One woman’s boyfriend pressured her into having an abortion. He drove her to the clinic and
“I told them that I did not want to have an abortion. I had changed my mind. They stuck a needle in my arm immediately to knock me out… I screamed and cried, that’s all I can remember… The other women that were in there, they were staring at me. I told them again, I’m not gonna do this. The women looked very scared when I left. I guess they heard me screaming.”
James D Slack Abortion, Execution, and the Consequences of Taking Life (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009) 67
Abortion clinic owner “Michelle” only allows abortions to be performed at her clinic up to 17 weeks. Of abortions at 24 weeks (which are legal in every state), she says:
“I visited a clinic that did them routinely. I wanted to see what a 24 week abortion looked like… It looks like a baby. You know, you’re getting too close. And I thought, how tragic that some women would wait until they were 24 weeks to have an abortion. How sad that we live in a society where that happens.”
James D Slack Abortion, Execution, and the Consequences of Taking Life (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009) 49
Rayna Rapp, who herself aborted it down syndrome baby, discusses abortions of disabled fetuses:
“New developments in reproductive technologies assist in the quest for the perfect baby not only by genetically creating “better” children but also by detecting and eliminating fetuses deemed abnormal and defective. In a world where babies are bred for desired characteristics, having a healthy, normal baby becomes nothing less than a duty. While it may appear that medicine simply offers procedure such as diagnostic ultrasound, fetal electrocardiography, and amniocentesis as options for those who desire them, the fear of producing a child that falls outside the boundary of “normal” compels many women to seek premonitory information regarding the status of the fetus. As one of [Rayna Rapp’s] interviewees explained regarding her tests, “if he was gonna be slow, if he wasn’t gonna have a shot at being President, that’s not the baby we wanted.”
16 week-old unborn baby
Rayna Rapp “Moral Pioneers: Women, Men, and Fetuses on a Frontier Of Reproductive Technology,” and Hoffman et al., Embryos, Ethics and Women’s Rights, 110, from Kathy Rudy. Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: Moral Diversity in the Abortion Debate (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1996) 11
Incidentally, abortions for fetal anomaly are almost always late-term abortions – the tests that detect problems such as down syndrome can only be performed in the second trimester.
A large percentage of abortions are performed on college-age women. These women often feel forced to choose between their education and their baby. Groups like Feminists for Life have college outreach programs where they try to encourage colleges and universities to provide services to pregnant and parenting students. This pro-life group believes that no woman should be forced to sacrifice her baby in order to have an education.
The problem is real. Frederica Mathews-Green writes:
“A student at an Ivy League college told the author that the campus health center refers about 50 women a year for abortions; yet in the previous five years the number of students who continued their pregnancies totaled zero.”
Frederica Mathews-Green. Real Choices: Offering Practical, Life-Affirming Alternatives to Abortion (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Books, 1994) 162
“Perhaps the major problem of pro-choice public relations is that the image of this procedure we so believe in – of someone scraping or vacuuming out a woman’s insides, digging between her legs into her tender sexual passage, blood, gooey tissue, injured fetus all falling out – is aesthetically a disaster. Are we really pro- that ?
Nora Johnson, “Whose Life Is It?”, “Hers” column, the New York Times Magazine, January 23, 1994 quoted in Frederica Mathews-Green. Real Choices: Offering Practical, Life-Affirming Alternatives to Abortion (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Books, 1994)
Abortion clinic workers often struggle emotionally with the difficult task of performing abortions. Ripping apart a fully formed unborn baby whether via suction or via forceps, can be very visually disturbing. In one study, 77% of abortion clinic workers in San Francisco saw abortion as “a destructive act against a living thing.”
eight week-old unborn baby
According to the study
“Particularly striking was the fact that discomfort with abortion clients or procedures was reported by practitioners who strongly supported abortion rights and expressed strong commitment to their work. This preliminary finding suggested that even those who support a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy may be struggling with an important tension between their formal beliefs and the situated experience of their abortion work.”
…
seen as murder:
“This theme was unexpected among pro-choice practitioners yet 18% of the respondents talked about involvement with abortion this way at some point in the interview. This theme tended to emerge slowly in the interviews and was always presented with obvious discomfort.”
Kathleen M. Roe “Private Troubles and Public Issues” Social Science and Medicine, Vol 29, No 10
“Later term abortions may be necessary, but you cannot read about them without feeling diminished as a human being. Something awful has happened, and simply as a matter of principle, we ought to be opposed.”
He said of pro-choice feminists:
“[they] talked as if late-term abortions affect only the woman, no mention of the fetus-child with the collapsed skull.”
Quoted in Suzanne Fields “Feminists Support an Evil Practice” The Washington Times, July 10, 2000
A lawsuit was aimed at the Queen’s Park Hospital in England, after an abortion led to a live birth:
From the “My Beautiful Abortion Baby” Lancashire Evening Telegraph, first published Wednesday 1st Nov 1995.
Office manager Julie Robb, 38, was admitted to Queen’s Park Hospital for a “therapeutic termination” after a scan revealed that her 23-week-old foetus could have serious abnormalities, [(cerebral palsy, water on the brain, or downs’ syndrome)]…. A team of medics induced Mrs Robb who gave birth to Elizabeth, weighing 696 grams (1lb 8oz), at 2.25am on December 7 last year
According to the testimony of medical experts, the baby “gasped” after it was born and showed signs of life.Also had heartbeat. The team (2 midwives and 2 specialists) decided not to revive the baby. Death certificate showed baby was alive for 90 minutes, Medical personnel testified it was less than 35 minutes.
Verdict was in favor of hospital
There have actually been many similar cases of babies born alive after abortions.
The Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which became law in 2001, forbids hospitals and clinics from aborting babies alive and leaving them to die. It was opposed by a number of pro-choice groups. It was also voted against by Barack Obama, then a senator.
When commenting about the uproar surrounding the partial-birth abortion ban, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists put out a statement that said `
“it could be considered more respectful to the foetus than established methods of abortion such as vacuum aspiration . . . in which the foetus is removed in fragments’
“Abortion: New and Disturbing Questions.” The Daily Mail. July 17, 1996. 11.
Here is a diagram of a vacuum aspiration, or suction abortion.
Carole Meyers OB GYN who has performed “hundreds of abortions” and worked as medical director of Planned Parenthood of Maryland:
Addressing crowd of students who had gathered to hear her speak at John Hopkins University:
“”If you are going to perform abortions, how is your family going to think about it? How will you tell your kids? What are you going to do if your church doesn’t want you to come anymore? How are you going to feel about a patient who admits she has picketed the clinic in the past? What about the woman who comes in for her third abortion and doesn’t want to hear about birth control? How are you going to feel about that? I’ll tell you how I feel. I get mad, frustrated, angry.”
unborn baby at seven weeks – most abortions are done at this point or later in pregnancy
((Patricia Meisol “A Hard Choice: A young medical student tries to decide if she has what it takes to join the diminishing ranks of abortion providers” Washington Post, Nov 23 2008))
Few doctors want to be abortionists. In this section, you can read about stigma and how it affects doctors.
It’s also interesting to note that this abortionist, like many others who work in clinics, gets frustrated and angry at women who have multiple abortions. If abortion is such a benign procedure, merely the removal of some products of conception and ending a pregnancy, why does it matter for woman has more than one? Why does it matter she relies on abortion instead of birth control? The truth is, the abortionist sees the little babies that were torn apart in every abortion and she or he knows the cost that these little people pay.
Many other doctors are disturbed by the act of abortion itself – pulling pieces of arms and legs off of babies or tearing them apart with the suction machine is not a very easy thing to do emotionally.
