Allegedly running what the prosecutor calls "a house of horrors," a Philadelphia physician, Kermit Barron Gosnell, was charged Wednesday with murder and other offenses related to illegal, late-term abortions.

The doctor is accused of causing the death of one of his female patients and killing seven viable babies in illegal abortions, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said.

The babies were born alive in the sixth, seventh and eighth months of pregnancy, but their spinal cords were allegedly severed with scissors, Williams said in a statement.

Nine other people who worked in the west Philadelphia medical office, including Gosnell's wife and sister-in-law, also were charged, Williams said. The practice, called the Women's Medical Society, served mostly low-income minority women for years, he said.

Williams provided a grisly scenario of the shuttered abortion clinic: A search of the office last year by authorities found bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses scattered throughout the building. Jars containing the severed feet of babies lined a shelf. Furniture and equipment was *la*hd-stained, dusty and broken.

In an interview with CNN, Williams described the abortion clinic as "horrific" and providing "botched and illegal abortions."

"It was a house of horrors beyond any type of definition or explanation I can humbly try to give," Williams told CNN. "And it's very sad for the women that were there, that were subjected to such horrific and barbaric -- I would say medical treatment but it wasn't medical -- treatment.

"My grasp of the English language doesn't really allow me to fully describe how horrific this clinic was -- rotting bodies, fetal remains, the smell of urine throughout, *la*hd-stained," Williams continued.

He said women patients were often "very poor."

"The doctor gained a reputation. People far and wide knew that he performed abortions at any time," Williams said.

Williams described one of the alleged infant deaths.

"The baby had been born and was on a cold steel table and murdered by using -- there's no medical basis for snipping or taking scissors and putting them into the neck and cutting, severing the spinal cord. It's just homicide. It's just murder," Williams told CNN.

Gosnell, 69, is not a board-certified obstetrician or gynecologist, Williams said.

Originally, he said, the clinic used another doctor as a consultant so it could receive a license to perform abortions in 1979.

Two primary state agencies, the Department of Health and the Department of State, have oversight, Williams said Wednesday at a news conference.

But a grand jury investigation found that health and licensing officials had received repeated reports about Gosnell's dangerous practices for two decades with no action taken, even after the agencies learned that women had died during routine abortions under Gosnell's care, the district attorney's statement said.

"What the (grand) jury found most troubling is that neither of those agencies took the time to investigate, to observe, to view, to go to the clinic itself since 1993," Williams said during the news conference.

Gosnell is also accused of reusing unsanitary instruments; performing procedures in filthy rooms, including some having litter boxes and animals present during operations; and allowing unlicensed employees to perform operations and administer anesthesia, including a teenage high school student, Williams said.

The doctor himself was seldom present, the district attorney charged. In his absence, untrained, unsupervised workers, including the teenage girl, routinely injected sedatives into women undergoing illegal late-term abortions, he alleged.

Among numerous charges, Gosnell is accused of third-degree murder in the death of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, Williams said.Mongar died on November 20, 2009, when she was overdosed with anesthetics prescribed by Gosnell, he said.

Law enforcement officers came upon "the medical abuses" while investigating tips that the doctor had been illegally selling thousands of prescriptions for OxyContin and other narcotics to "patients" that he never examined, Williams said.