Steven Massof, an unlicensed doctor who worked for convicted abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell, was sentenced today to 6-12 years in jail. Massof previously pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree murder.
Massof took part in and witnessed hundreds of illegal abortions at the West Philadelphia abortion clinic. and was sentenced today by a Philadelphia judge.
From a local report on the sentencing:
Steven Massof’s voice cracked and he forced down a sob as he told Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner he was “ready to take full responsibility for my actions and my inaction.”
Massof called his involvement with Gosnell a “horrific part of my life that will always be there.”
Lerner credited Massof’s remorse and his cooperation with prosecutors before he even had a lawyer. Nevertheless, Lerner said what happened at the Gosnell clinic was “unspeakably horrible.”
“As evil as Dr. Gosnell was, as charismatic as he may have been, he didn’t do this alone,” Lerner said. “He couldn’t do this without the assistance of someone like you.”
Massof, 51, of Pittsburgh, was an unlicensed physician in 2003 when he began working for Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society clinic at 3801 Lancaster Ave. He testified at Gosnell’s murder trial last year that he quit in 2008 because he was exhausted by the workload, dismayed by deteriorating clinic conditions and was in a dispute with a clinic worker.
During the murder trial for Gosnell, the judge dropped three of the murder charges related to the babies he killed.
One of the three charges the judge dropped includes a 28-week unborn baby who was killed in an abortion-infanticide and eventually discovered in a freezer at Gosnell’s clinic. Another involved “Baby B,” about whom a Gosnell staffer testified was a newborn child who survived a failed abortion and was still breathing into a shoe box.
The third murder charge thrown out was for “Baby G,” who was the subject of testimony of a former Gosnell staff who, in the grand jury report, said he saw alive. Massoff said he saw exhibit “a respiratory excursion,” meaning a breath.
“According to Massof, Gosnell then ‘snipped the cervical part of the vertebra,’” the grand jury report states.
Earlier in the trial, Massof, an unlicensed medical school graduate, gave shocking testimony concerning the inner workings of Gosnell’s shoddy abortion business. He described a chaotic office where conditions continuously degraded over the nine years he worked there.
Massof testified that he had an interest in abortion and a curiosity about it. To become more involved in the abortion part of Gosnell’s business, Massof began “helping move patients around” from one area of the clinic to the next. Later he began doing first trimester procedures and eventually took on the “second tris,” testifying that he saw over 100 babies born alive who had their necks snipped in what he said was “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.”
During busy times, when the women were given drugs to induce contractions all at once, Massof told the court that “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.”
“I felt like a firemen in hell. I couldn’t put out all the fires,” he said.
