Magda Denes, who spent a year watching abortions and interviewing people at an abortion clinic, describes becoming numb to the horror of the procedures and the pain of the women:
“In a month’s time I acquire a sort of wooden torpor to the screams that periodically shatter the humdrum noises of the floor. Tears cease to unsettle me. I am unmoved by wailing. I take it for granted that we are in the business of death here, and the tenor of each day will be heartbreak… I am shellshocked, as it were, stunned by being spoken to. Staggered by these readily revealed dramas, whose plots are loneliness, whose resolutions are defeat.”
Magda Denes In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital (New York: Basic Books, 1976) 126
The abortion facility Magda Denes visited did abortions up to 24 weeks – the age of the baby pictured above.
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