Former abortionist Dr. Robert Siudmack had this to say;
I worked at the [Planned Parenthood] Margaret Sanger Center in downtown Manhattan for about a year before moving to South Florida, and it was all about the money, and how many abortions we could do in a short period of time. There was a set price, and obviously the more abortions one did, the more money they would make…. Abortion is big business.
The baby has a brain. It has a nervous system. It has nerve endings. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put the dots together that obviously the baby has the capacity to feel sensation and pain. In fact, when we do ultrasounds on many of these babies, when we want to try to get it to move, we’ll jostle the woman’s abdomen and the baby does feel the sensations of movement and encouragement to move, and it, in fact, responds to that. Studies have also shown that the baby responds to music, it responds to sound. This is all a function of the baby’s nervous system. So yes, the baby does feel, and can feel pain.
Coral Springs Ministries videos “The Truth about Abortion.” uploaded on January 15, 2009
Former abortionist Robert Siudmack admits that life begins at conception:
“As a doctor, I know, as do my colleagues, that life begins at conception. That life begins the moment of conception is no longer a matter of personal opinion. It is an established medical fact. And this fact is not in dispute in any reputable medical textbook in the world. At the beginning of conception, a distinct, living, and whole human organism is formed.”
“The Truth about Abortion” Coral Springs Ministries Video, uploaded on January 15, 2009,
From former abortionist turn pro-lifer Dr. Bernard Nathanson:
“I have spent my life in the practice of obstetrics and gynaecology and have watched as the attention of the specialty has turned from a preoccupation with the maternal welfare to the welfare of the unborn child. It is the transcendent irony in the history of medicine that as increasing scientific attention and enormous resources were being assigned by the medical community to the protection and welfare of the unborn child, a new liberty was being quarried out of the United States Constitution which permitted and even encouraged the mass scale destruction of the child.”
Bernard Nathanson, M.D. The Abortion Papers inside the Abortion Mentality (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1990) 17
Dr. Patti Giebink, a board-certified OB/GYN and former abortionist, appeared in a commercial promoting initiative 11, a measure that would have banned abortion in South Dakota. The commercial was produced by pro-life activists who supported the initiative.
When the video opens, Dr. Giebink is standing in a building that once housed an abortion clinic. In her own words:
“In this building, this used to be a private abortion clinic, for many years, and when that doctor wanted to retire he then sold the building to Planned Parenthood, which then hired me to work for them doing abortions….”
She then describes what happened when a woman entered the abortion facility.
“As soon as the women would come in, they would be checked in at the front desk, and they would pay their money before they got past the gate. So after they did the paperwork, then they would get some laboratory studies done, a pregnancy test, and then they would give their urine specimen for the pregnancy test, then they would be taken back to the ultrasound room. And at that time, they weren’t asked if they wanted to see the ultrasound. But they did get an ultrasound, and then they would go back to the waiting room to wait. Then, they would be taken to my room.”
Here we see, once again, that while Planned Parenthood does ultrasounds before abortions as a matter of policy, women are not offered the chance to see their babies on the screen. This is not surprising, considering the power of ultrasound images to change hearts and minds.
Giebink goes on to describe the abortion procedure:
“So I would meet the woman in the exam room and I would have a short period of time to talk about the procedure, ask if she had any questions, and usually one of the things that I always knew I had to explain was that when I turned on the suction machine, it was so loud that we couldn’t carry on a conversation. I would dilate the cervix according to the number of weeks, and I would choose the cannula that I was going to use. And I would attach the cannula to the hose going to the suction machine, and I would slide that into the dilated cervix, and then I turned the machine on, and then I would go around, suctioning out the uterus. And then I would take what’s called a sharp curette, which looks a little bit like a spoon, and then slide that into the cervix and just make sure the tissue was all removed, and then I’d make one more pass with the suction machine. And generally that was a very quick procedure.”
Dr. Giebink then walks over to a fetal model of a three-month-old child in the womb and says:
“By the time we get to three months, you can see the baby is well-developed. [Pointing to the fetal model, which clearly shows a fully formed unborn baby] You can see the size of the head and you [can] imagine how this head could not go through a plastic straw. And the further along, the more weeks of the pregnancy, the larger the cannula would be, up to a certain point.”
She then explains why aborting a child at this age is dangerous to a woman’s fertility:
“And when we talk about the risk of abortion, and how following abortion the woman is at risk for preterm delivery, and you can see that for this head to fit through a cannula, that the cervix has to be dilated to the point where you could fit a cannula through it.… The largest cannula we would have here was, I believe, a size 12.”
“And so you could also see that the hands and the feet are going to come through okay. But sometimes the head, which was also known as the calavarium, would not come out through the suction cannula, and I would have to use a forcep or a tool to grasp the head; to pull it out.”
She then describes the grisly procedure of verifying that all the pieces of the baby have been removed:
“And so you see the necessity of actually lining up the body parts, and making sure that there’s two hands, two feet, the head, the torso, because if I’m missing body parts, then I have to go back and repeat the procedure. And that didn’t happen very often; it was a very rare instance when I had to go back to retrieve more body parts.”
Then she explained how the baby parts were disposed of:
“People would ask me, how did we dispose of the babies – the body parts, the tissue? And so I would usually [goes to the sink] rinse everything under the water and end up with just parts. And then there would be a big container under here [gestures to a container in the cabinet under the sink] that had a medical waste bag, and all the tissue would go into this container with the medical waste bag. Nothing but liquid went down the sink.”
The babies were further dehumanized by being treated as medical waste.
After the broken body of the child was discarded in the biohazard container, the abortion procedure was over.
“Once the patient was done with the procedure, was done with the abortion, then the patient was taken to the recovery room.…”
Dr. Giebink then gives the reasons that she now opposes abortion.
“We’ve learned that abortion hurts women. That women are more likely to have a preterm delivery after having an abortion. They’re more likely to have depression and suicide. There are serious risks of having elective abortions. Some women never get over it. Women develop problems…
And I think in a woman’s heart, she knows that that is unique human being. That’s not just a piece of tissue. And I was guilty of adding to that concept, because that’s what I explained – I said, “it’s just a piece of tissue.” I could not allow myself to think of that as a unique human being, as a life, because obviously, the next train of thought was “I’m killing a life.”
…. I was the main abortion provider during those years. And it’s my desire to end abortion on demand in South Dakota.”
Unfortunately, despite Dr. Giebink’s moving testimony and the efforts of pro-lifers in South Dakota, initiative 11 failed to pass. Abortion is still legal in South Dakota, but with more and more abortion providers converting and telling their stories, perhaps one day abortion will be banned.
According to the documentary “The First Hour” Stojan Adasevic performed more than 550,000 abortions. He would convert and become a pro-life leader. It was an unusual dream that influenced him. In his own words:
“There were times when I used to carry out 20, 25, 30 or even 35 abortions every day. We used to work 5 days a week….
He describes one abortion:
I opened up the womb, tore the placenta, the birth waters flowed out and I got to work on the inside with my abortion forceps. I grabbed something, crushed it a little, removed it, and threw it onto a cloth. I look, and I see a hand – quite a large hand. The child was 3 ½, perhaps 4 months old. I had no tape to measure it.
Someone had spilled some iodine on a part of the table and the hand fell in such a way that the nerve endings came in contact with the iodine. And what happened? I look and I say, “my God, the hand is moving by itself.” I nevertheless carry on with my forceps, and again catch something, crush it, and pull it out. I think to myself, “let it not be a leg.” I pull, and look. A leg. I want to put the leg on the table, carefully, so that it isn’t near the moving hand. As my arm falls, I hear a bang behind my back. I jumped, and automatically, my grip on the forceps loosened. At this very moment, the leg completed a somersault and fell next to the hand. I look – both hand and leg are moving by themselves. I nevertheless, once again, direct my instrument into the womb, and begin to crush everything inside. I think to myself that all I need to complete the picture is the heart. I continue to crush, and crush, and crush, and till I am sure that I have ground everything inside into a pulp, and once again pull out the forceps. As I pull out the mess, thinking it will be bone fragments I lay it on the cloth, I look, and I see a human heart, contracting and expanding and beating, beating, beating. I thought I would go mad. I can see that the heartbeat is slowing, ever more slowly, and more slowly still, until it finally stops completely. Nobody could’ve seen what I had seen, with my very own eyes, and be more convinced that I was that I had killed a human being.”
Foot of baby at 3 months
…
“They taught us and they taught us, told us that life began with the first cry. When a baby cries for the first time. That up to that moment a human being is like any other organ in a woman’s body. Like an appendix. The removal of an appendix from a mother’s body is not murder. Only a child that had been born, and had cried, could be killed. It hasn’t cried, then there can be no talk of murder. That is why, immediately after birth, children were taken, and their head’s submerged in a bucket of water. A child that would take in water instead of air. And would never cry. That was, therefore, not regarded as murder. Terrible, but that was how things were.”
“The medical textbooks of the Communist regime said abortion was simply the removal of a blob of tissue,” the newspaper reported. “Ultrasounds allowing the fetus to be seen did not arrive until the 80s, but they did not change his opinion. But I began to have nightmares.
“I dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from 4 to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence. The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat. One night he asked the man in black and white who he was. ‘My name is Thomas Aquinas.”
“Why don’t you ask me who these children are?” St. Thomas asked me in my dream.
“They are the ones you killed with your abortions,’ St. Thomas told me.
“That same day a cousin came to the hospital with his four months-pregnant girlfriend, who wanted to get her ninth abortion—something quite frequent in the countries of the Soviet bloc. I agreed. Instead of removing the fetus piece by piece, I decided to chop it up and remove it as a mass. However, the baby’s heart came out still beating. I realized then that I had killed a human being,”
After this experience, I “told the hospital he would no longer perform abortions. Never before had a doctor in Communist Yugoslavia refused to do so. They cut my salary in half, fired my daughter from her job, and did not allow my son to enter the university.”
After years of pressure and on the verge of giving up, I another dream about St. Thomas.
“You are my good friend, keep going,’ the man in black and white told him. I became involved in the pro-life movement and was able to get Yugoslav television to air the film ‘The Silent Scream,’ by Doctor Bernard Nathanson, two times.
Webmaster’s note; The changes in pronouns here are probably due to translation errors.
Also, Thomas Aquinas would be a strange figure to appear in an anti-abortion dream. Aquinas was not pro-life in the sense that he agreed with prolifers today. He did not believe life began at conception. He believed that the soul did not enter the baby until at least 40 days after conception (for a boy) and later for a girl. Prior to that, abortion was not killing. So to have Thomas Aquinas appear in a pro-life dream might be unusual.
It is more likely that the abortionist’s dream was not a visitation from a saint but rather a function of a subconcious mind that felt guilty.
From a former abortionist, as told to Paul B Fowler:
“Instead of a loop shaped knife [as is used in a D&C], a grasping forceps (similar to pliers with teeth) is inserted into the womb, to grasp part of the fetus. Because the developing baby already has calcified bones, the parts must be twisted and torn away. This process is repeated until the body is totally dismembered and removed. Sometimes the head is too large and must be crushed in order to remove it. Bleeding is profuse.”
Paul B Fowler Abortion: Toward an Evangelical Consensus (Portland, Oregon: Multnomah Press, 1987) 192
He is describing abortions done by D & E in the 2nd trimester.
Dr. A. Panay performed over 10,000 abortions. She now compares abortion to infanticide. According to the article:
“[Dr. Panay says that] abortion destroys women, it violates their spirit and their souls, and equally important, it damages the reproductive tract to the extent that she believes gynecologists are seeing more problems with infertility than ever before.”
The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY) 8-29-9. Quoted by Life Dynamics.
“Once a person becomes accustomed to inflicting pain, he becomes callous in other ways.
One of my teachers, a very clever professor, who performed many abortions, turned very cold in his attitude towards women. He didn’t care about them at all. He was unaffected by their physical and emotional pain. He had an academic detachment from women in their feelings. Yes, I think doctors who do abortions become dehumanized. They have to.”
Mary Arnold “Abortion Burnout” Catholic Twin Cir., August 1984 4
“The baby is simply chopped up and pulled through the suction machine and emerges as just a pile of chopped meat.”
Former abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson, on a first trimester abortion
8 weeks
On a D & E:
“….the doctor, with the patient under general anesthesia, punctures the bag of water, drains out the fluid, reaches into the uterus, finds the baby, and then systematically tears the arms and legs off the baby and then takes the parts, the organs, out of its abdomen, pulls the abdominal wall and the chest and the heart and everything else out. And finally, the head is located and crushed with a clamp and removed.”
18 week D & E
Initial Transcript: The Ankerberg Theological Research Institute “Is Abortion Justifiable?” televised program Jan 1990
