One abortionist, Charles deProsse, described how the older abortion technique of D&C (where the doctor scrapes the woman’s womb to remove the unborn baby) was more difficult for abortionists to deal with emotionally than the newer, now widely used suction abortion. In a suction abortion, a cannula attached to a tube is inserted and the baby is pulled apart by violent suction and removed from the womb. All the abortionist has to do is dilate the cervix and insert the cannula. He will see blood and tissue going through the tube, but usually no recognizable body parts unless the remains are carefully examined. Here is the quote:
“The technique was such that it put a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of doctors with respect to therapeutic abortions. The only thing we had at the time… was doing a routine D&C… And doing an abortion by routine D&C was a very bloody procedure, frighteningly so, sometimes… I don’t think that without the advent of suction abortion that abortion would ever have been is accepted by the medical practice as it was… A lot of older doctors, when it did become legal, just all they could think of was this horrendous therapeutic abortion regimen that they had gone through, and they just didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to get involved.”
Johanna Choen Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005) 185
