And, more importantly who took her to a Pennsylvania abortion clinic where she died?
Only four months before she died at the hand of an abortion doctor in a squalid office in Philadelphia, Karnamaya Mongar was a Bhutanese refugee who had been resettled in Woodbridge, Virginia, according to this account from WUSA9.
The whole horrific event happened in 2009, but is only coming out now as prosecutors prepare their murder case against abortion doctor Dr. Kermit Gosnell.
From WUSA9:
WOODBRIDGE, Va. (WUSA) — Her name was Karnamaya Mongar. She was born in Bhutan and then survived nearly two decades in refugee camps. She had finally immigrated to Woodbridge, Virginia, only to die in a squalid, Pennsylvania abortion clinic, filled with bags of aborted fetuses. The operator, Dr. Kermit Gosnell is charged with her murder and the murder of seven babies.
“Children were born and then killed. Killed by putting scissors in their back and then snipping spinal cord,” said Seth Williams, the Philadelphia District Attorney.
Mongar, 41, was a desperately poor mother of three and pregnant with her fourth in her second trimester. Unfortunately, someone directed her and her husband, Ash, to Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic where she died in 2009 after being giving too much anesthesia. The nearly 300 page investigative report says paramedics who arrived at the clinic found her lifeless, and Gosnell was just standing there not doing anything.
She had only been in the US for four months,* would have still been under the care of a resettlement agency and would not have known how to arrange a trip to Philadelphia without help? What did her resettlement agency know, and did they help her?
First read this incredible article from last month in, of all places, The New York Times. It seems this was the abortion clinic of choice for poor women of color. Who in Virginia helped Karnamaya Mongar get there?
Did a “church” resettle Karnamaya Mongar?
Enterprising reporters should start here with a list of resettlement agencies in Virginia. Woodbridge is twenty miles south of Washington, DC so it wouldn’t take long to figure out who resettled Karnamaya Mongar because agencies usually have territories. As one Catholic website from Texas reflected, here, this story is going to be huge.
It will be even larger if it turns out that those who helped her find Gosnell in Philadelphia work for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Lutheran Social Services, or Virginia Council of Churches (a subcontractor of Church World Service)—all involved in resettling refugees in Virginia along with the secular International Rescue Committee.
I am reminded of a story in 2008 where Catholic Charities was involved in an abortion for a 16 year old unaccompanied minor in Virginia.
For new readers: We are in the process of resettling a minimum of 60,000 Bhutanese of Nepali descent. They have been living in camps in Nepal and there is no reason many couldn’t have been taken in by their ancestral home—Nepal.
This resettlement plan was approved by Ellen Sauerbrey, Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration in the Bush Administration. We just learned in December that the Obama Administration would place no cap on the number of Bhutanese coming to the US, here. Some Bhutanese are doing well we are told. But, we have also had cases of Bhutanese murdered or beaten in horrible neighborhoods in the US (where they were placed by resettlement agencies), we’ve had at lease one suicide, here.
* Some resettlement agencies unload their refugees on to communities as early as 3 months after arrival, but many refugees are still involved with the agency for up to 8 months.
An afterthought: I wonder do the good folks at Unbound Philanthropy really know what they are funding.