They said it.
Sherry Cage
abortion clinic counselor
“A chain of tears:’ a doctor and abortion”
In the article, abortion clinic counselor spoke of the reactions women have regarding their abortions. She asked, “Remember the one who wanted to take it home in a jar?”
Quoted by Life Dynamics
Share on FacebookRobert Crist
abortionist
“A chain of tears:’ a doctor and abortion”
Explaining what the girl’s ask abortionist Robert Crist he made these comments:
“Was it a boy or a girl?”… “Can I see it?”…”You must think I’m awful.”
Then there are the questions they ask before the abortion, which can seem the most disheartening part of all:
“How much does it cost to terminate the baby?”…. “Am I going to be tied down?”…”Is a doctor going to do it? Is he licensed? A real doctor?”
Quoted by Life Dynamics
Share on FacebookPeg Johnston
director of Southern Tier Women’s Services near Binghamton, New York.
Ms. Magazine, Abortion under attack, August-September, 2001
“Women who sit in my clinic don’t see it as a right, They’re scared.”
Quoted by Life Dynamics
Share on FacebookKaren Jones
abortion clinic administrator
St. Petersburg Times, “A chain of tears:’ a doctor and abortion:6-3-1990
“We’ve had a lot of those. They want to bury it [the aborted baby] themselves. We had one, her mother wanted to know the exact moment it happened so she could go into the bathroom and light candles and have a ceremony. I said, “Not in our bathroom.’ So she went into the parking lot.”
Quoted by Life Dynamics
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Charlotte Taft
abortion clinic owner
Fairfield County Weekly: Listening to Women About Abortion, A new wave of abortion rights activism is spreading across the country–from zines to documentaries– that focuses on telling women’s stories rather than spouting stale feminist aphorisms, by Jennifer Baumgardner – May 26, 2005
“I was shocked by how many who seemed fine during the (abortion) procedure were now having thoughts and feelings that no one had anticipated.”
The biggest thing she noted was that women felt sadder than they had anticipated.
Taft went on to say, “They wondered, How can I feel sad about something I chose?” ….
“I would go out there and scream at them. [the anti-abortion protesters] Then I would come back in and listen to a woman talk. Frequently the words were almost the same. The protesters would be saying, ‘You’re murdering your baby,’ and the women inside would be saying, ‘I feel like I’m killing my baby.’ I used to think, well, they’re just echoing what they are hearing. There was a time when I would correct them if they used those words.” “The word killing was hard. It was so difficult to see women that guilty or distressed….But eventually we got into conversations about the difference between murder and killing. Now our reaction is more: well, does it feel like killing to you and how are you going to make peace with that?”
Quoted by Life Dynamics
Share on FacebookJane Bovard
owner of the Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo, N.D.
NY Times, Scant drop in abortion rate if parents are told: 3-6-2006
“I see far more parents trying to pressure their daughters to have one (abortion). But I say to parents, ‘You force her to have this abortion, and I can tell you that within the next six months she’s going to be pregnant again.’
Quoted by Life Dynamics
Share on Facebook“…in my clinic, we wash off the tissue and examine it. It is treated respectfully and put with the woman’s first name into a container. We show it to patients if they ask to see it, and make sure they understand which part is the sac [later the placenta], which part the pregnancy if visible (after nine weeks) and which is part of the lining of the uterus. People have been known to pray over it, write notes for inclusion, “baptize” it, etc., etc. Some clinic staff have also been known to say a little prayer over it– thanking it for its sacrifice so that the woman could continue on the path she was on.”
Abortion clinic employee
blog Abortion Clinic Days, Blog 11-30-2005
“A counselor at an abortion clinic told me that when adoption is mentioned as an option, a typical reaction from many women goes something like this: “Are you kidding!? Give my baby to some stranger? I could never do that!” What these women are feeling is instinctual – it’s a combination of self-preservation, and a maternal obligation to the child. Giving up a child for adoption is very traumatic; it can haunt a woman forever. This relates to women’s strong need to control what happens to their children. The fetus is theirs. It’s in their body. And they feel obligated to it. They have a gut feeling that it’s irresponsible to give your children to strangers – good mothers simply don’t do such things. Most women feel that it’s better to prevent the birth of a child than consign it to an uncertain fate.”
Joyce Arthur. “The Fetus Focus Fallacy.” Pro-Choice Press [Pro-Choice Action Network], March 2005. Downloaded from http://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/fetus-focus-fallacy.shtml on December 31, 2007.
Share on FacebookFrom Anne Finger, clinic worker:
“Each day at the clinic I confronted what it meant to have come control over our wombs and less control over our social circumstances. You can decide to no longer be pregnant, you can walk into a clinic and plunk down your Medi-Cal card…or two hundred dollars in cash, but you can’t decide not to be poor anymore, or to have support so that you can finish school, or to have a partner who wants to raise a child with you…
We’ve won the right [to legal abortion] however tenuously, but now control of reproduction is expected; we are expected to have children when we can afford them, to schedule our pregnancies to coincide with the demands of education and employment….Our victories are always partial ones; we win part of what we wanted, and then find our victories turned into something else.”
Anne Finger. Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth (Seattle, Washington: Seal Press 1990) 55-56
Share on FacebookOne clinic worker says:
“Sometimes I loved working at the clinic: I felt like a miracle worker. Women came in and their futures were transformed. I was of use, and I thought how rare that was in this world: to get paid for doing something worth doing….but sometimes, I hated it. I hated to see women in pain. The pain never lasted for very long…but still it was probably the most painful thing they’d ever felt. I hated to hear women say:
“I just killed my baby.”
“I’m never going to have sex again.”
A few women told me, when it was over, that they understood how the “right to life” felt, or that abortion shouldn’t be legal.”
Anne Finger. Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth (Seattle, Washington: Seal Press 1990) p 52
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