“I often hear the argument [keeping] late-term abortion legal is necessary to save women’s lives in cases of life-threatening conditions that can and do arise in pregnancy.
Albany Medical Center where I worked for over seven years is a tertiary referral center that accepts patients with life-threatening conditions related to or caused by pregnancy. I personally treated hundreds of women with such conditions in my tenure there.
There are several serious conditions that can arise or worsen typically during the late second or third trimester of pregnancy that require immediate care. In many of those cases, ending or “terminating” the pregnancy, if you prefer, can be lifesaving. But is abortion a viable treatment option in this setting? I maintain that it usually, if not always, is not.
Before a suction D&E procedure can be performed, the cervix must first be sufficiently dilated. In my practice, this was accomplished with serial placement of laminaria. Laminaria is a type of sterilized seaweed that absorbs water over several hours and swells to several times its original diameter.
Multiple placements of several laminaria at a time are absolutely required prior to attempting a suction D&E. In the mid-second trimester, this requires approximately 36 hours or more to accomplish. When performing later abortion procedures, cervical preparation can take up to three days or more.
In cases where a mother’s life is seriously threatened by her pregnancy, a doctor more often than not doesn’t have 36 hours, much less 72 hours, to resolve the problem.
Let me illustrate with a real-life case that I managed while at the Albany Medical Center. The patient arrived one night at 28 weeks gestation with severe preeclampsia or toxemia. Her blood pressure at admission was 220/160.
As you are probably aware, a normal blood pressure is approximately 120/80. This patient’s pregnancy was a threat to her life and the life of her unborn child. She could very well be minutes or hours away from a major stroke.
This case was managed successfully by rapidly stabilizing the patient’s blood pressure and “terminating” her pregnancy by cesarean section. She and her baby did well. This is a typical case in the world of high-risk obstetrics.
In most such cases, any attempt to perform an abortion “to save the mother’s life” would entail undue and dangerous delay in providing appropriate, truly lifesaving care.
During my time at Albany Medical Center I managed hundreds of such cases by “terminating” pregnancies to save mother’s lives. In all those hundreds of cases, the number of unborn children that I had to deliberately kill was zero.”
Quoted in Adam Peters with Robert Alexander Pro-Choice Lies: How to Expose the Pro-Abortion Deception (Irvine, California: Renaissance Publishers, 2021) 36 – 37
The pro-life group Live Action just released a video where former abortionist Kathi Aultman describes a second-trimester D&E abortion.
She says:
I’m a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist with almost 33 years of experience, and I’ve completed over 500 abortions.
Today I’m going to describe a second-trimester surgical abortion called dilation and evacuation or D&E. A D&E is generally performed between 14 and 22 weeks of pregnancy.
Before a D&E abortion can be done, the cervix must be dilated slowly over one to two days with laminaria or a similar product. laminaria is a type of seaweed that absorbs water and swells to several times its original diameter.
When the woman undergoes the evacuation portion of the procedure. She lies on a table with her legs in stirrups. She may be given injections of local anesthetic in the cervix, IV conscious sedation, or general anesthesia.
The abortionist uses a speculum to open the vagina and uses an instrument to stabilize the cervix. Metal dilators may be used to further open the cervix if needed.
Once the cervix has been stretched open a cannula attached to suction tubing is placed inside the uterus. The suction machine is then turned on and the amniotic fluid surrounding the fetus is suctioned out. The fetus is too large to fit through the cannula, so he or she must be removed in pieces with a clamp such as this sopher clamp.
A sopher clamp is made of stainless steel and is about 13 inches long. At the tip there are rows of teeth for grasping.
The abortionist reaches into the uterus with the clamp and tries to grasp an arm or leg. Once the abortionist has a firm grip, she pulls forcefully in order to remove the limb. Piece by piece, the abortionist removes the arms and legs followed by the head or the body, including the torso and pelvis. Along with the intestines, the heart and the lungs.
The placenta is also removed. If the cervix has been over-dilated, the body or even the entire fetus may be pulled out intact.
Usually, the most difficult part of the procedure is extracting the fetus’s head, which at 20 weeks is about the size of a large plum. The abortionist must open the clamp widely to grasp the head and then crush it so that it will fit through the cervix.
The abortionist knows she has crushed the skull when a white substance, the fetus’s brains, leaks out through the cervix. The abortionist then removes the compressed head.
Any remaining limbs, organs, bone fragments, or pieces of placenta not removed with the forceps are removed by scraping the uterine lining with a large curette or by reinserting the suction cannula.
The abortionist then reassembles the fetal parts to make sure that there is nothing left inside the uterus which could cause infection or bleeding. Once all the parts have been accounted for, the bleeding has been controlled, and all the instruments have been removed from the vagina, the abortion is considered complete.
For the woman, this procedure carries the risk of major complications, including perforation or laceration of the uterus or cervix, with possible damage to the bowel, bladder, or other maternal organs. Infection and hemorrhage can also occur which can lead to death. Future pregnancies are also at an increased risk for loss or premature delivery due to abortion-related physical trauma and injury to the cervix.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I used to perform abortions. At the time I truly believed I was helping women. After the birth of my daughter, however, I realized that abortion doesn’t just undo a pregnancy, it kills an innocent human being.
Such terms as zygote, embryo, or fetus are simply terms that refer to age, like infant, toddler, and adult, and do nothing to diminish the humanity of the child.
As I cared for women in my OB-GYN practice, I also learned how abortion harms women. I stopped doing abortions because I could no longer kill babies just because they were unwanted. I am now a pro-life advocate.
I am proof that anyone can change no matter who they are, or what they’ve done. I invite you to join me and make a decision to protect the preborn.
Dr. Anthony Levatino, who performed over 1000 abortions, describes a first-trimester suction aspiration abortion:
“The baby has a heartbeat, fingers, toes, arms, and legs, but its bones are still weak and fragile.
The abortionist takes a suction catheter… It’s clear plastic, about 9 inches long and it has a hole through the center. It is inserted through the cervix into the uterus. The suction machine is then turned on with a force 10 to 20 times more powerful than your household vacuum cleaner.
The baby is rapidly torn apart by the force of the suction and squeezed through this tubing down into the suction machine, followed by the placenta.
Though the uterus is mostly empty at this point, one of the risks of a suction D&C is incomplete abortion, essentially pieces of the baby or placenta left behind. This can lead to infection or bleeding. In an attempt to prevent this, the abortionist uses a curette to scrape the lining of the uterus.
The curette is basically a long-handled curved blade. Once the uterus is empty, the speculum is removed and the abortion is complete.
The risks of suction D&C include perforation or laceration of the uterus or cervix, potentially damaging the intestine, bladder, and nearby blood vessels, hemorrhage, infection, and in rare instances, even death. Future pregnancies are also at a greater risk for loss or premature delivery due to abortion-related trauma and injury to the cervix.”
In 1984, the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson created the groundbreaking video “The Silent Scream,” which showed a baby being aborted via ultrasound. He was the cofounder of the pro-abortion group NARAL, and performed many abortions before he became pro-life.
In his memoir, he wrote:
By 1984, however, I had begun to ask myself more questions about abortion: what actually goes on in an abortion? I had done many, but abortion is a blind procedure. The doctor does not see what he’s doing. He puts an instrument into a uterus and he turns on a motor, and the suction machine goes on and something is vacuumed out; it ends up as a little pile of meat in a gauze bag.
I wanted to know what happened, so in 1984 I said to a friend of mine, who was doing 15 or maybe 20 abortions a day, “Look, do me a favor, Jay. Next Saturday, when you doing all these abortions, put an ultrasound device on the mother and tape it for me.”
He did, and when he looked at the tapes with me in an editing studio, he was so affected that he never did another abortion. I, though I had not done an abortion in five years, was shaken to the very roots of my soul by what I saw.
“I have taken the lives of innocent babies, and I have ripped them from their mothers’ wombs with a powerful suction machine…
There isn’t any way that you can say that there isn’t a human body inside of those containers when you can look and see the little arms, feet, and faces.”
MacArthur Hill, MD “Meet the Abortion Providers” Conference, Pro-Life Action League, February 1989
“Few doctors can do abortions for very long. Although women seeking abortions are told that the pregnancy is just a blob of tissue, the abortionist knows exactly what he or she is doing because they must count the body parts.
Eventually, the truth sinks in. It is especially difficult for ob/gyns because they are normally concerned about the welfare of both their patients, but in abortion, they are killing one of them.”
Donna Grisham Journeys of Choice (Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: Destiny Image Publishers, Inc., 2021) 114
Abortionist Dr. Kathi Aultman writes about one woman’s abortion experience:
“For years I performed abortions before becoming pro-life. While I was actively practicing as an OB-GYN, a woman came to me suffering from prolonged bleeding from a late-term abortion.
What she told me was shocking. She described being given medication and then being left in a cold room overnight with no blanket or call button. The next day, she was given more medication, and eventually told to sit on the toilet and push. She delivered a living 20-week-old baby boy into the toilet, where he drowned.
The experience traumatized her, and she described having emotional problems following the abortion. I knew from experience that this was not an isolated case.”
Aultman says:
“At the time, only six states required abortion clinics to report babies born alive after an abortion attempt to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Florida was not one of them. This meant that cases of infant death after abortion were not included in the agency’s widely quoted 2015 “Abortion Surveillance” report.
Of the six states that did report these numbers between 2003 and 2014, 143 babies were recorded as having died after being born alive after an abortion attempt.”
In an interview with Live Action, former abortionist Kathi Aultman describes her pro-life conversion, The interviewer is Lila Rose:
Rose: Can you tell us first how you got involved in doing abortions?
Aultman: Well, what most people don’t realize is, almost all OB/GYN’s have done abortions. Unless you have opted out on a conscience clause, you have to learn how to do abortions. Now at the time, I wouldn’t have opted out, because I felt abortion was really something that was important for women. I felt that no woman should have to have a baby if she didn’t want it. I felt that it was their right to have an abortion. They should have control over their own bodies. So I felt it was important, and I wanted to learn how to do it.
Rose: And where did that strong conviction come from, that women should have a right to an abortion?
Aultman: I think that really came from the, kind of, the women’s lib movement, and I was one of very few women in medicine at the time, so I had to really, not fight my way up, but had to try to be better at everything to get where I got. I wanted to make sure that women had access to abortion and I thought I could help with that.
Rose: And you first started, you learned how to do first trimester abortions and that you elected to learn second trimester abortions. Can you share more about that?
Aultman: We had an attending [doctor ] that I highly admired. As a matter of fact, this man had done my abortion several years earlier. And I just thought a lot of him, and he was doing late-term abortions, and I decided I wanted to learn how to do that.
I was challenged by the procedure and I really hate to say this, but the bigger the better. I cringe now when I say that, but I wanted to do the biggest ones I could. It was a challenge, and my whole focus was being good at what I did, and stretching the limits.
Rose: When you were doing those later trimester abortions what was, you said, “the bigger the better.” What was the experience for you like, when you were – these involved going in with forceps, and involved dismemberment. What was that like for you, as a medical professional, to try and distance yourself? From “this is not a baby, it’s just a procedure.” How did that work in your mind? What was your mindset when you were doing that?
Aultman: I think when you go through the process of medical school and residency, you learn to compartmentalize things. I think also, in medical school, you have to learn so much so fast that you just take it all in without question. I think I just bought the whole line that abortion was a part of women’s healthcare. I didn’t question it. I just bought it.
I think part of the problem was that I didn’t see a fetus any than a chick embryo. The chick embryos that we dissected in college. And I didn’t see them as human beings.
As a matter of fact, and again I hate to admit this, but when I would look at the parts that I had taken out, I was fascinated with them. I thought, “Oh, these are so cute. And they’re great, they’ve got little fingers and toes.”
I actually would do extra sections through the different organs when we would send them to pathology so that I could look at those pathology slides later, because fetal tissue is a little bit different than mature tissue. The cells were a little bit different. And so, I just wanted to find out everything about them that I could. But I did not see them as human beings. I just saw them as embryos and fetuses. Not as people.
Rose: And then what was the moment or the experiences that changed that for you. Instead of like, this is what, this is like, it might as well be a chick embryo, it changed to, “this is a human.”
Aultman: A baby.
I got pregnant while I was in residency, and I was moonlighting at an abortion clinic at the time doing abortions. And I was almost proud of the fact that here I was pregnant and I was still doing abortions. I felt like, well, my baby’s wanted, theirs is not. They have the right to abort their babies. And so I continued to do abortions during my whole pregnancy. But then when I went back after having had my baby, there were three patients there that changed my mind.
The first one was a young girl that came in, and she was scheduled that morning. I had done three abortions on her myself.
Rose: The same girl.
Aultman: Same girl. And she had had other abortions that I didn’t do, but I had done three of them. And I told the people at the clinic that I didn’t want to do it. And they said, “You don’t have the right to judge. It’s her choice. If she wants to use abortion as birth control, that’s up to her.”
I looked at them, and I said, “Yeah, but I’m the one that’s having to do the killing.” So I ended up doing the abortion, and afterwards I tried to get her to take birth control and she refused, so she left.
Then the next woman came in with a friend, and sometimes people did want to see the tissue. And the friend said, “Do you want to see the tissue?”
And she said, “No. I just want to kill it.”
And it just hit me, like cold water in the face. And I thought, “What did this baby do to you?” It’s not the baby’s fault.
And then the third woman was a mother of four, and she and her husband didn’t feel that they could afford another child. And so she came in for the abortion. And she cried the entire time. Thankfully, she was my last patient, because I just, I couldn’t do them after that.
I think I had finally made that baby = fetus connection. And I realized that that was a little person, just like my daughter was a little person. And the fact that they were no longer wanted was not enough for me to kill them.
But I have to say it was really sad because I still believed abortion was a woman’s right. I still believed that abortion was necessary, and I still referred for abortion.
It wasn’t until I started to see young girls in my practice who had babies and did really well. I had always thought that an unplanned pregnancy for a young girl was the worst thing that could happen to her. That’s sort of the normal thinking.
Rose: That’s the narrative
Aultman: That’s the narrative. And to see these girls do so well. And then I had other patients who were seeing psychiatrists, or were struggling with the physical complications of abortions. And, it just wasn’t what I expected. It didn’t jive with the rhetoric, the rhetoric that I had embraced.
Rose:… You were seeing in the clinic as you were doing these abortions, and you just saw this callousness in some of these experiences you had.
Aultman: Yes.
Rose: And then you went from that to still thinking, well, I’m not going to do abortions myself, you made the baby/fetus connection, as you say, but then you were still referring for abortions. So what were the other experiences? What happened next, that move you from “I can’t do an abortion, but I’m still okay with them” to “now I’m a pro-life advocate and none of it is okay.”
Aultman: I did one more little step in there, and that was that in the process of all of this, my marriage was falling apart and I ended up going back to church. I became a Christian, but that didn’t change my beliefs. I still felt it was a woman’s right. It was something that was important to have.
The other thing that began to change my opinion was as I saw children that were born at church – were born to women at church – young girls, who very easily could’ve easily had abortions. If I had been taking care of them I would’ve recommended they have an abortion. But they didn’t.
And as I watched those little children grow up into these wonderful people, I began to again see, okay, these are real people that we are killing. Who never get a chance to be alive. And we never get to see who they’re going to become.
The thing that finally did it was I had friends who were very good friends and accepted me even though they knew my position, but they were brave enough to at one point say, “We understand your position, but would you read this article?” And it was an article on the Holocaust. And comparing the Holocaust to abortion.
My dad was with…the group that opened the first concentration camp during World War II. And so I grew up with all those stories and those horrific pictures. And then, when I became a doctor, I couldn’t understand how the German doctors could do the things that they did.
Rose: So your dad was part of that generation.
Aultman: Yes, my dad fought in World War II, and was there when they liberated the first camp.
Rose: And you were hearing those stories.
Aultman: And I heard those stories my whole life growing up. When I read that comparison between the Holocaust and abortion, I finally understood how they could do the horrible things that they did. Because just as I didn’t see the fetus as a person, they didn’t see the Jews and the Gypsies and the others as people. And if you don’t consider someone human, you can do anything you want.
That’s when I realized that I was a mass murderer. I had killed all of these people. And that’s when I completely changed my opinion on abortion. And then it took a lot of prayer and a lot of healing to get over all of that.
Rose: Tell me more about that. So you have this pain of conviction, you see, you said yourself, considering yourself a mass murderer, looking at what happened during the Holocaust and saying, it’s happening today. It is happening here, with abortion.
Aultman: 6 million vs. 60 million.
Rose: 6 million vs. 60 million children. 6 million killed in the Holocaust. I mean, the numbers are horrific. So what did you do? What was your journey like once you had that realization? You saw, this is our Holocaust. This is our Holocaust, and your part in it, what was that journey like to even process that?
Aultman: It really took reading a lot of books, and some counseling, and then I actually went to the Christian healing center there in Jacksonville, and one of the women in our church was there, and was a counselor there, and prayed with me.… I never understood what “crying your eyes out” meant until that point. Because I literally cried my eyes out and couldn’t stop. But after that, that was probably the biggest bit of healing.…
Rose: There are hundreds of doctors or others out there right now, in America and worldwide there are more than that, but in the United States who are committing abortions. That’s part of their daily work. What message, especially for you having this realization of the life in the womb and feeling forgiven, knowing you’ve been forgiven what message would you send, would you want to share with all of them?
Aultman: That these are people. I would want them to have as much compassion for that baby as they would for the woman who’s in the circumstance of having the unplanned pregnancy. Because in the one case, when you think about it, there’s not that much time from the point you find out that you’re pregnant to the point that you deliver. Months. Not that many months.
So you’re thinking you’re helping this poor woman. There are alternatives for her, okay? There aren’t any alternatives for the baby. So you’re, in order not to inconvenience this person, or make her feel bad about “giving her baby away” or whatever you’re then taking the life of this other person, who never gets to experience the light of day. Never can grow up and be who they’re supposed to be. So, have as much compassion for the baby as you do for this woman. And let’s, as a society, provide the things that she needs to be able to thrive even though she’s had a pregnancy that was unplanned. So that we can encourage her, and help her, and also help this baby.
Rose: You have been a member of the American College of Obstetricians [and] Gynecologists for years, so those are the doctors, ACOG, the medical professionals of the United States who are involved in women’s healthcare.
They are pro-abortion. They support abortion. Tell us a little bit about your experience with ACOG, having gone from doing abortions now to being a pro-life advocate.
Aultman: It really saddens me because they’re the ones who really should be up to bat for women and their babies. And most obstetricians care about both patients – the mother and the baby.
As a matter of fact, and I didn’t tell you this earlier, not many people can continue to do abortions. They may do them during their residency training, but very few of them go on to do abortions because the normal human cannot be ripping apart and killing other human beings for very long, if you have a conscience. And that’s why there aren’t that many abortionists, because people just can’t continue to do it. Something happens along the way, where they see the light, and they realize what they are doing.
Rose: Do you think there’s a lot of doctors like that, who are members of ACOG, that went to medical school, that had to commit abortions in residency, then stopped – they don’t do it anymore – but they’re not as outspoken as you are. They’re not sharing their story. Why do you think that is?
Aultman: One, because they don’t want their pregnant patients to know they did abortions. Because here they’re trying to take care of their babies and do all of that, and most women don’t like the idea of someone taking care of their baby if they did abortions. So I think that’s a biggie.
It’s very embarrassing to say that you’ve done it. Most people want to hide that fact, they don’t want to put it out there.…
Imagine if all those doctors came forward to say, “yes, I did abortions during my training, and I regret it. It was a terrible thing to have done.” Think what would happen if all the women who’ve had abortions came forward and said what it really did to them. You know, the devastation it wreaked in their lives, which doesn’t show up on polls and things like that because women don’t want to talk about it. And oftentimes, it doesn’t hit them until they’ve either had a child later or they haven’t been able to have a child because of the abortion.
Rose: Dr. Aultman, you also testified multiple times, including before the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and you shared, as a former abortionist, what actually happens during a dismemberment abortion. So you’re talking about the baby. And you’re describing it in detail. But you’re sitting in front of, sometimes, groups of legislators who are still supportive of abortion through all nine months. What do you – I mean, it’s one thing, we talked about doctors, but for legislators, why do you think that is? How do we change them?
Aultman: I think they were the same as I was. They’re believing a lie. It is a delusion that is so powerful that it’s very difficult to get past. They truly believe they’re doing the right thing. I think some of them feel that if they become antiabortion they’ll lose the female vote. I think that’s probably a big one. But also, I think many of them really believe they’re doing the right thing. It’s a woman’s choice. We’ve convinced them that it should be a woman’s choice. So they see it as a choice issue, not a life-and-death issue. They don’t see the baby as a baby. They see it as an embryo, or a fetus.
And I think what may get through to them, I think, are their constituents telling them they don’t agree with their pro-abortion stand. And hopefully some friends that might come into their life who might gently talk to them about it and explain why their position is incorrect.
It wasn’t people yelling at me, berating me, trying to make me feel guilty, that’s not what changed my opinion. It was people loving me, even though I was pro-abortion and me respecting them and then them telling me, “well, maybe you should consider this.”
Rose: And the friends who had the courage to share that Holocaust article with you.
Aultman: Right. That’s really what did it.
Rose: Friends willing to talk to you about it in a loving way.
Aultman: In a loving way.… And I think that’s what’s critical. Because I actually used to think all of you pro-lifers were crazy radicals, rabid, nasty people. And I think that’s the opinion of many pro-abortion people.
Rose: They’ve got to get to know us.
Aultman: Yes. And as I have gotten to know people in the pro-life movement, I have found them to be the most loving, caring people that I’ve ever met.
