Abortion clinic worker: Sallie Tisdale

In her article in Harpers magazine, Tisdale talks about her work in an abortion clinic:

“A twenty-one-year-old woman, unemployed, uneducated, without family, in the fifth month of her fifth pregnancy. A forty-two-year-old mother of teenagers, shocked by her condition, refusing to tell her husband. A twenty-three-year-old mother of two having her seventh abortion, and many women in their thirties having their first. . . .Oh, the ignorance . . . .Some swear they have not had sex, many do not know what a uterus is, how sperm and egg meet, how sex makes babies. . . .They come so young, snapping gum, sockless and sneakered, and their shakily applied eyeliner smears when they cry. . . .I cannot imagine them as mothers.”

She talks about lying to women about their unborn babies:

“I am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about ‘the tissue’ and ‘the contents’ when the woman suddenly catches my eye and asks, ‘How big is the baby now?’. . . .1 gauge, and sometimes lie a little, weaseling around its infantile features until its clinging power slackens.

But she knows the reality of abortion:

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside. . . .I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. . . .”

Quoted in Jason Deparle, “Beyond the Legal Right; Why Liberals and Feminists Don’t like to Talk about the Morality of Abortion,” Washington Monthly Apr. 1989,

See babies aborted at this age.

Read more about clinic workers lying to women or withholding information from them.