Author: Sarah

Reporters spent a day at the abortion clinic of Dennis Christensen. They described one of the abortion procedures this way:

Christensen performed two abortions that day on women who were at the end of the first trimester. In each case, the tissue was suctioned into a large glass jar, filling the bottom half inch. Christensen later poured it into a straining basin and examined it “to make sure we removed all of it.”

At one point, he picked up a tiny foot and placed it against a ruler. “Thirteen millimeters,” he announced, “which is consistent with 12 weeks of actual pregnancy.”

Later he held a tiny head. Its brain tissue will be sent to the National Institutes of Health for research on brain tumors.

Women Need Control over Birth Choice, Physician Says” Wisconsin State Journal. March 4, 2001. Quoted by Life Dynamics

“I was watching the doctor struggle with the cannula, trying to pull it out,” she said. “I didn’t understand what the resistance was all about. And I was very alarmed and all of the sudden the doctor pulled the cannula out and there, as I was at the woman’s side, I looked down at the cannula and there was a foot sticking out. I will never forget the feeling I had in my chest as the doctor pulled that cannula out. And it almost took the breath out of me. Because the reality of this was very hard for me…This sounds terribly cavalier, I suppose, but within about a month, like everything else we do after a while, it just becomes pretty routine and it has never bothered me since then.”

Nurse from a Seattle Abortion Clinic

M. Gianelli, “Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts,” American Medical News, July 12, 1993

“You have to dismember the fetus. You have to actually pull pieces of the fetus out.”

Former abortionist Brian Finkel (Finkel was later convicted of sexually assaulting several of his abortion patients)

.ABC 20/20 Transcript # 99030802-j11, A Woman’s Right, A Woman’s Risk:3-8-1999. Quoted at Deathroe.

Abortion clinic worker “Celia” discusses late term abortion. Her clinic injects Digoxin into the hearts of the babies before dismembering them:

“It’s going to be weird now because you’re going to see the sono. You’re going to see the heart beating – little hearts, you know- and then, all of a sudden, you’re going to put this cardiac medicine in it to make it stop- to kill it. I won’t kill it, the doctor will kill it …It’s just a harder reality check of what we’re doing…It’s like rationally I know this is going to be much better because, God, you know, if it can make a twenty-three-week skull come out easier, you know bless this digoxin.”(21)

.Wendy Simonds Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswich, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) p 73

Clinic worker “Karen” describes a 21 week abortion:

“You’re looking between the woman’s legs; you’re seeing, you know, what the doctor’ s doing. And it’s what a lot of people would call kind of, I guess, gruesome – that’s not really the word because – it’s identifiable. I mean, when he… Takes the forceps and pulls out a foot, you can see the foot, and my reaction – because I feel so strongly that women who want to have a 21 week abortion should be able to have that – but I mean when I looked and was just like, you know my first reaction was you know, I was pretty horrified. And I immediately denied that, and I said, you know, “no, that can’t be my reaction. I’m here for the woman,” and just really sort of squashed that down, that what I saw really freaked me out. And it stayed with me, you know, and really upset me. I mean, I’d be in the shower, you know, washing my feet, you know, and… The picture would come to me… I just got to the point where… I just really needed to sit down and cry, and, like, deal with it.”

Wendy Simonds Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswich, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 82

Clinic worker “Nell” on seeing aborted babies:

“Because it looks like a baby. That’s what it looks like to me. You’ve never seen anything else that looks like that. The only other thing you’ve ever seen is a baby…You can see a face and hands and ears and eyes and, you know…feet and toes…It bothered me really bad the first time…”

Wendy Simonds Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswich, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 88

“And, in the beginning, yes, I remember standing behind this woman’s shoulder [as she performed an early second trimester abortion] and thinking, I can’t do this …Features are discernible, you can count five fingers on a hand, and five toes on a foot. You know, all the organ systems are formed. You know, you can see ears as structures, and the nose and eyes as structures…I think the destruction is hard.”

Clinic worker “Sarina”

Wendy Simonds Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswich, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 96-97

One author who observed in an abortion clinic for one year describes an abortion:

“Still holding the forceps, Lane begins pulling, tearing apart the fetus. His first three tugs yield indistinguishable tissue. The fourth brings out more solid mass, which Anneke, from her position in the back of the small room, immediately recognizes as the trunk of a fetus…. Tiny hands and feet, extracted next, are the most recognizable. The head is less so. The pieces of the fetus and the placenta are placed by Lane on a surgical tray at his side.”

Peter Korn Lovejoy: A Year in the Life of an Abortion Clinic (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996) pgs 235-236

Author Magda Denes witnessed abortions for her book In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death Inside an Abortion Hospital:

“I am drawn to the unit, irresistable, by my reactions of disbelief, sorrow, horror, compassion, guilt. The place depresses me, yet I hang around after working hours. When I leave, I behave outside with the expansiveness of one who has just escaped a disaster. I have bad dreams. My sense of complicity in something nameless grows and festers. I consider giving up the research…

I remove with one hand the lid of a bucket…I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person there floating in a bloody liquid- plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But then perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises and the face has the agonized tautness of one forced to die too soon. Death overtakes me in a rush of madness…I have seen this before. The face of a Russian soldier, lying on a frozen snow covered hill, stiff with death and cold….A death factory is the same anywhere, and the agony of early death is the same anywhere. I take the lid off all the buckets. All of them. I reach up to the shelf above this bucket and graveyard tabletop and take down a pair of forceps….With the forceps I lift the fetuses, one by one.

I lift them by an arm or a leg…Finally, I lift a very large fetus…I look at the label. Mother’s name: Catherine Atkins; Doctor’s name: Saul Marcus. Sex of item: Male. Time of Gestation: Twenty-four weeks. I remember Catherine. She is seventeen, a very pretty blond girl…This is Master Atkins- to be burned tomorrow- who died like a hero….Might he have been the only one to truly love her?”

.Magda Denes In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital(New York: Basic Books Inc. 1976) 50, 58-61

Magda Denes interviewed Andre Winston, who delivered the aborted babies to the incinerator to be burned:

“In the ones where you could see the babies with the hands and the feet and the heads and everything, and you can tell what sex, a boy are girl. Really sometimes it gets nasty. They are so big sometimes. Some are small and still have hands. It’s just too bad the baby had to go that far and end up here…Seeing what I’ve seen and everything- and I’ve worked around here and seen these dead fetuses. I wouldn’t want to have to come here, or have my girlfriend come here, and have an abortion, and I end up seeing the kid that was almost mine, look where it ended up at.”

.Magda Denes In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital(New York: Basic Books Inc. 1976) p 87