I am a 20 year old woman who had an abortion 3 yrs. ago. I think it is appalling how these clinics lie. I was nine weeks pregnant and they told me my baby looked like was a piece of skin, that is had no heartbeat,or feeling. I had a friend recommend me to this website and I know its murder, and I know that if the clinic would actually tell the truth, there wouldn’t be so many abortions. There is so much pain involved, not only physically, but mentally as well. That clinic never told me that I would feel bad about this later, or that it reduces my chance of having kids, or about the risks of breast cancer. All they wanted was my money. They don’t care about these women, all they care about is getting that abortion done, and getting the money. I really like your site and I wish you the best of luck!
Please just sign me,
I had an abortion 10 years ago to date. I cant have children because of an infection I contracted after my abortion. I’m 25 years old. I beg people to practice safe sex. I didn’t think it could happen to me and it did. I’m a smart girl but it still happens. I used to be pro-choice to an extreme and hate all pro lifers. I definitely have changed my mind after seeing the online movie “the silent scream”. I can only imagine what my poor baby went through. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about my child. When I decided to get my abortion at 15 (without needing my parents consent) Planned Parenthood acted like I was just ordering the #5 combo meal from their fast food restaurant. There was no counseling, nothing. I beg , please, for any couple considering abortion don’t do it! If you don’t want your baby, I DO! Don’t let anyone talk you into killing your child! My boyfriend said he would leave me, I wish he did. Then at least I would still have my precious baby.
“I’m so sad… I’m so regretful for what could have been. …. Will I ever get over my regret? I want my baby back. …. I wish I would have thought through it more. I wish I would have taken the time to visit old friends I haven’t seen in a long time… who have little children in their thirties. But I didn’t… I was feeling pressed for time. As the more time that went by, the more attached I got. I was confused, I felt fat already and uncomfortable in my clothes. I wasn’t married. Didn’t want to get married… But would love to hold another big, fat healthy baby. I knew, with this one, there would be no arguing, no divorce or custody issues. I would be with this baby each and every day of its life. But its life never came to be… I’m still so sad… I feel I made the wrong choice. I believe in Pro-Choice… but why aren’t those clinics given more counseling requirements. Why couldn’t they be forced to make me wait another day or week? Perhaps I would be a very happy expecting mother… Now I’ll never know whether or not I made the right choice. I’m still so sad.”
I’m 23 I had a termination when I was 18. I had no idea how far I was, and I was in two minds.
The doctors and nurses seemed like they didn’t have any time for me. If only I was offered a scan then my baby would have been here now. I still regret what I done. Every morning when I wake up my baby is the first thing on my mind and the last at night. I still brake down and cry. When I had the operation the moment I woke up I felt empty. I knew I made the wrong decision. I don’t know what to do because I’m so depressed. I know now that I was talked in to doing it from my boyfriend and his mum. I torture myself by seeing those photos but its because I hate myself. If you are in two minds never ever go ahead with the termination. NEVER NEVER let anyone talked you in to it. My heart brakes when I think about what my baby was going through. Even the day when my boyfriend drove me to the hospital I was sobbing thinking this little person doesn’t know what his/hers mum is about to do to you. My boyfriend still kept saying shut up its the right thing. Why did I do it? I was a selfish bitch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A woman who calls herself pro-choice wrote the following:
“I just want my child back and I can never have that. (Expletive), I am never going to heal from this. I’m just going to live in regret, agony, and tears for the rest of my life. I have no purpose.
For a few fleeting moments my purpose was to be a mother and all that is gone now and I am left with nothing. And the would-be daddy? He didn’t give a (expletive). He just wanted me to kill it. He never cared one ounce about his child I was carrying. He didn’t want the responsibility even though he was physically and financially able to give his child the life it deserved. So now here I am. Alone. Empty. Utterly empty. Nothing can replace the child I wanted more than anything when I found out I was pregnant. But that chance has passed and now I am left alone. Crying. Alone. Inconsolable. I no longer have a purpose except to be miserable.”
“What is making it so difficult for me is the fact that I didn’t want to have an abortion. When I found out I was pregnant I wanted the baby. I knew I couldn’t handle an abortion, I knew I didn’t want one, I knew as I sat in the clinic crying I should leave but I didn’t. I got on that table crying, shaking, being told by the nurses I needed to calm down so they could give me the anesthesia. It was horrible. It was traumatic. I don’t know why I didn’t leave. I let TK convince me if I did it everything would be OK, that he was going to take care of everything and make it better. I knew in my gut that was not going to happen. I knew I shouldn’t abort my child but I wanted to believe in the impossible. I wanted to believe that if I did it magically TK and I were going to have some kind of wonderful relationship. We didn’t have a relationship before I got pregnant, why would I think we could have one after? I longed for what I had never had – love, family, someone to be there for me. I knew if I kept the baby TK was going to shut me out so stupidly I did what he asked me to, I aborted my baby.”
Joan Appleton was a head nurse at the Commonwealth Clinic, she states,
“I was very active in the National Organization for Women (NOW). As a registered nurse, I thought that I had a wonderful opportunity as a nurse and as a firm believer in choice to be able to actually practice my political beliefs.
I looked at it as a gift, so I went about working hard at the (abortion) clinic for four years and remained active within NOW.
The doctors that we used were primarily physicians who were starting out in practice and would do abortions until they had enough money to open their own private practice. Or they were physicians who didn’t have such a hot practice and did abortions to pay for their medical malpractice insurance.
I never, ever had a doctor in the five years I was there who did abortions because he believed it was the right of the woman. It was not what was foremost in his mind. I’m not saying that they don’t exist, but you certainly can’t prove it by me or by my clinic.
I have come to the realization that there is a great deal of diversity among abortion clinics in different states. My clinic, in Falls Church Virginia, we were primarily nurses. I was head nurse at the clinic. My entire staff were nurses or lab technicians, and we really didn’t have any type of secular personnel outside of the secretarial work. Upon moving to Minnesota, unfortunately the freestanding clinics that I have found, there are no medical personnel outside of the doctor who is performing the abortion.
The differences in these clinics have to do with state regulations. The state of Virginia is regulated. Medical staff is required. In many, many states, there are no state regulations. So what they end up being, actually, are legalized back alley abortions.
12 week ultrasound
The doctors that we use are, were primarily physicians who were starting out in practice and would do abortions to earn enough money until they had their own private practice going. Or they were physicians who didn’t have such a hot practice and use working at abortion clinics to pay for their medical malpractice insurance, which for especially OB/GYN’s, is extremely high, all across the country.
I was convinced that pro-choice was indeed the best thing for women. I began to work more with organizations like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and NAF on certain projects, and began to learn even more. I was issuing birth control pills after an abortion and this is where I learned the real business, the real work of the abortion industry.
She goes on to describe how clinic workers handed out low dose birth control pills (with a higher failure rate) and neglected to tell women that taking a birth control pill while on antibiotics interferes with the action of the pill and makes it useless. This way, they were able to get more women to come in for abortions, when their birth control failed
I often saw women who were injured emotionally by abortion. However, my supervisor told me, “if she’s having a problem after her abortion, it’s because she was having a problem before her abortion.”…
One of the things that kept bothering me even while I was head nurse in the clinic, was why it was such an emotional trauma for a woman and such a difficult decision for a woman to make, if if it was a natural thing to do. If it was right, why was it so difficult? I had to ask myself that all the time. I asked myself too, I counseled these women so well, they were so sure of their decision, why are they coming back after me now, months and years later, psychological wrecks.
We deny, we in the pro-choice movement and in the abortion industry, deny that there is anything like postabortion syndrome, yet it is real, and they do come back, and I couldn’t deny their presence, and the numbers were increasing, and I kept asking, why?
I started out in the pro-choice movement believing I was helping women, believing that women had the right to choose, they had a right to life, they had the right to go on. I thought when I was counseling women, I was preparing them. I was preparing them, I was helping them through a difficult situation so they could go on with their lives. I told them that they were the most important person on this earth, that nothing was more important than them. And once we see you through this difficult situation, once this is over you can go about your life, you now have the freedom, you can go to college. Guess what folks, it didn’t happen. And I had to stop and say, what’s going on? Why isn’t this happening? Instead you’re going out, you’re getting pregnant again, you’re getting diseases, how am I helping you? And those are the questions that were gnawing, gnawing, and gnawing on me.
If it was right, why are they suffering? What have we done? We created a monster, and that we don’t know what to do with it. We created a monster so that we could now be pawns to the abortion industry, those of us women who really, really still believe in women’s rights. Those of us who still believe in care and are pro-woman, who still believe that we are worth something, we are intelligent, we aren’t doormats, we aren’t something to be used, and we used ourselves. We abused ourselves. And most of us won’t accept it, most of us can’t accept it. Most of the people, those who work in the abortion industry, those who really care and believe, can’t accept the bad part, can’t accept the flaws.
And I too had seen an ultrasound abortion. It was, we did first trimester, this was late first trimester, probably early second trimester, really we could look to 13.7 weeks. Give or take. I can’t remember offhand what the specific problem was, but we wanted to do the abortion by ultrasound, to make sure that we did indeed get the entire, all the baby. The terminology was that we wanted to make sure we had the entire pregnancy. I handled the ultrasound while the doctor performed the procedure, and I directed him while I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. I had seen Silent Scream a number of times, but it didn’t affect me – to me it was just more pro-life propaganda. But I couldn’t deny what I saw on the screen. After that procedure, I was shaking, literally, but managed to pull it together, and continue on with the day.
My way of getting out of NOW was that I was a guest speaker at a Virginia NOW dinner. I got up to the podium and I said, “Folks, I can’t do this anymore. There is something wrong here and I can no longer be a part of the abortion industry or a part of the pro-choice movement and so I can no longer be a part of NOW.”
1st trimester sonogram
Pro-Life Action League: Meet the Abortion Provider
Dr. Tiller was a late term abortionist who practiced in Witchita, Kansas. At the time of his violent and tragic death at the hands of an anti-abortion fanatic, he was facing several malpractice suits and other legal problems. In the following case, Dr. Tiller was accused of deceiving a woman and performing an abortion against her will.
According to Christina Dunigan at Realchoice.com
“Dolores” Meets George Tiller
Dateline: 1/8/99
“In the fall of 1989, [Dolores C.] encountered health problems and bleeding which she associated with pregnancy. On the suggestion of her boyfriend, she went to ‘Women’s Health Care Services’ … to seek medical care and advice.”
On behalf of his client, who I call “Dolores C.” to protect her privacy, attorney Ted Amshoff filed suit against Tiller and his business. What follows is her story, told in her attorney’s words as much as possible.
“When [Dolores C.] first suspected she was pregnant, she did not consider abortion, and she so informed Defendants. [Dolores C.] wanted to keep her baby and she informed Defendants that she did not believe in abortion unless it was the only alternative.”
Dolores had a pregnancy test at Women’s Health Care Services, which confirmed the pregnancy.
“Defendants then told [Dolores C.] that her health was at risk because the pregnancy was ectopic, or tubal, and that the pregnancy was in the fallopian tube on her right side, close to the uterus. Defendants told [Dolores C.] that the risks of death from a ruptured tubal pregnancy was very great, and that ‘surgery’ should be performed to remove the tubal pregnancy.”
Although an occasional undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy (pregnancy outside the uterus) will survive to viability and be delivered without killing the mother, these cases are so rare that they’re considered freakish accidents. Although there have been rumors about doctors successfully transplanting ectopic pregnancies into the uterus, these have not been verified. The only known treatment for ectopic pregnancy is to remove it, either by surgery or by using drugs to kill the embryo and allow it to be expelled or absorbed by the woman’s body.
“In reliance upon the training, expertise, advice, and counsel of Defendants, and under the impression that she was undergoing a procedure to surgically remove a tubal pregnancy, [Dolores C.] consented to such a procedure and submitted to a medical procedure performed by Defendants on November 4, 1989.”
“In actuality, Defendants performed an abortion, terminating a healthy, wanted child or children. [Dolores C.] subsequently learned that her pregnancy had not been ectopic and that the procedure performed had been an abortion.”
Dolores filed suit against Tiller and Women’s Health Care Services in November of 1991.
“[Dolores C.] reasonably relied upon Defendants’ expertise and their representation to submit to the ‘surgery’ as the only method available to save her life.”
The suit also alleges that Tiller and his corporation continued to make attempts to “conceal the true nature of the state of affairs” surrounding the abortion.
“Defendants’ actions in performing an unnecessary and nonconsensual abortion upon Plaintiff was extreme and outrageous conduct, going beyond all possible bounds of decency, and was atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community.”
I would say so. Tiller’s supporters might think otherwise.
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Once I graduated from medical school, I returned to Memphis for residency in ob-gyn at the University of Tennessee. It had become a tradition within our residency program that the most lucrative and sought after moonlighting jobs were found in the three local abortion clinics.
You could make good money without having to leave town to work nights in hospital emergency rooms.
I knew there were good residents who chose not to do abortions for religious reasons, but I never really understood what one thing had to do with the other. My best friend in college had an abortion, and I had been very supportive of her decision at the time. We were thankful that the Supreme Court had made abortion legal the year after we started college. It seemed only logical that when I was offered the chance to provide those services that I had an obligation to do it. After all, if doctors who believed in a woman’s right to choose didn’t do abortions, who else would?
By the time I was a senior resident, I was medical director of one of the clinics and spent my vacation time at pro-abortion seminars and political functions.
It was not until I was pregnant myself that I began to really examine my feelings about the moral aspects of abortion. It had taken over a year for me to become pregnant with my daughter. The first time I saw the tiny little flicker of her heartbeat on an ultrasound screen I fell completely in love with her. I finally had to come to terms with the fact that the only thing that made my daughter any different than all those tiny babies I had terminated was the fact that I wanted her. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes and I was at last able to see what I had not allowed myself to see in all those years of doing terminations.
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Dr. Moore now conducts training sessions for volunteers at a local crisis pregnancy center about the medical and emotional complications of abortions.
Deborah Henry was hired at an abortion clinic after working at a clinic that did not do abortions. She gives her testimony at the Meet the Abortion Providers Conference in 1993.
“We had quite a few women coming through the clinics who would be referred for abortions.
Three of the doctors that I worked for in that clinic had their own practice and they had four different offices throughout the area. This is where our referrals [were] to.
After a while, I wanted to get out of the clinic because they just weren’t paying enough money. A doctor offered me a position in his own private practice in Livonia, so I took the position. He explained to me that they did the abortions, but again, I didn’t think too much of it. At that time, I was pro-choice, or pro-abortion as now I would say it, and I didn’t really think much about what abortion was. I used to think of abortion as eliminating a problem, instead of killing a baby.
The women who would come into the office mostly came in for an abortion. We only did about four a day–it wasn’t like a typical abortion clinic, but we did more than our share. The women would go through routine exams, blood work and blood pressure, and then we would confirm the pregnancy with a urine test. I did not experience any of the women having abortions who were not pregnant, although this may have happened. I just was not aware of it.
The reasons that women had for having an abortion were totally unreal. I can see this now; but at that time, the brainwashing helped me to understand why they had to have these abortions. We were told as medical assistants that we were there to help the women, no matter what the reasons were. Many women could not afford to have babies, so we would use examples–like the price of babies’ shoes, the price of clothing, how much it cost to raise a baby. If they weren’t finished with their education, the hindrance it would have on their education, how they would have to find a baby sitter, who was going to take care of that baby for them? We would find their weaknesses and work on them. After the basic questions, they were told briefly about what was to happen to them after the procedure. All they were told about the procedure itself was that they would experience slight cramping similar to menstrual cramps, and that was it. They were not told about the development of the baby. They were not told about the pain that the baby would be experiencing or the physical effects or the emotional effects that it would have on them. They had no idea who was going to be there to help them when they fell apart afterwards. They were taken into the room then, and, as I said, there was no counseling done. These women basically had no idea what they were getting themselves into. They were just told to lay on the table; they were undressed.
Some of the women were a little apprehensive about it. We were told that in explaining to them that we could never use the word “babies.” It was always tissues, tissues of cells or clusters of cells or products of conception. We would then start the procedure.
unborn baby at eight weeks
There were three basic procedures that we would use, and I will go into a little bit more detail about them. The first one is the most common procedure that is used–that is the vacuum curettage. From some research that has been done, it was explained that the suction on these machines is 49 times stronger than that of your home vacuum cleaner. I realize that many of you are familiar with many of the procedures that we do, and some of you may not be. But for those of you who are, please bear with me and just think about what I am saying. I have seen this, and I am here to reaffirm what you have heard, because everything you read about is the truth. None of this is lies. We don’t exaggerate any of it.
The vacuum curettage is normally done between 6 and 8 weeks of pregnancy. The instrument is inserted into the woman’s uterus, and then the baby is sucked out of the uterus. She experiences the pain and the baby is then pulled into the jar. We would take it out of the little sac, lay it in the pan. The doctor would then come in and examine it. If he felt that it was adequate enough tissue, we would take the baby, put it into a jar and send it to the lab if the mother had insurance. If she had no insurance, the baby was simply put down the garbage disposal.
14 weeks – early D&Es are done at this stage
The second common procedure that I have assisted in is the D&E, which is dilation and evacuation. This is normally done between 9 and 16 weeks of pregnancy. I noticed many times that the laminaria was brought into the description. But in my experience, we did not use laminaria all the time; sometimes, we did. A laminaria would be inserted the day before and then the next day, the women would come back in to have the procedure done. However, on the ones that did not have the laminaria, we would use instruments, that are like long metal rods and each end is a little wider than the last one which were inserted into the cervix to help dilate it. of course, through this procedure, the woman is going through a lot of pain. She is given an IV of Valium and Sublimaze to help make her relax, but she is awake during the whole procedure.
The procedure starts with an aspiration of the fluid, and then the doctor uses his forceps to go in and literally break the limbs off of the baby. There was one incident where a white piece came out and I asked the doctor later on what it was, and it was the baby’s skull. I can still, to this very day, hear the crushing noise of that baby’s skull being crushed. The women are feeling pain. It is not until after the procedure that they realize what is happening to their baby or to themselves. Ninety percent of these women start crying afterwards and it is not because of the pain.”
….
20 weeks – candidate for D&E
“The women were never given any type of alternatives to the abortion. It was just automatically assumed that they knew what they wanted. They were never told about adoption agencies. They were never told about people out there who were willing to help them–to give them homes to live in, to provide them with care and even financial support. The euphemisms that are used — clusters of cells, products of conception, or just plain tissue — are all lies.
10 weeks
I have been there, and I have seen these totally formed babies as early as 10 weeks, a couple of inches long with a leg missing, or with their head off. These are things that I have to live with now. I know the Lord has forgiven me, but I can never erase those things from my mind. The sounds of those bones breaking, The sight of those babies. It seems like the longer I go on working with the Pro-Life people, the more it is affecting me. I can understand the reality of a baby inside of you–a full baby growing.
One of the famous lines that the doctor’s wife used to use after the procedure, when she would come in and the women were crying–she would pat them on their shoulder and say: “It’s okay, honey, everybody makes mistakes–that’s why pencils have erasers.” How can you erase that thought from your mind? Where is she going to be when that woman is threatening suicide because she realizes that she killed her child, and there is no bringing that baby back. Where is she going to be then? She is off, counting her money and buying new cars, or whatever. She doesn’t care.
When I was in Nuremberg, I came across an interesting story I always repeat this when I speak–about little Josh. His mother went through a divorce and had an affair shortly afterwards. She got pregnant and she was forced to have an abortion. Afterwards, she kept experiencing pain, so she went to the doctor. She had not had any relationships since this one. So, she knew that she could not have been pregnant again because she had had the abortion and had not had any relations. That doctor had told her that what had happened was that because of the abortion, she developed a tumor, and that they were going to have to perform a hysterectomy. She was on the table, just about ready for the surgery, when the doctor did another exam and found that it was not a tumor. She was, in fact, still pregnant. She continued on with the pregnancy and little Josh was a miracle in himself. At the program, he had a sweatshirt on that said: “I Survived the Abortion Holocaust.” Unfortunately, because of the procedure, he did have a scar on the side of his head, and slightly impaired hearing and vision. What they think happened was that he might have had a twin that was, indeed, aborted.
…
10 to 12 weeks
We had a rather interesting group of people outside of our clinic–the picketers. They were out there almost every single day, with their signs, walking back and forth, really looking ridiculous out there. We were told to ignore them because they were silly. They didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t understand the justification for these women, and, of course, I believed it. So when I would go to my car every day they were out there. I would look down–I wouldn’t look at them at all. I was afraid that they would say something to me. But I found out that they were all very loving people. One of them in particular is Lynn Mills. She is the Director of the Michigan Pro-Life Action League. We have since become best of friends.
…
One day we decided to meet at a local restaurant with one of my other co-workers, and she had taken along one of her friends. We debated all of these questions that I thought meant that it was okay to have an abortion. Lynn had a reason or an answer for every single question that I had for her. I went back. It took a little while longer, but eventually it hit home. More than that, I think it was the Lord working on me then. I really think that he has given me the strength to endure everything that I saw in that clinic. I was only there for six months, but I think there was a reason for it because now I can go out and tell everybody what I experienced.
…
16 weeks
There are a few more experiences that I want to go into before I forget. There was one incident of a baby who was about 16 weeks. One of the girls had called me into the lab as she was cleaning up, and on the end of the cannula, which was the instrument at the end of the hose, was a little baby’s foot. It was about half an inch long. This foot was perfectly formed. I couldn’t believe it. I was so amazed by the sight of it. It was all black and blue. When you drop something on your foot and your foot becomes bruised, it is usually because of pain. This baby’s body was completely ripped apart because of the abortion.
In another incident, the hose popped off of the machine, and we had blood splattered all over us. This poor woman just lay there and cried. It was too late for any of us to do anything about it. That baby was dead.
I was told that one of the Pro-Life problems is that we talk too much about the babies being ripped apart. We show terrible pictures–we dwell on these too much. What are we supposed to do? This is the reality of abortion. Are we supposed to say, Oh, don’t go into that abortion–your fetus, or tissues, will become deceased? It doesn’t make sense. You tell them the truth–the facts. We are not there to lie to them. I am there to tell them the truth. Babies are being ripped up. Yes, babies do look like this after an abortion. And yes, it does hurt your baby, and most of all, it does affect the woman.
There was an incident of a 14-year-old girl this past spring, who was pregnant. Her mother forced her to have an abortion. The doctor botched it up and now she’s sterile. How is that mother going to answer to that girl when she grows up and understands later on that she will never be able to have a child?
We had a lady who came into the clinic who was married to a foreign man. This was really interesting because still, to this very day, I don’t understand how this marriage was existing. He could not speak English, and she couldn’t speak his language. I guess there was some communication, but not enough. She told him that she wanted to make a baby. He didn’t know what he was doing and she ended up pregnant. So when she told him they were going to have a baby, he was upset. He didn’t want a baby. He didn’t know this was what he was doing. So, she went in and had an abortion. Just like that–for no reason. She didn’t want a baby now. That was it.
five weeks
We had another woman who came into the clinic who was on her ninth abortion. She was about 40 years old. Nine! There is no justification for it. I just don’t understand it. I get dumbfounded sometimes just thinking about it again.
….
Our doctors used to also work with surrogates, which is becoming a very popular thing now for infertility patients. I couldn’t understand how he could go in one room and kill a baby, and go in the next room and give his full effort in trying to impregnate another woman for a couple who could not have a baby. It was even stranger because every once in a while, we would get a letter from, for instance, a couple in California who couldn’t have any children. They were sending letters out to different offices, hoping that they would get a response from a pregnant woman who was willing to give up her baby for adoption to them. The doctor wouldn’t consider that at all. I mentioned it to him. I said that this couple was so nice–a nice picture, a nice home, and they made nice money. They could offer a baby everything. I asked the doctor why we couldn’t refer one of our women to them? He said that we couldn’t do that–the women were here because that is what they want to do and we were not to interfere with their decision. That was all of the answer that we would ever get.
Probably the most effective thing that converted me over was a nightmare that I had one night, shortly after I had met with Lynn. I had this dream that I was in the examining room with the doctor, and we had just completed an abortion. Alongside her table was another little table and we had a little baby that was about so long. I had never really experienced this, but this baby was born. He was just laying on the side of the table. His little leg was dangling off the side and his body was covered with a paper towel. The mother looked over and said, “Do I have to lay here and look at this baby?” The doctor asked me to take the baby into the lab. I picked up the baby, It was one of those dreams where there is an endless hall, and you are walking on and on and on, and you are never getting to your destination. All I could feel in my hand was this big baby. I woke up and I was crying and in a sweat. I was never so shaken by anything in my life. It was the most horrible experience that I have ever had. For the first time in my life, I realized that what I had been involved in was killing innocent babies. I didn’t do the abortion itself, but I might as well have. I handed those instruments to the doctor. I still have nightmares–not as often and not as much, but I think it is a reminder to tell me that I have to keep going on for these babies, and with the love and support that I get from all my new Pro-Life friends, I am able to do this. I hope that there are some people here infiltrating our convention because you know what I am saying is true. I want you to think about this. When you go home and you have nightmares about those dead babies, it is because you are killing them. That is all there is to it. Abortion is murder. There is no other way to put it. Hopefully, you will call one of us, and, I guarantee, we will be there with open arms to greet you and to help you through this ordeal.
This testimony came from a conference held by The Pro-Life Action League
“I got into my medical training. As part of the medical training, abortions became a necessary procedure, according to my chief of my department. This was in 1971. This was a few years before the law changed in the country, but it changed in New York a few years before, and the abortion law changed, and we were going to do abortions. After all, we needed to serve women. We needed to do it in a complete way. We needed to know all the procedures that we needed to do for women. We needed to know how to do them well; otherwise we weren’t considered effectively trained. Our chief said that if we didn’t do the abortions, we might as well get out of obstetrics and gynecology because we just wouldn’t be a complete physician. He was a very influential man. I remember that he would be up with us at night, very frequently, with patients.
He wasn’t an “ivory tower” sort of guy–distant from the other residents in my training program. He was there with us, so we respected this man. He was brilliant, but right there on the frontlines with us, so when we started doing the abortions, we had panels. I don’t know if any of you remember that, but there were panels that the women had to pass by before they had the abortion. They were made up of nurses, social workers, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like, to very carefully see if the women really were rather ill, medically or emotionally, before they had the abortion.
The abortions, when we started, were done by the D&C method–there was no suction then. This is where you dilate and curette–you actually scrape the lining. This took, sometimes, 15 to 20 minutes, even for an eight- or ten-week-size uterus, so it was kind of a bloody sort of thing. We didn’t really like it, doing it, when we started, really. one doctor was Catholic, so he was allowed by his beliefs not to do that, but the others of us went along with peer pressure.
We thought about it, though, and we felt uncomfortable about it, but we sort of did it. We knew we were going about it quite carefully, and we only did about five or six a week, so amongst 12 or so residents, that meant we only did one about every two weeks.
But things gradually changed–new technology came along; we developed the suction procedure, and things went much quicker. It wasn’t as bloody and it was quicker and it was a little bit easier to take. I can’t really say that any of us had nightmares about this thing at that time. We just felt kind of uncomfortable doing them. But when the suction came along, we did them quicker, and then we did five or six in a day. Then gradually, those panels dropped by the wayside.
We were doing too many to really have them go through this arduous, long process of evaluation, and then the reasons, of course, for abortion–the severity of the reasons, medically, became less and less, and then emotional problems needed to be less and less severe. It was a gradual desensitization, so to speak, or toleration of doing them, more and more and in larger numbers.
Then we advanced up along in pregnancy a little bit further. It used to be we didn’t go beyond about ten weeks. Then we want up to 12 and we kind of stayed there for a while.
The media was very active early on. It really probably was one of the major influences to us. It told us that abortion was number one, legal, that it was to serve women, it was to give women a choice, more or less give them a freedom to grow and to take their rightful place in society where they had been kind of pushed down prior to that.
We believed the lie that there were tens of thousands of women being maimed and killed from illegal abortions prior to the legalization of abortion law. It kind of made things feel a little bit better. By this time, since we were doing five or six a day, it didn’t bother us as much.
In my life at this time, too, I had become married and I had moved, back in 1973, from Albany down to Atlanta, Georgia, with the Army–Uncle Sam got me. I spent two years there at Fort McPherson in Atlanta Georgia. During that time, I had one baby; then I had another baby, and I have two boys. I also began working in abortion clinics. That was the newest thing. There were like seven or eight of them at that time in Atlanta.
I had been moonlighting at other times to make money to save to go into practice, because going into practice is expensive for a young doctor, and you needed to save your money in order to do that, so the clinics offered an easy way to make money.
Prior to that, I had to do insurance physicals, and I had to travel all over the countryside to do them, so that didn’t really pay off too well. I had to go down and work in Emergency Rooms a hundred miles away for 36, 48 hours at a time; up all that time working.
And they didn’t pay me, maybe a few hundred dollars for doing that, so that wasn’t going to amount to much. In the clinic, I could make $25.00 for each abortion case, but we did 20 or 30 of those some days, and I remember one day, when they really got going, we did 62. That was my high point, or, you might say, low point. So you could make a great deal of money doing the abortions, it became quite evident.
Through my industriousness and my skill, I was sort of appointed by the medical director of the clinic to more or less take over the running of the clinic from the medical perspective and I, myself, became the medical director of a clinic there.
Something was happening to me also at that time, emotionally, though. As it has been spoken about, I could do an abortion–rather, I could do several hours of abortions–and feel nothing. I was just a good technician. I think at the most, I would get a little bit of a charge out of the fact that women occasionally would thank me for doing the abortion.
They were really relieved of the pressure that that would have brought on to their lives. But, for the most part, I didn’t think much of it at all at that time. It wasn’t until I became divorced and began really searching for something more. It was sort of like, here I was a doctor; I was making a lot of money; but what did I have?
There must be more to life than this. I sort of had this searching feeling from inside of me. Something was not there. Something was missing. I thought at first it might be love, you know. So you take that to its natural extreme–I had a relationship with a woman outside the marriage–and the marriage broke up, and I became divorced.
The sad part, of course, was that two little boys lost a father in the case. But still, I was determined. I felt that this time, I finally had it made–here I was, a bachelor doctor in Atlanta, Georgia, with just everything before me. I got all the women I wanted, and all the good times, life in the fast lane, so to speak. I really felt that I had it made, but I still had this gnawing sort of emptiness inside.
What happened then was a Christian girl came into my life and influenced me, basically. The reason she came into my life to start with is because the only prerequisite that I had for dating somebody was that they looked good. She happened to look good. So with that great motivation, the Lord twisted that around. She broke up with me, but on doing so, she gave me two Scriptures.
Now that should have, under this influence, had absolutely no influence on this guy at all. You have to picture me now. I was a bachelor doctor; I had an Afro and a beard that made my face look rather round all the way; I had a leather jacket from K-Mart–it wasn’t really leather, but it looked good, and I looked tough and I took Karate to prove it. I had a motorcycle, too, of course. You have to have a motorcycle with a jacket.
So this is this person here. Why this Christian ever dated me, I have no idea, but God did. She gave me two Scriptures–Jeremiah 15 and Psalm 139:13-18, well known to a lot of people. I had not read the Bible for years–you know that–and I hadn’t. But for some reason, these Scriptures meant something to me.
Now, she knew I had done abortions and felt terrible about them and this was to hopefully change my mind, and I kind of laughed. But when I read them, I didn’t laugh because it was just as if there was a knife that went right through my middle and it made me realize that instead of serving women, I was killing babies. This slowed this super-macho guy down real quick. But, it didn’t stop me from doing the abortions.
What those Scriptures say, briefly, and meant to me, is that God knew us before we were conceived (me, before I was conceived–all the babies I ever killed, before they were conceived), He had plans for their lives and they became human beings to me, in the truest sense of the word–they became babies, they became children, really, in a deeper sense than ever before. So, what they did to me was they made me feel uncomfortable doing the abortions. I just plain felt uncomfortable doing them. The Lord knew this.
14 weeks – D&E abortions are usually done after this point
At the same time, He knew that I was going to be starting to do these D&E procedures, because just at that time the D&E procedures were starting up in the clinic. Now, as you have heard about these, the babies are bigger.
They are visible, they are fully-formed babies, and you are tearing them apart from below. I was experienced–I had done many, many thousands by then–so I was sent to Chicago to learn this procedure, and I did, because no one else knew how to do them safely. So, I did them and I started doing them, and then I really started feeling uncomfortable.
The other thing that was shocking to this science of fetology that may have been talked about today was well-developed now. Interestingly enough, almost parallel with the abortion movement, this (I am sure God set this up, of course) was to show everyone that at the same time we are killing babies to tell us that they really were babies.
I think the greatest thing there is– there are all sorts of details on babies feeling things and having brain waves and being so well-developed and almost indistinguishable really from us and our own sensitivities–but I think the greatest thing that got to us was the ultrasound. At that time, the ultrasound was a sound wave picture which was moving, called real-time ultrasound, to show the baby really on TV.
The baby really came alive on TV and was moving and that picture–that picture of the baby on the ultrasound bothered me more than anything else, because as I didn’t know then really, you bond with that picture. Women get those pictures even if they are still pictures, and boy, it’s their baby and they put it up on walls, they bring it in to show it to me, and they don’t even know what’s there, but they see head, arm, leg all typed out for them so they know what it is, but they know it’s a baby.
Anyway, the nurses had to help with this, had to look at this to stage how far along the D&E was, because you got paid more if it was 14, 16, more if it was 18 weeks and so on. In other words, the larger the pregnancy, the more you got paid, and the more the clinic got also. So it was very important for us to do that and to make sure they weren’t too large for us to do.
When we started, we lost two nurses. They couldn’t take looking at it. Some other staff was lost. The turnover got greater when we started doing the D&Es and mostly, as I said, the ultrasounds.
So I think the ultrasound was one of the keys there. The other thing, too, is because the women who are having the abortions are never allowed to look at the ultrasound, because we know even if they heard the heartbeat that many times they wouldn’t have the abortion, and you wouldn’t want that. No money in that.
So that science, my intellectual development, and my heart development were kind of running parallel at that time. Well, I was undaunted. I was going to still search for the “truth” so I decided to start giving a little bit more. I had kind of been a taker all my life–at this time of my life, I was quite a taker–so I was going to give back to people, so I joined the Lion’s Club, and I roared with the best of them. And I got plaques for doing good stuff, for myself, really–it made me feel good. But it didn’t–it still came up empty, so that didn’t work too well so I decided to become active in the medical community. I got active in the hospitals and got all sorts of boring committees and things.
Back in my earlier life, even in college, I was in the campus religious council, and we went out and painted churches and did all sorts of good stuff. It made me feel good. When I was in high school, we did some of those things, so I kind of went back to that. I thought maybe that would help this empty feeling. So I did that, and that came up empty. I was Vice President of the Medical Society–so what? It just didn’t come up getting me what I needed.
I even went out and got into searching for the truth in the occult. This was actually quite interesting. I got into astroprojection–this is where you lie in your bed with candles on, humming this funny stuff and vibrating one toe, and then the next and pretty soon your whole body and then– poof! You pop out. But beware, because getting back isn’t always as easy as going out, you know. So that was kind of cool.
But what that really did was leave me with this dreadful fear, such that this macho man with a leather jacket and a motorcycle had to sleep with his light on at night–a nightlight for macho man, you know.
That didn’t work, so I said I will try one more thing (I was getting desperate, by this time). I decided to try psychic surgery–this has got to be it! Psychic surgery is it! What I had to do was read a lot of this stuff–Mexico seemed to be a hotbed for this–so I was even going to go down there, but anyway, I started reading about this, and getting into this.
At the same time I was doing this searching which didn’t get me anywhere, obviously, God put in my life an activist…a Christian activist who worked for me part-time, but for God, full-time. He put her right in my office, I’ll call her Becky (that was her name). Becky was married and she did something very interesting.
She became a friend of mine partly because she took in foster children–hundreds of foster children. She adopted a couple a little later on, but see I appreciated that because I was in foster homes before I was adopted and I liked that, and God knew that. So, he put her in there and we became friends.
Now the key about Becky was that Becky, I knew, didn’t like abortions. Everyone knew Christians were those picket-line freakos, you know. They didn’t like abortions. She never judged me; she never put me down; she became my friend. She loved me.
Despite the fact that every week, a couple of times a week, I would go down to the clinic and do my abortions in great numbers. But she stuck with it. She also took me to church, a large church that believes in spreading the truth about the Gospel of Jesus Christ to everybody, every week, embarrassingly calling you up front to make a decision for Christ. Now, I knew about that, really. I knew about all that stuff I read in the Bible. I have plaques for reading the Bible.
I knew about that stuff and I even agree that it probably was true–a lot of that stuff. But I had chosen not to do that when I was around 19, just before I went off to college years ago. So I kind of listened for about a year and a-half.
Now I am coming back to my occult experience that I dropped off at before, and I was just about ready to get into psychic surgery. I had a course all lined up at the Foundation of Truth, I kid you not, that was their name–Foundation of Truth. I knew I had come down to the point where I knew I was looking for truth, and so I was all set to take this course down at this institution which was right around the corner from the abortion clinic. How convenient. After I finished the abortion Saturday, I could go down there and take my course. The course was cancelled; I missed out!
But at that same time, I became gradually convinced that what they said in church was truth–that God did come down here, in the form of Jesus Christ; that He did die for our sins; and that I wanted to have a relationship through God that would guarantee me getting into heaven–not upon what I could do, because I couldn’t do enough. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. So, I wanted to become a Christian, but I knew I couldn’t be a good Christian abortionist.
It just didn’t make sense. It’s sort of like being a good Christian gangster, as alluded to in Chuck Colson’s book–you can’t be a good bad guy. So I was on the fence.
Now, what kept me on the fence for a year and a half was money. I had become trapped by the money; not that I wouldn’t give up money, necessarily, for certain things, but not my whole life. And now I was getting divorced.
By the way, a divorced doctor is known as a poor doctor in Atlanta. The reason for that is that your ex-wife gets a whole lot of money. In my case, she got two-thirds of my income. Now half of my income was tied up in doing the abortions, and the other half in a gynecology practice. I mention a gynecology practice because I didn’t do obstetrics. I couldn’t deliver babies. I just didn’t do that.
I said I was giving up delivering because my abortions were my deliveries. Kind of a hard-hearted sort of a guy. You know, it was good not having to get up at night and so forth. It just worked out that way. So, here I was with two-thirds of my income having to go to support my ex-wife and fifty percent of my income, though, being involved with abortion.
Therefore I assumed that I would go immediately bankrupt. Now the reason I assumed that even more was my ex-wife was not friendly. It took nine hearings just to get divorced. I just knew it was going to be a terrible thing to do, so I had to come to grips with a little bit of an honesty within me that said, Yes, you can wait till you finish up paying your wife off–it was only like a year or so later that I would be finished making these enormous payments. But the voice said, Do it now. Do it now. It said, Trust Me. A lot of voices were also saying you’re going bankrupt; you’re going to have all sorts of problems.
So, on October 23rd of 1983 (it was a Saturday), I went and did my last abortions on just a few patients. That wasn’t my weekend to work so it was just a few patients. And I knew it would be the last day. And that evening, I said No to money and Yes to God, and I called up Becky. Now, Becky has a voice about 50 decibels when she gets excited. So she was excited and the next day I went down to church and opened my mouth and confessed with my mouth that Jesus was Lord and went right up to the altar and cried there with the best of them at the altar.
Then, on the way out of church, I saw this blue brochure for a crisis pregnancy center. I just looked at it and kind of felt that this was what I should be involved with. So I picked that up, and the next day I called up the center and said I needed to speak to the head of it. I told them I was a doctor in Atlanta and had done many, many thousands of abortions, and that I came to Christ the day before and now wanted to do everything to save babies instead of take their lives. Well, there was this silence on the phone. You could hear a pin drop, but what I did hear was his Adam’s apple going up and down. Is this guy for real?
Anyway, he kind of squeaked out, we’ve gotta talk, and so we went down by the lovely Chatahootchie River–a lovely river in Atlanta–and we talked. And he said, people are going to need to hear this. I am the world’s worst speaker–very fearful of speaking– and now I know exactly what he meant.
So that is what I have been doing since then. I think the centers were, at that time, parallel in my heart to what Becky did. They were one of a new wave of love that’s going on throughout this country, where they are loving the women who have abortions. They are presenting the Gospel to them; they are giving, sacrificially, in many cases, of their time, of their money, of their willingness to take them into their homes, regardless of whether they keep the baby or give it up for adoption or even abort the babies.
They will talk to them after the abortion, if they have problems–they just never give up on these women. And that non-judgmental, fully-accepting love I think is what really attracted me most to continue with those crisis pregnancy centers, and I think it is really what is going on here today and throughout the country.
Now, since then, what happened? Well, not only did God give me a new life, everything was completely different after that, and here is this guy who did all the abortions now talking to people about saving babies. What a twist, right? He also gave me gifts, and one of the greatest gifts He gave me was my wife, Patty, a lovely woman whom I met at church, and who had a ministry of her own with alcoholics, and who takes wonderful care of me.
What happened about my money? Well, things got a little pinched for a while, as you might expect. My ex-wife has never been known to accept any agreement for payback. We had to come up with an agreement to try to change the financial arrangements. She has never been known to accept anything, not only from me but from any of my attorneys or her six attorneys. Attorneys love me in Atlanta. My attorney uses my case as an example of what not to do.
Anyway, I had to come to grips with saying that I needed to pay back all my debts, even though I said it’s not fair. I am only making half of my income. How can I pay all of this out? So I had to come to grips with saying that, No, the Bible says that if someone asks for your cloak, you give them your tunic, too.
And when I came to that position and that feeling in my heart, the Lord just gave me a plan, and guess what she did? She accepted it. And I am paid up. It’s been a few years now.
On top of that, it took me about ten years, and perhaps more than that when you consider that rest of my life before that, too, to gain a certain estate amount–a certain amount of net worth and all.
Since I have changed my life, my net value or worth has increased by two times what I had before, and, as you notice, in one-third of the time. You have to remember that I lost everything that I had made before–well over a million dollars worth of real estate and everything. And that from basically nothing–I used to have to eat in the hospital because it was free–my wife gives a story of my inviting her over for dinner and having two slabs of cheese and water.
I was poor. And from that position, in just a short period of time, the Lord has done this. Also, I have a medical building–the land and the whole thing is mine–that’s another whole story I won’t get into, but the Lord set that whole thing up. I also have a new partner–a new partner who had to leave the hospital she was taking her life’s training at because she refused to have anything to do with abortion. The Lord has put that kind of person around me and that kind of person to be my partner. I never advertised for a partner–I didn’t have to.
I think there are two things that I’ll just briefly mention in the end. There are two things that are problems in any movement: apathy and disunity. Basically, apathy is saying something like: I am sick and tired of it all and I just don’t care about it anyway. It’s the type of thing that can be fought very easily. All you have to do is be available and be involved. If you are involved, you are influenced by others and the point of the whole thing is that if you don’t do something, the Lord is going to hold you responsible. Proverbs 24 was mentioned and it states quite clearly that if you know people are being led to slaughter, and if you don’t do anything about it, you are guilty of murder. And the other thing is, time is running out.
Martin Luther said, “If I knew the Lord was coming tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.” And I think that’s just a stimulus to you all. I know you are all active, but take that sense of urgency–we are running out of time.
Number two is disunity. The Surgeon General had talked to me a while back, and he had come over to Emory for a conference, and he had said that really, if we had gotten it all together and got united, we would have licked this thing a long time ago. The key to all that is we have to put down ourselves.
We have to put down our own denominations that might tend to separate us. We need to put down our traditions, put down our particular ministries, our maternity homes, our crisis pregnancy centers–whatever–that we all consider our own, really. They are not ours–they are God’s. And basically they make us interested in ourselves, and all this tends to really separate us.
But we need to be united in the humility of the servant, serving these women, and what they need most is love…the love that was shown to me by God, for forgiving me so that I can stand up here and talk to you all, and let you know what’s going on and what happened to my life. We need to love the pregnant women for sure, their little babies within them, their husbands, their boyfriends, their families. Love the abortionists; love their staff; love those that hate you. In the words of Mother Teresa also, “Give till it hurts, and then give some more” for life itself is at stake.
I would like to end with Scripture, Ecclesiastes 11:5:
Now our hope is in God. And even when we don’t know the way, He does. And the Bible says that God’s ways are as mysterious as the pathway of the wind. And as the manner in which a human spirit is infused into the body of a little baby inside its mother.
So keep on sowing your seed for you never know which will grow. Perhaps it all will. And the silent least of our society are blessed by youth.
Note: Religious beliefs expressed in testimonies are not endorsed by the website owner.
This testimony came from a conference held by The Pro-Life Action League
