They said it.
“[I’ve seen women] who have just had an abortion … lie in the recovery room and cry, ‘I’ve just killed my baby. I’ve just killed my baby.’ I don’t know what to say to these women. Part of me thinks, ‘Maybe they’re right.'”
Nurse who works an abortion clinic
Diane M Gianelli, “Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts” American Medical News, July 12, 1993
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“Even if you are pro-choice, no one likes to see a dead fetus.”
Vilma Valdez, Education Director Planned Parenthood of Greater Miami
The Miami Herald, October 24, 1992
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“I went up to the lab one day and on the pathologist’s table was what I thought was a little rubber doll until I realized it was a fetus. I got really shook up and upset and I couldn’t believe it. It had all its fingers and toes, you know, hands and feet, and I didn’t know what a fetus was going to look like. I never thought it would look – so real. I didn’t like it…”
Clinic worker (Controller) Nancy Stein
Magda Denes, PhD. In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death Inside an Abortion Hospital (Basic Books, Inc: New York) 1976. p 29
Share on Facebook“I don’t approve, but it doesn’t matter if I don’t approve. I’m doing my job, I’m doing what I am trained to do.”
Abortionist
Ellen Mark “The Abortionist” GQ Magazine February 1994
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“The face looks like what it is, the human fetus. You can talk yourself into putting whatever value you want on it.”
Abortionist Dr. Dennis Christensen
“Women Need Control Over Birth Choice, Physician Says” Wisconsin State Journal March 4, 2001. Quoted by Life Dynamics
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From an interview with an abortionist:
Abortion Doctor: “So when I went back to doing abortions and saw the fetus on the ultrasound, I recalled the early days of my pregnancies, when I found out I was pregnant and saw the baby on the ultrasound, and it really felt like this is a baby, a very real and potential being. Now, I do feel that this is a potential person and it does not have a life of its own outside of the mother, but I also am really aware that when you’re ready to embrace a pregnancy, you can embrace it from the very moment you conceive or are aware that you are pregnant.”
Interviewer: Faye Wattleton said recently, “I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus, but it is the women’s body, and therefore ultimately her choice.”
Abortion Doctor: “I believe that very firmly. You look at the ultrasounds and there’s a fetus with a heartbeat and then after the procedure, there’s the fetus, usually in pieces, in a dish. It was alive one moment and it’s not the next… I don’t believe, as some anti-abortion people would have you believe, that there’s a “silent scream.” But it’s very clear to me that it’s killing a potential life. And I found that hard at first.”
Camille Peri “Birth Doctor, Mother, Abortionist” Salon Magazine June 1997
It is interesting that she uses the term baby when describing her own pregnancy, even though she later says that the unborn baby is only “potential life.” It seems that on some level, she is aware that when she performs abortion she is killing babies.
Share on Facebook“There are many aspects of medicine that may not be particularly fun or enjoyable or pleasant, but I have an ethical obligation to do what’s best for my patients and not take my own personal convenience into consideration.”
Abortionist Dr. David Grimes
Miriam Clare, The Abortion Dilemma: Personal Views on a Public Issue (Basic Books: New York) 1995 p 121
Dr. Eugene Fox:
“I like obstetrics, I like delivering babies in talking to patients about their expectations… I really don’t like to do abortions. The act of abortion goes against my own personal feelings about obstetrics. I have spent an awful lot of time trying to save babies and prevent prematurity… So abortion doesn’t really fit my feelings…”
Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 177
Share on FacebookMany former abortionists and clinic workers have said that their clinics turned out abortions as if the women were on an assembly line, with the doctor hardly having any contact with each patient. Here one abortionist agrees:
Dr. Eugene Fox, speaking about the abortion clinics that emerged shortly after Roe:
“They would put up these clinics and then they would bring in doctors, and the game was, how many can you do in an afternoon?… You didn’t get a chance to know the patients ahead of time… We were like cogs in the wheel.”
Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 175
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“In Carole Joffe’s ethnographic work at an abortion clinic that performed first-trimester abortions, she found out, “the most interesting problem was how to refer to the product of the abortion. Although it was acknowledged that many clients would refer to this as “baby,” or “the pregnancy,” new counselors were, not surprisingly, urged not to use these charged terms, but instead to use the more neutral, though admittedly more awkward, ‘products of conception’ or ‘tissue.’
Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ) 1996 p 80
