, West, Williams and Baldwin sentenced.
January 2015: Superior Court grants O'Neill a new trial.
January 2017: McElhinney and McAleer's book is published.
October 2018: the feature film opens.
November 2025: a nonprofit is named conservator of the former clinic building.
March 1, 2026: Gosnell dies, aged 85, at a hospital outside the prison system, while held at SCI Smithfield.
March 23 to 24, 2026: the death is made public and confirmed by the Department of Corrections.