“One day the medical director announced he had a new doctor who would work part-time. This new doctor arrived and explained he was Catholic and unsure if he wanted to perform abortions. He said he would try it for one shift.
After he completed several abortions, a patient told him, “I never wanted to have an abortion.” He then informed me, “I never want to hear that again. I can’t come back.” …
As experienced abortion clinic workers we knew the patient meant she would have preferred not to have been in the situation to need an abortion. However, what she said pushed the guilt button in the doctor and he never returned
Norma Goldberger Abortion Confidential: Secrets of an Abortion Clinic Owner (CreateSpace , November 23, 2014) Kindle Edition
“Our patients were very anxious and tense every time they had to listen to picketers shouting, “Don’t kill your baby,” and “Jesus loves you.” We advised our patients to ignore the protesters but occasionally one yelled back, “I know Jesus loves me. That’s why am having this abortion.”
Norma Goldberger Abortion Confidential: Secrets of an Abortion Clinic Owner (CreateSpace , November 23, 2014) Kindle Edition
9-10 weeks. Over 40% of all abortions happen at this time or later
When states were trying to ban the partial-birth abortion procedure, the pro-choice movement came up with many lies to defend it. Partial-birth abortions were late-term abortions done when the baby was partly out of the mother. They are now illegal, but it was a long struggle to make them that way.
“The spin out of Washington was that it was only done for medical necessity, even though we knew it wasn’t so. I kept waiting for [the National Abortion Federation] to clarify it and they never did. I got caught up: What do we do about this secret? Who do we tell and what happens when we tell? But frankly, no one was asking me, so I didn’t have to worry.”
Renee Chelian, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers
“Abortion: Activists lied: Pro-choice advocates admit to deception.” Bergen Record, February 27, 1997
Abortion clinic owner recounts the joke that their abortionist made after each abortion:
“He was from India and was unpretentious, friendly and low key. He always whispered to us after each abortion, “Another American who didn’t make it.” Initially we thought was in poor taste. After a while, we just got used to the “joke.”
Norma Goldberger Abortion Confidential: Secrets of an Abortion Clinic Owner (CreateSpace , November 23, 2014) Kindle Edition
An interview with Sir Albert Lilley, a scientist who is often called the “Father of Fetology” on fetal pain:
Question: In the case of an 8- to-10-week fetus, if you apply pressure will it tend to try to get out of the way?
Answer: … as the famous work of Dr. Davenport Hooker shows, in his many thousands of feet of film, babies at this maturity are responsive to touch.
9 week old preborn baby
The fetus also responds violently to painful stimuli-needle puncture and injection of cold or of hypertonic solutions- stimuli which you and I find painful, children will tell you are painful, and the neonate, to judge from his responses, finds painful….
abortions at 9 weeks
I have been told by advocates of abortion that we have no proof that the fetus actually feels pain. Strictly, they are quite correct. Pain is a peculiarly personal and subjective experience and there is no biochemical or physiological test we can do to tell that anyone is in pain – a phenomenon which makes it very easy to bear other people’s pain stoically, which is an important point for obstetricians to remember. By the same token we lack any proof that animals feel pain. However, to judge from their responses, it seems charitable to assume they do. Were this not so there would be no point in having an organization like the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and I for one would be unhappy to think we would withhold from the human fetus a charitable consideration we were prepared to extend to animals.
Question: The question, then, of pain felt by the fetus – it is your personal opinion, I gather from what you say in your paper, that in effect the fetus does feel pain?
Answer: I can only say that the fetus responds violently to stimuli that you and I would find painful. Bertrand Russell once remarked that a fisherman had told him that fish had neither sense or sensation, but how he knew that the fisherman would not tell him.
Pro-choice activist Sarah Ditum arguing in favor of sex selection abortion:
In a world where it’s possible to end a pregnancy safely and legally, it seems like rank brutality to force anyone to carry to term against her will.
And as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter why any woman wants to end her pregnancy. As the conscious and legally competent entity in the conception set-up, it’s the woman’s say that counts, and even the most terrible reason for having an abortion holds more sway than the best imaginable reason for compelling a woman to carry to term.
Since sex cannot be determined on ultrasound until the 18th to 20th week, babies aborted because they are girls are at least 18 to 20 weeks old and often more than that. The baby below is 20 weeks old.
Is passing a law against killing this baby brutality? Or is killing the baby like the one below brutality?
Pro-choice writer Jessica Arons acknowledges the euphemisms used in the abortion debate when she says:
As we approach the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion, I urge people who care about this issue not to shy away from the word “abortion” itself. We should resist the urge to hide behind allusions to “women’s health,” “choice,” and “Roe” when we’re really talking about abortion only.
“I lay on the cool slab of padded stretcher watching as she [the ultrasound technician] moves the instrument across me. ..
She becomes the eyes that this technology takes from me. Yet I am the one who is asked to fashion the gaze that she produces- to turn and twist and interpret until I have called the fetus in from its shadows, from its blurry frozen lines and taken it, like the picture book snapshot I hold in my hand, and made it real….
Each time the face of the baby retreats, I long for its return as I so much want to participate in the this drama of creation. Here, in the ultrasound room, is where this “life” is created.
Here is where I know there is no turning back. Here is where the howling ghostly possibility becomes real. Here is where the dewing begins, the aural images of feet, head, heart, spine, bone are all taken and pieced together and handed back to me like the fuzzy snapshots I clutch so carefully.
Here is where the notion of wholeness becomes reified through a collection of the pieces of the phantom fetal body. No longer just part of the mother, a dreamlike possibility hovering somewhere in still fluids. “
Karen L. Carr “Optical Allusions: Hysterical Memories and the Screening of Pregnant Sites” Postmodern Culture V. 5 n . 2 January 1995
I have been fortunate not to need abortion services thus far in my life. But when I was pregnant with my son I was comforted to know that should I encounter any complications, any decisions would be left to me and my husband and any care I needed would be covered by my health insurance.
