Month: September 2012

A spokesperson for an abortion clinic met with pro-choice leaders to discuss a legislative plan to defend legal abortion. The group was discussing a plan to defend abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, up until birth:

“These people are political activists, Fran thought. Their work was critical to protecting abortion rights, but how many of them knew the reality of abortion, had seen the reality of what it destroyed? Fran felt like standing up and saying to those arguing for unrestricted abortions,

“You haven’t seen the little feet. They look just like the little feet pushpins that the antis wear.” As a provider at Repro once said, if half the pro-choice people saw the fetal remains of a 2nd trimester abortion, they would jump the fence into the antis’ arms.”

Sue Hertz Caught in the Crossfire: A Year on Abortion’s Front Line (New York: Prentice Hill Press, 1991) 122

“But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside.”

Clinic Worker Sallie Tisdale

Tisdale “We Do Abortions Here” Harpers Magazine October 1987

“I am walking out the back door, and I see a plastic jar of tissue and blood waiting to be sent to the path lab, and in the plastic jar a tiny perfect white hand. . . “

Clinic worker Ann Finger

.Ann Finger Past Due Seal Press 1990, p 86

From the brief of Dr. LeRoy Cahart Et. Al. In Steinberg V. Carhart:

After a portion of the fetus has been removed, other parts of the fetus remaining in the uterus will sometimes be alive. J.A. 258 (Stubblefield) The district court found out that sometimes the embryo or fetus is brought into the vagina while it is still living and intact. S.A. 9, 28. Physicians know that suctioning a pre-viable fetus or embryo out of the woman’s uterus will inevitably kill it.

“You are doing a destructive process. Arms, legs, chests come out in the forceps. It’s not a sight for everybody.”

Dr. William Benbow Thompson of the University of California at Irvine

.Liz Jeffries and Rick Edmonds “Abortion: The Dreaded Complication” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 2, 1981.

“It is advisable to use the biggest forceps that you can get through the cervix to morcellate the fetus…[the need to] “visually check the parts as they are retrieved” “is necessary to ensure complete evacuation but is part of the reason that second trimester abortion is not popular among surgeons. All those here who do second trimester abortions will agree that the most difficult ones are those between 14 and 16 weeks. In those, there is a tendency for the uterus to form an ‘hourglass’ and the head and part of the trunk to be trapped in the upper part and difficult to retrieve. The passage of large, recognizable fetal parts by the woman some hours or days later is extremely distressing for the woman and her family.”

Abortionist Dr. Cope

.Celeste McGovern “Fourteen Week Olds Cost 250- Cash” The Report. February 28, 2000

Reporters spent a day at the abortion clinic of Dennis Christensen. They described one of the abortion procedures this way:

Christensen performed two abortions that day on women who were at the end of the first trimester. In each case, the tissue was suctioned into a large glass jar, filling the bottom half inch. Christensen later poured it into a straining basin and examined it “to make sure we removed all of it.”

At one point, he picked up a tiny foot and placed it against a ruler. “Thirteen millimeters,” he announced, “which is consistent with 12 weeks of actual pregnancy.”

Later he held a tiny head. Its brain tissue will be sent to the National Institutes of Health for research on brain tumors.

Women Need Control over Birth Choice, Physician Says” Wisconsin State Journal. March 4, 2001. Quoted by Life Dynamics

“I was watching the doctor struggle with the cannula, trying to pull it out,” she said. “I didn’t understand what the resistance was all about. And I was very alarmed and all of the sudden the doctor pulled the cannula out and there, as I was at the woman’s side, I looked down at the cannula and there was a foot sticking out. I will never forget the feeling I had in my chest as the doctor pulled that cannula out. And it almost took the breath out of me. Because the reality of this was very hard for me…This sounds terribly cavalier, I suppose, but within about a month, like everything else we do after a while, it just becomes pretty routine and it has never bothered me since then.”

Nurse from a Seattle Abortion Clinic

M. Gianelli, “Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts,” American Medical News, July 12, 1993

“You have to dismember the fetus. You have to actually pull pieces of the fetus out.”

Former abortionist Brian Finkel (Finkel was later convicted of sexually assaulting several of his abortion patients)

.ABC 20/20 Transcript # 99030802-j11, A Woman’s Right, A Woman’s Risk:3-8-1999. Quoted at Deathroe.