Sarah, Author at ClinicQuotes

Pro-choice author: 2nd & 3rd trimester abortions are “overwhelmingly” done for reasons other than health

From pro-choice author Sarah Erdreich:

“While 88% of abortions are performed within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, women who have abortions later in their pregnancies overwhelmingly cite a delay in making the necessary arrangements, including raising money and getting an appointment as the reasons for having 2^nd or 3^rd trimester procedures.”

Sarah Erdreich Generation Roe: inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013) 19

This means that babies aborted in the 2nd and 3rd trimester are “overwhelmingly” aborted because their mothers had difficulty making arrangements to kill them. These women, therefore, are not suffering from serious health problems. Rather, 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions are done “overwhelmingly” on healthy mothers with healthy children. Below you can see the hand of a baby aborted at 28 weeks. Is it acceptable for a woman to have an abortion this late because she was unable to arrange an abortion earlier?

Incidentally, price is often cited as a major reason why women have late abortions. Women have a hard time coming up with the money to pay for the procedure, which can be very expensive and which gets more expensive as each week goes by. Perhaps if abortion clinics are so dedicated to women having access to abortion, they could lower their prices and take slightly smaller profits. Pretty unlikely though.

Sonogram at 26 weeks. Candidate for an abortion for convenience — Sonogram at 26 weeks. Candidate for an abortion

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People see abortion as “dirty” and “the dark side of medicine,” says abortionist

“Abortion has failed to escape its back alley associations… [It is the] dark side of medicine…

Even when abortion became legal, it was still considered dirty.”

Abortionist Morris Wortman

Democrat and Chronicle, July 5, 1992

Life Dynamics “Access: Key to Pro-Life Victory”

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On abortion and “priorities”

“Mostly, this must seem selfish, when I had an abortion a decade ago, I knew I was killing. There was no other way to think about it, to describe it… But I was killing a very small piece of life in favor of my bigger life. That’s important, it makes you get your priorities straight.”

Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999) 137

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Actress Jennifer O’Neill on regretting her abortion

Actress Jennifer O’Neill:

“… I was told a lie from the pits of hell. I had the abortion and paid for it all my life until I healed and am now able to help other women. By age 38 I had mourned 9 miscarriages – certain that they were the result of my agonizing abortion.”

Quoted from a Letter from Joseph Scheidler, director of the Pro-Life Action League, February 21, 2003 Intecon Abortion: Pros and Cons (Bloomington, IN AuthorHouse, 2004) 396

For information on studies that show a connection between abortion and miscarriage, and other reproductive health problems, go here.

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Average age of aborted baby was 11 weeks in 1991

In 1991, the average age of an aborted baby was 11 weeks.

“America Must Decide” The Life Chain People, 1991

I am looking for more current statistics. The Alan Guttmacher institute groups all abortions before ten weeks together in its statistics, so its impossible to extrapolate from their data. Last time I looked, 42% of abortions took place at ten weeks or later.

In the early 90s, there were over 4,000 abortions a day, with some estimates as high as 4,500.

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Abortionist label is “kiss of death” in medicine

“[Hospital administrators say] abortion is a sleazy and offensive procedure… The doctor who does abortions – even if they are only a small part of her practice – is known as an abortionist… This label is the kiss of death for any professional hopes a doctor might have.”

Glamour, October 1993

Quoted in Mark Crutcher “Access: the Key to Pro-Life Victory” Life Dynamics Incorporated

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Atheist Christopher Hitchens on abortion

“I do, as a humanist, believe that the concept “unborn child” is a real one and I think the concept is underlined by all the recent findings of embryology about the early viability of a well conceived human baby, one that isn’t going to be critically deformed (or even some that are) will be able to survive outside the womb earlier and earlier, and earlier and I see that date only being pushed back. I feel the responsibility to consider the occupant of the womb as a candidate member of society in the future, and thus to say that it cannot be only the responsibility of the woman to decide upon it, that it’s a social question and an ethical and a moral one. And I say this as someone who has no supernatural belief.”

Hitchens versus Turek debate, September 9, 2008

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“You will never see an [abortion provider] Nominated to the Department of Health and Human Services

An abortion clinic worker talks about stigma. After saying that she finds it easy to dismiss criticism when it comes from pro-lifers, she says:

“What’s harder, though, is to talk about how our parents sidestep friends’ questions about what their progeny are doing these days, or how high school reunions are at even greater risk of being depressing/distressing/disastrous than for everyone else, or how we worry about our kids learning what we do not because we aren’t proud but because their classmates’ parents might shame or punish them.

We go to schools that don’t want to talk too much about abortion because some nebulous outside audience may object; we attend reproductive health lectures by professors who feel comfortable accommodating the opinion that it’s OK to be anti-reproductive health; we don’t get hired because someone thought we’d bring unnecessary attention to an organization that doesn’t even really care about abortion either way, maybe they even support what we do, but just wants to get its own work done without pointless interference. You will never see an abortioneer nominated to the Department of Health and Human Services.”

“All stigma great and small” The Abortioneers September 29, 2011

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Women gives reasons she will abort “retarded” baby

From a woman waiting for the results of her amniocentesis, who intends to abort if the baby has down syndrome or another defect:

“I would have a very hard time dealing with a retarded child. Retardation is relative, it could be so negligible that the child is normal, or so severe that the child has nothing… All of the sharing things you want to do, the things you want to share with a child – that, to me, is the essence of being a father. There would be a big void that I would feel. I would feel grief, not having what I consider a normal family.”

Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999) 133

At the time the book was written, 1999, the only available test for down syndrome was amniocentesis, which is used at about 16 weeks. By this time, the baby is fully developed. (See picture below of a on the left at only 14 weeks) at this stage, the method of abortion used most is D&E, in which a baby is dismembered in the womb, her arms and legs pulled off and extracted by forceps and her skull crushed.