A Philadephia doctor who performed late term abortions for over 30 years is on trial for the death of a mother and murdering seven babies.  

Mainstream media organisations are under fire for not covering the trial of Dr Kermit Gosnell, 72.

Dr Gosnell is reported to have killed babies born alive in his clinic cutting the newborns’ spinal cords.

Eight former employees have already pleaded guilty, some to third-degree murder.  

One employee said she saw aborted babies move at least twice. Another said she snipped the spines of at least 10 babies.

Yet another said she thought one baby could have lived if it had not been aborted. She cried as she said she thought he was at least 30 weeks — around seven and a half months along.

Dr Gosnell himself later joked the baby was so big he could have walked to the bus stop. His lawyer disputes that any babies were born alive.

In testimony on Thursday, a former intern, Ashley Williams, who was 15 at the time, told of seeing at least five aborted babies moving, breathing and, in one case, “screeching,” after procedures at Dr Gosnells’ Women’s Medical Society clinic.

“They looked just like regular babies,” Baldwin said to Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore.

Baldwin said one baby she saw was so big that Dr Gosnell joked that “this baby is going to walk me home.”

Baldwin was hired by Dr Gosnell in September 2006.

She said she also saw Dr Gosnell use scissors to “snip” the neck of newborns who were moving after the procedure.

If the jury finds him guilty, Dr Gosnell could be sentenced to death.

Dr Gosnell’s lawyer has argued that none of the infants was killed; they were in death throes from the abortion drug Dr Gosnell had already administered.

Dr Gosnell is also charged with one count of third-degree murder in the 2009 death of a Virginia woman who was allegedly killed by an overdose of Demerol by Dr Gosnell’s untrained staff.

By his own lawyer’s count, Dr Gosnell performed more than 16,000 abortions over the course of 31 years.

The clinic was not inspected from 1993 to 2010, when FBI agents finally raided the place. They found moaning women covered in blood-stained blankets and jars with severed fetus feet, according to the 281-page grand jury report.

The grand jury report that lays out allegations against Gosnell has an entire section called “How did this go on so long?”  

Pennsylvania’s health department stopped routine inspections of abortion facilities in the state after Tom Ridge, a pro-choice Republican, became governor in 1995.

Health department lawyers “changed their legal opinions and advice to suit the policy preferences of different governors,” health department official Janet Staloski said in grand jury testimony. In this case, she said the state didn’t want to be “putting a barrier up to women” who wanted abortions.

In 1999, high-level Pennsylvania officials met to consider starting up regular inspections again but decided not to, state lawyer Kenneth Brody testified, according to the grand jury report. He told the grand jury that officials were concerns that abortion clinics wouldn’t meet inspection standards and then there “would be less abortion facilities.”

The state’s politics-driven policy continued until the gruesome allegations regarding Gosnell came to light.

Inspections finally resumed in 2010 after more than 15 years. When pro-life Republican Gov. Tom Corbett took office in 2011, he asked officials to issue a report on the state’s failure to inspect facilities for so long, the AP reported.

By February 2011, Corbett had announced sweeping changes at the health department — including routine, unannounced inspections of abortion facilities.