News that a Philadelphia doctor had murdered hundreds of babies delivered alive during illegal late-term abortions received scant press coverage when it came to light in 2011. Ditto for the movie that tells his story, Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer, which opened in October, three years after filming finished. That’s how long it took producers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney to find a distributor. Not only has the press ignored the film—just a handful of mainstream reviews as of this writing—venues like Facebook and NPR, by refusing to run ads, have actively suppressed it. Theaters too. Despite Gosnell’s successful opening—it was in the top ten at the box office the weekend of Oct. 12—nearly a third of... Read More →

  From 1898 to 1943, entertainment seekers from Coney Island to the Chicago World’s Fair could buy tickets to gawk at tiny premature infants in incubators. In our enlightened age we might wonder what kind of parents would put their newborns on that kind of display. The answer is they were parents who believed this was the only hope for their child. Rejected by the medical experts, they had turned to Martin Couney, the “Incubator Doctor,” who, while definitely not a physician, saved thousands of babies otherwise doomed to die. The “Incubator Doctor” is the subject of a fascinating new book by Dawn Raffel, whose previous work includes a novel and two short-story collections. The Strange Case of Dr. Couney  can’t properly be called a... Read More →