Dr. Grant Clark performed abortions for a while shortly after Roe versus Wade. He then left practice. He contacted Oregon right to life to tell his story.
From the interview:
Doctor: Well, most of the abortions I did were in the first trimester, the first three months, and it was done with a suction machine, a high powered suction machine, vacuum cleaner, dilate the cervix and put in the tip of the suction machine, and suction out the baby, which comes out in shreds. And after the procedure is over, you must make sure that you got all of the pieces of the baby. Otherwise, if you leave pieces in, it’s likely to cause an infection. Although, I’ve had several patients say afterward, a week after the abortion, they were still passing little baby parts. So it is-
Interviewer: The women would actually see-
Doctor: Oh yeah.
Interviewer: Recognizable body parts?
Doctor: Oh yeah. And not very much fun for them or for anyone else. Um..that was probably the most difficult part of the abortion procedure with the suction abortions, you had to go through what you suctioned out of the uterus and identify perfectly formed little arms and legs and little hands, skulls were usually crushed. Eyes and cute little noses- you just killed a baby. And I don’t care what you do, you can’t bring them back.”
When the interviewer asked what made Dr. Grant Clark call Oregon Right to Life, he said:
“I saw a billboard and it said “the score of abortion: one dead, one wounded.” And I thought, no, one dead, and a whole bunch of people wounded, including the doctor, the nurses involved, the anesthesiologist, the grandparents, you know, the father of the baby… all of these people have been wounded.… Knowing that I’ve been wounded, and knowing that I’ve wounded others, talking about it and bringing it out is something that is not good at all, is useful. It’s time to make a decision, and say, “this has to change.” Our society can’t go on this way, of pretending it’s hunky-dory. It’s not. It’s murder….
Legs at 11 weeks
There were 2 cases that were significant in my life, and one of them was the beginning of acceptance of 2nd trimester abortions, which were accomplished by putting a needle into the uterus, draining off some fluid, to make sure that you were in the uterus, not the bladder or somewhere else with your needle, and injecting into the uterus a very strong salt solution, which would cause a: the baby to die, and b: contractions to begin, very shortly after the salt solution was in there, and the mother would then abort the baby.
Interviewer: She’d deliver a dead baby
Doctor Clark: Deliver a dead baby. But in one case, she did not deliver a dead baby. It was a live baby that she delivered.
Interviewer: Do they not have their skin burned?
Doctor Clark: The skin was burned, it was hard to look at, and hard to realize that I killed a near-term baby. The dates that the mother had given me were wrong, and we had no real way of checking it at that time. Ultrasound and stuff has come in since then, so we can date a baby’s age fairly well, but not, not back then. And the baby was born alive and lived for an hour.
Interviewer: was it a girl or a boy?
Doctor Clark: I don’t remember, and I didn’t want to remember.… But at that point I said, “No more 3rd or 2nd trimester abortions…”
Interviewer: was the mother aware the baby was born alive?
Doctor Clark: yes, she was, and it was just a bad scene all the way around. I mean what was I supposed to do, smother it? Strangle it?… It was just, what do I do, so I took the coward’s way out and did nothing, and the baby died. As it probably would have anyway.
….
The other one was a little bit later and came on the heels of that one and that was a young lady who came in, unmarried lady, came into the office, wanted an abortion, would not settle for anything else, and, um, went through the procedure of the suction abortion and all I got out were some chewed up tissue, and I recognized no body parts at all, and so we sent the material, it’s called “the products of conception” (that’s the high sounding words that we used) to the laboratory as we did all the cases, you have to send it all in. And they gave me the report back saying, “this is products of a dead conception”, the baby had already died.
And all I did was essentially a D&C, scrape out the insides of the uterus. Well, several months later, she gave birth to a full-term normal child. And then came the lawsuits. She sued me for not completing my work, not aborting the baby, and she also sued me for 18 to 20 years of child rearing costs, and then she sued me for all the pain and anguish she went through for having to go through labor, and I talked to my lawyer about it. And I said, wait a minute, what pain did she go through that she would not normally have gone through had there been no attempted abortion.
…
Interviewer: so she had a baby that died, and she didn’t know that she had another one living in her the same time.
….
Interviewer: so she was upset because somehow she still had a live baby?
Doctor: yes.
Interviewer: this is why this woman was all upset, because she gave birth to a healthy, live child?
Doctor: I talked that over with the lawyer, saying, “what happened here is the absolute normal way a pregnancy is supposed to end. In what way is it malpractice for it to end up totally normally?” Then the other thing is, she adopted out the baby – and still sued me for child rearing charges between age 1, or zero, and 21 years of age.
Interviewer, so you’re saying, this experience put you up close and personal with a mother so intent on the death of her child?
Doctor: and also, so intent of making money out of it.
Interviewer: making money out of it, if it didn’t die… These people are really out there… It sounds absolutely unbelievable –
Doctor: The lawyer offered her $2000 if she would drop the case and get out of town. She did. That’s how it ended.… Except it didn’t end that way for me. I went through the cases, and more and more I was seeing, why are you there for the abortion, and there all selfish reasons. “It doesn’t fit in with my lifestyle. It doesn’t fit in with what I had planned and I dare not let anyone know I have been pregnant, because that might indicate that I had sex and oh my, that can’t get out.” Well, foolishness, and greed and… I said, enough.
“In the early 70s we began to use machinery, apparatus, and instruments which allowed us to finally put a larger and much more sophisticated window into the womb.
But for the first time as a physician and as an ethical person, I began to understand that more was involved in an abortion than merely suctioning out a mass of cells, a few grams of tissue. I began to be aware that there was something here which had a moral density to it which commanded respect.”
Bernard Nathanson, cited in Abortion: a Reflection on Life (Fort Lauderdale, Florida: Coral Ridge Ministries, 1989) P 5
And Then There Were None reaches out to men and women who are in the abortion field. They have helped over 44 clinic workers leave their jobs and find employment. They offer counseling, emotional support, material help, and help finding a job. See their website here.
Here is an email they received:
“I just wanted to let you know, you’ve touched my heart. For years…too many years to count, I murdered countless children..up until 3 months ago that is. I believed I was doing what was best at the time. I worked for Planned Parenthood.
I became hardened and cold to the fact, I was killing children. How I, a physician who had taken an oath to preserve life can perform abortions — can actually kill defenseless unborn babies — literally ripped out, many times in pieces, from the mother’s womb, is beyond me..but I see it now. Partial-birth abortions was my living. :'(
Finally one day, something hit me…and my hard-heart began to soften. After receiving a pro-life tract, and having read it; I got angry, but I didn’t throw it away. And then for some reason, I couldn’t perform abortions anymore.
I broke down that day and felt like I had died on the inside. Millions of emotions came at me and I had a weight of guilt, on my shoulders so heavy. So heavy, worse than any depression I’ve ever felt.
I felt like, for every baby I had taken from this world, a part of me died as well. I cry as I write this. I cry for the mothers, the fathers..who decided because of “choice” they would kill their children. I cry for the babies, who were brutally murdered at my hand. It takes a lot to admit that. ALOT.
Where is the churches? The outreach groups? Get out there! Do something. Please! Don’t say, “it isn’t my field” Shouldn’t it be every moral person’s responsibility, to defend the defenseless? And don’t tell me pro-life outreach doesn’t work, or tracts don’t help. It certainly did for me.
There’s not a day that goes by now, where my heart isn’t heavy with grief, or I don’t angry. I can only hope God can forgive me. If anyone deserves a hell, it’s the one who murders children.”
Please keep reaching out to clinic workers with kindness and compassion.
Dr. Arnold Hapern was the director of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic. In the movie “Eclipse of Reason,” which was produced by former abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson, he tells of his conversion:
“…I never personally considered a fetus a real baby until 20 weeks of gestation when one could hear the fetal heart tones and a woman feel movement.
Now somewhere along the line I was apprised or thought I was apprised that the fetus was not a human being until it arrived to the point where women could feel that baby move. As we’ve gone from1982 to 1986 and into the late 1980s we realize that the fetus really is a child and that it really is moving, and that the heart beat is really beating by the use of ultrasound and modern techniques of detecting the fetus.…
In one day I walk to the abortion clinic with 10 or 12 or 13 women waiting and I realized I cannot do anymore abortions. I felt uncomfortable doing it, I felt disgusted at myself.
I realized now that I’d started doing second trimester abortions and not only did I I see a little tissue coming out , I saw fetal parts, I saw babies coming out, and I felt that I was so uncomfortable at this point that I could not continue and I walked out of the clinic and left that clinic without doing the abortions and never entered the abortion clinic again.”
Columnist Phil Greenberg witnessed former abortion provider Kathi Aultman’s testimony at a trial on Partial Birth Abortion at a federal courthouse. From his column:
“One of the expert witnesses, Dr. Kathi Aultman of Orange park, Florida, explains that she no longer does abortions. She used to. She never thought overmuch about what it was she was destroying. Actually, she found it fascinating, how all the expelled parts fit together into a tiny, perfect being. Amazing. She would go down to Pathology and section them- the little hearts and livers and lungs.
But one day Dr. Aultman read an article comparing the abortion industry with the Holocaust.
“Personally,” she testifies, “I had a hard time understanding how the German doctors could do what they did during the war.” Now it became clear. “Any time you take a group of people and consider them non-human, you can do anything to them. It wasn’t until I had my own baby and then read that article that I understood how the German doctors could do what they did….All of a sudden, I saw what happened to me during training.”
Phil Greenberg “A Perfectly Normal Morning” October 12, 1997.
From “To Life: A Collection of Editorials & Columns on Abortion, Life, and Choice” (Little Rock, Arkansas: The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 1999) P 91
On another day of testimony:
Testimony of Kathi A. Aultman, MD before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution at a Legislative hearing on HR 4965 the “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2002” July 9, 2002
When I started my OB/GYN Residency, I was very pro-abortion. I felt no woman should have go through a pregnancy she didn’t want. I felt abortion was a necessary evil, and I was determined to provide women with the best abortion care possible. I perfected my D&C with suction technique and then convinced one of our local abortionists to teach me to do D&Es. I moonlighted at an abortion clinic in Gainesville as much as I could. The only time I felt uneasy was when I was on my neonatal rotation and I realized that the babies I was trying to save were the same size as the babies I had been aborting.
I continued to do abortions almost the entire time I was pregnant (with my eldest daughter) without it bothering me. It wasn’t until I delivered my daughter and made the connection between fetus and baby that I stopped doing abortions. I found out later that few doctors are able to do abortions for very long. OB/GYNs especially, often experience a conflict of interest because they normally are concerned about the welfare of both their patients but in an abortion they are killing one of them. It’s hard for most doctors to deliver babies and do abortions.
It also has to do with the fact that to almost everyone else the pregnancy is just a blob of tissue, but the abortionist knows exactly what he is doing because he has to count all the parts after each abortion. I never had any doubt that I was killing little people, but somehow I was able to justify and compartmentalize that.
Even though I later became a Christian, I continued to be a staunch supporter of abortion rights. I just couldn’t stomach doing them myself anymore. It wasn’t until I read an article that compared abortion to the Holocaust that I changed my opinion. I had always wondered how the German doctors could do what they did to people. I realized that I was no better than they were. I had dehumanized the fetus and therefore felt no moral responsibility towards it.”
24 weeks. partial birth abortions were often done around this timeShare on Facebook
Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former abortionist who performed thousands and thousands of abortions, describes how he would be aborting a baby on one floor of a hospital and then trying to save a baby of the same age on another floor.
“In the mid-70s, I would be up on one floor, putting the hypertonic saline into a woman 23 weeks pregnant, and on another floor down, I would have someone in labor at 23 weeks, and I would be trying to salvage this baby. The nurses were caught in the same bind, the same moral whipsaw. What were we doing here, were we saving babies or were we killing them?”
This baby was born at 23 weeks. Abortion is legal at this age in every state of the United States.
Nathanson, Bernard N, M.D The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing Inc, 1996) 128
The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson performed thousands of abortions before becoming pro-life. He claims that the reason he stopped doing abortions was because he began to have doubts about the humanity of the unborn baby due to advances in technology, including the availability of ultrasounds. He made the famous film “The Silent Scream” which had a major impact on the abortion debate in the 1980s when it was produced. He says this of the taping of the famous video:
“By 1984, however, I had begun to ask myself more questions about abortion: what actually goes on in an abortion? I had done many, but abortion is a blind procedure. The doctor does not see what he’s doing. He puts an instrument into a uterus and he turns on a motor, and the suction machine goes on and something is vacuumed out; it ends up as a little pile of meat in a gauze bag. I wanted to know what happened, so in 1984 I said to a friend of mine, who was doing 15 or maybe 20 abortions a day, “Look, do me a favor, Jay. Next Saturday, when you are doing all these abortions, put an ultrasound device on the mother and tape it for me.”
He did, and when he looked at the tapes with me in an editing studio, he was so affected that he never did another abortion. I, though I had not done an abortion in five years, was shaken to the very roots of my soul by what I saw.”
Nathanson, Bernard N, M.D The Hand of God: a Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing Inc, 1996) 140 – 141
“I ran the largest abortion clinic in the world for 2 years. I had no conflicts whatsoever at the time I was doing the abortions. I changed my mind because the new scientific data which we were getting from advanced technology persuaded me that we could not indiscriminately continue to slaughter what was demonstrably a human being.”
Dr. George Flesh decided to stop performing abortions. He said the following:
“Extracting a fetus, piece by piece, was bad for my sleep. Depression clouded my office day when I had an abortion scheduled. My pulse raced after giving the local anesthetic. Although I still felt sorry for the unmarried 20-year-old college junior, I felt increasing anger toward the married couples who requested abortions because a law firm partnership was imminent, or house remodeling was incomplete, or even because summer travel tickets were paid for.
Anxiety attacks, complete with nausea, palpitations and dizziness, began to strike me in some social situations. In public, I felt I was on trial, or perhaps should have been. I no longer was proud to be a physician. Arriving home from work to the embrace of my kids, I felt undeserving that God had blessed me with their smiling faces. The morning shave became an ordeal, as I stared at the sad face in the mirror and wondered how all those awards and diplomas had produced an Angel of death.”
“Tearing a developed fetus apart, limb by limb, is an act of depravity that society should not permit. We cannot afford such a devaluation of human life, nor the desensitization of medical personnel it requires. This is not based on what the fetus might feel but on what we should feel in watching an exquisite, partly formed human being being dismembered.”
Dr. Flesh talked about the experience he had that led to him quitting abortion practice:
“… a married couple came to me and requested an abortion. Because the patient’s cervix was rigid, I was unable to dilate it and perform the procedure. I asked her to return in a week, when the cervix would be softer.
The couple returned and told me that they had changed their minds and wanted to “keep the baby.” I delivered the baby seven months later. Years later, I played with little Jeffrey in the pool at the tennis club where his parents and I were members. He was happy and beautiful. I was horrified to think that only a technical obstacle had prevented me from terminating Jeffrey’s potential life. The connection between the six-week-old human embryo and a laughing child stopped being an abstraction for me. While hugging my sons each morning, I started to think of the vacuum aspirator that I would use two hours later.”
….
“[After saying that abortion should not be illegal] but I am revolted when I see how casually some couples choose an abortion – for the convenience of having a baby in June instead of February, for example. I do not believe that a civilized society should encourage this.”
“Since I stopped doing abortions, my life has blossomed. I love my practice. Years of struggling guilt have ended. A certain calm and inner peace have returned. I feel closer to God.”
George Flesh “the Spiritual Cost of Abortion” Originally an Editorial in the Los Angeles Times, 1994 in Gary E McCuen Abortion Violence & Extremism (Hudson, Wisconsin: GEM Publications, 1997) 76-79
