“I found much distress in the clinic, but it involved not only the women. I saw the pain of the babies who were born burned from the saline solution used for late-term abortions. I saw the bits of feet, bits of hands, the mangled heads and bodies of the little people. I saw pain and felt pain.”
Paula Sutcliffe “Precious in My Sight” Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices Gail-Garnier-Sweet, editor Life Cycle Books (June 1985)
“Following [the doctor’s] directions, I took the collection bottle and poured its contents into a shallow pan. Then I used water to rinse off the blood and smaller particles which clouded the bottom of the pan. ‘Now look closely,’ the doctor said. ‘It is important that we have got all the stuff out.’ I looked in the pan to find that the stuff consisted of the remains of what had been, a few minutes before, a thirteen-week-old fetus. I could make out the remains of arms and legs and a trunk and a skull. I tried to piece them back together in my mind, to see if there were any missing parts. Most of the pieces were so battered and bloody they were not recognizably human. Then my eyes locked upon a perfect little hand, less than half a centimeter long. I stared at four tiny fingers and a tiny opposed thumb, complete with tiny translucent fingers. And I knew what I had done.”
12 weeks
Former clinic worker quoted by Stephen Mosher
Stephen Mosher A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One Child Policy pgs 60-61
“When they’re about 12 weeks, then the doctor takes the baby out with forceps. He takes the baby out in pieces. He checks each part and he places each one in a tray down below. When he finishes the procedure, I have to drain everything. We drain it to separate body parts from blood. We place all the parts in a jar that goes to the laboratory. It’s impressive how well-defined they are. You can’t believe what you are seeing. You see perfect little hands, tinier than those of a Barbie doll. You can see intestines, tiny ribs, their little faces, and their tiny squashed heads. You can distinguish among the parts if the baby was a boy or girl…. It makes me so sad to see the jars. It’s very hard for me to do all this. To see all that falls on the floor, or for example, to remove a tiny foot from the instruments. A girl who worked here told me that she came home with a tiny foot stuck to her uniform, close to her shoulder.
12 weeks foot
She, of course, hadn’t noticed until her husband told her…When the patient is more than three months pregnant, we have to prepare her so that she can come back the next day when she is dilated. The really large terminations are impressive. I have seen three fetuses come out whole. In one instance, you could see the little hand coming out of the uterus. The little hand was moving. But the most impressive thing was the baby that came out breathing. That time, the doctor got sick. The girl lived in Tijuana. They put dilators in her for two days. The baby was five and a half months.
five months
She didn’t have a car and came walking to the clinic. Then it seemed like she was going through labor. When the doctor started to work on her, the baby came out without any help. The child came out breathing and died right there….Since a few days ago, a substitute doctor has been coming in. He’s younger and has a different technique. He doesn’t scrape the uterus, he just uses the vacuum. Last Sunday, he couldn’t take it any more because we did some rather large terminations, around four months. He used a technique I hadn’t seen. He divided the ultrasound screen in two parts and used an apparatus during the entire procedure. Usually, what you see with the ultrasound is the child sucking his finger, or playing, but on this occasion when the doctor began vacuuming, you could see the baby was moving as if he hurt because it was pulling him or tearing something off. It was horrible, horrible.”
Clinic Worker
Miguel Vasquez “It was Horrible! Horrible! A First-Hand Account of What Goes on Inside a Chula Vista Clinic” San Diego News Notes
Nurse interviewed by a Priests for Life researcher described a first trimester abortion she witnessed:
10 week sonogram
“The doctor did a sonogram to show me that the baby didn’t feel it. On the sonogram, when he started the suction, the baby’s arms spread out. It immediately threw its hands out. Its little arms spread out. So, you know it had to feel it. [The instrument used for the first trimester abortion] it is a silver tube with stainless steel blades on it. He inserts it first, and then turns on the suction. The baby comes out all shredded. ‘Now, you watch this, and you’ll see how it doesn’t feel a thing.’ [The doctor said] I think it was kind of shocking to him. I looked at him and he looked at me, and then he wouldn’t look at me after that. I don’t think he had used a sonogram before during an abortion. It was over in a short period of time.”
This is from a student who preferred to remain anonymous:
“To begin, I must say that until yesterday, Friday, July 2, 2004, I was strongly pro-choice. I am a pre-medical student, and being very scientific, I understood that the mass of cells that forms the fetal body is not often capable of survival before 24 weeks in the womb.
I am also somewhat liberal, and I believed that every woman should have the right to choose what she did with her body and one that could potentially be growing inside of her.
This summer, I was accepted into a pre-medical program in NYC in which we are allowed to shadow doctors and see all sorts of medical procedures. When given the opportunity to see an abortion, I did not hesitate to accept the offer. It was something new, edgy, and exciting that I had never seen.
When I entered the operating room, it felt like any other I had ever been in. On the table in front of me, I saw a woman, legs up as if delivering a child although she was asleep. Next to her was a tray of instruments for the abortion and a vacuum machine for suctioning the fetal tissues from the uterus.
The doctors put on their gowns and masks and the procedure began. The cervix was held open with a crude metal instrument and a large transparent tube was stuck inside of the woman.
Within a matter of seconds, the machine’s motor was engaged and blood, tissue, and tiny organs were pulled out of their environment into a filter. A minute later, the vacuum choked to a halt.
The tube was removed, and stuck to the end was a small body and a head attached haphazardly to it, what was formed of the neck snapped. The ribs had formed with a thin skin covering them, the eyes had formed, and the inner organs had begun to function.
The tiny heart of the fetus,obviously a little boy, had just stopped — forever. The vacuum filter was opened, and the tiny arms and legs that had been torn off of the fetus were accounted for. The fingers and toes had the beginnings of their nails on them.
The doctors, proud of their work, reassembled the body to show me. Tears welled up in my eyes as they removed the baby boy from the table and shoved his body into a container for disposal.
I have not been able to think of anything since yesterday at 10:30 besides what that baby boy might have been. I don’t think that people realize what an abortion actually is until they see it happen.
I have been tortured by these images – so real and so vivid – for two days now…and I was just a spectator. Never again will I be pro-choice, and never again will I support the murder of any human being, no matter their stage in life.”
Some prominent doctors cannot understand why women do not abort their handicapped children. Dr. Cecil B. Jacobson, Chief of the Reproductive Genetics Unit of George Washington University Hospital:
“I can’t imagine any reasonably responsible person arguing against the abortion of mongols [down syndrome babies]… If we could tell what fetuses are going to be affected with cancer in their 40s and 50s, I would be for aborting them now.”
Cecil B. Jacobson, Chief, Reproductive Genetics Unit, George Washington University Hospital, Washington, D.C. Psychology Today, September 1975, page 22.
“There is no evidence that the handicapped child would rather not go on living. As a matter of fact, handicapped persons commit suicide far less often than normal persons. An interesting study was done at the Ana Stift in Hanover, Germany, a center where a large number of children with phocomelia, due to thalidomide are cared for. Psychological testing on these children indicated that they do indeed value their lives, that they are glad that they were born, and that they look forward to the future with hope and pleasant anticipation.”
Eugene F. Diamond, MD
Eugene F. Diamond MD “The Deformed Child’s Right to Life” in Death, Dying and Euthanasia, Dennis J. Horan and David Mall, eds (Washington DC: University Publications of America, 1977) 133 quoted in Francis J. Beckwith “Politically Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights” (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1993)
According to prenatal screening expert Eva Alberman, 92% of women who discover their carrying a fetus affected with Down syndrome choose to have an abortion.
The decision to abort a handicap baby is often framed in terms of concern for the child. Those who support killing these babies often say that they are sparing the children a lifetime of suffering. In reality, often the main reason why women abort their down syndrome children is that the children would be an inconvenience for them. Here is one example:
Natalie and Richard are a couple who aborted down syndrome baby late in pregnancy. Natalie gives the following reasons why she aborted:
“A seriously handicapped child takes a lot from your life that you wouldn’t otherwise have to give… We knew that a Down child would require, at best, constant care from us….”
This quote shows that the true reason that many women abort handicapped babies is their own unwillingness to make sacrifices. While this is understandable, there is a waiting list oof people willing to adopt handicap babies, especially babies with Down syndrome. Adoption is a viable option for these babies.
Mary E Williams. Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego, California: Greenhaven Press, 2002) 115
A woman with a special needs daughter wrote the following:
“My youngest daughter is 10 years old. Developmentally, however, she is more like an infant. She does not speak in words, cannot feed or dress herself, wears diapers and cannot walk without assistance. Hearing this litany of what she cannot do, many people would say it would have been better if she had not been born.
A few weeks ago, I attended a national conference on mental handicaps. Most of the participants were special needs professionals; many were parents. At one of the scientific sessions, a physician spoke about the remarkable strides which have been made in prenatal testing, making it possible to detect a whole host of genetic disorders in the womb. Now, of course, she said ominously, the “decision” can be made by the parents.
Her smug certainty that any “normal” parent would choose to get rid of a baby known to have some disability infuriated me. But what I found really astonishing was the temerity that allowed her to say such things to us, people who actually love and cherish the very children she is targeting for destruction. For us, they are not “the handicapped.” They have names and faces. They have their winning ways, their sweet charms, their difficult behavior patterns. They are our children and here she was telling us we had missed the boat by having them too soon, before the technology existed which would’ve allowed us to get rid of them.”
Joan McGowan, Human Life Review Spring/Summer 2000. Quoted in Mary E Williams. Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego, California: Greenhaven Press, 2002)
