Dr. Stuart Campbell, former abortionist, referring to advances in ultrasound imaging:
“Even a fetus lying there dead doesn’t convey the horror that one experiences seeing a baby moving its arms and legs, opening its mouth, sucking its thumb, and then thinking, gosh, somebody wants to, you know… It looks so vital. It has changed my view. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”
(Campbell is a pioneer of pregnancy scans, he regularly performed abortions, until he left the NHS practice.)
Stuart Campbell “The Hidden Wonders of New Life” The Tablet October 7 2004 Quoted in Deathroe
“I wanted to be the world’s best abortionist, for the good of my patients. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. So, after I met each patient, reviewed the medical information gathered by my nurse, examined the patient and performed the abortion, I would then carefully sift through the remains to be sure all the parts were accounted for. I had to find four extremities (two arms and two legs) a spine, a skull, and the placenta, or my patient would suffer later from an incomplete abortion…My attention was so focused on my perceived patient that I managed to deny that there were, in fact, two patients involved- the expectant mother and a very small child…I had to wonder, how can having a child be so wrong for some people that they will pay me to end its life?”
Former abortionist Dr. Beverly McMillan
“How One Doctor Changed her Mind About Abortion” Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs
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In her speech at The Meet the Abortion Providers Convention in Chicago, Dr. McMillan elaborates:
“One of the things that was starting to bother me was, as I said, I was trying to run the best abortion clinic in the country. We were just a first trimester abortion facility, and we did that on purpose too. We were new in the community; this was a conservative community; what we didn’t need was a bunch of complications. Complications increase with increasing size of the pregnant uterus, so we deliberately stopped at 12 weeks and we just did suction D&Cs. I would go in and meet my “well-counseled” patient; I would examine her, and then I would do the suction D&C procedure under a paracervical block. After it was all over, I would leave my patient on the table and I would go over to the suction bottle and I would take the little stockinette out and go outside the room to a sink where I would open the stockinette up, and I personally would pick through it with a forceps and I would have to identify four extremities, and a spine and a skull and the placenta. If I didn’t find that, I would have to go back in that room and scrape and suction some more, or else my patients would be showing up in 48 or 72 hours, just like those women at Cook County with an infected incomplete abortion.
Standing at that sink, I guess I just started seeing these bodies for the first time. I don’t know what I did before that. I think I just counted. I was cool. Blood didn’t make me sick. I could handle all the guts and gore of medicine just fine. But I started seeing this for the first time and it started bothering me.
Being medical director of the clinic, rank has its privileges. I made out the schedule of who worked when. So I just started making out the schedule so that I wasn’t scheduled to do abortions. I just directed. My fellow abortionists by this time loved it, because we got paid by the procedure and there was less pie to share with me. In fact, at that point, I was an unpaid employee of the abortion corporation because I did my medical directing gratis. So I can’t say that money was the reason behind our clinic. They’re all different, but that was how ours started.
I remember one afternoon in particular, a very attractive young woman who was the day-to-day manager of the clinic came up to the sink one day while I was getting ready to go through my little procedure, and she said, would you let me see? I’ve never really seen what you look at at the sink. I said, sure, and I started showing her. And this happened to be about a 12-week abortion, and that was about the farthest along we went. That day as I was showing her, I remember very clearly seeing an arm and seeing the deltoid muscle, and it just really struck me that day how beautiful that was. The thought just flashed through my mind: What are you doing? Here is this beautiful piece of human flesh here, what are you doing? That was one of the very last ones that I did.”
This testimony was originally given at a “Meet the Abortion Providers” workshop sponsored by the Pro-life Action League of Chicago, directed by Joe Scheidler.
“Thank you for inviting me to the Pro-Life Action League’s fifth “Meet the Abortion Providers” conference, I think you will find my story of how I became an abortionist, unfortunately, somewhat typical, and my story of why I stopped, unfortunately, somewhat atypical.
I say “unfortunately” because it seems the majority of physicians who leave training today have been indoctrinated in [and have adopted] a pro-choice viewpoint. Even those of us who are strongly pro-life face tremendous pressures to support a national standard of care which does not honor the sanctity of human life. I will say more about this later.
I am 50 years old. I have been delivering babies in Indianapolis for 26 years; I lost count many years ago of the actual number, but I would estimate the total to be between four and five thousand. My father is also an obstetrician, now retired, who practiced obstetrics in Anderson, Indiana where I grew up. He delivered over 10,000 babies and has a strong pro-life viewpoint even though he is an agnostic.
I did all of my training at the Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis. I rotated back and forth between the private Coleman Hospital for Women and the Marion County General Hospital for the indigent population. My residency was from 1970 – 1973. Since the infamous Roe v. Wade decision came down in January 1973, my career overlaps the years before and after that landmark decision. However, I became all too familiar with abortions from the very beginning of my residency.
Of course, I saw women whose social circumstances seemed desperate who asked to be referred for illegal abortions. Once, I asked an attending staff physician about such a referral, and rather than condemn it, he said he knew of a general practitioner who had the reputation of doing abortions. In retrospect, I asked the wrong doctor that question, but at that point in my life, I respected the opinion of all of my mentors.
About 1970 the state of New York passed legislation allowing abortions to be performed legally. This was not necessarily a popular choice. Referendums to legalize abortions in Michigan and North Dakota were defeated by 3:1 and 4:1 margins.
A few months into my residency, I came face to face with the issue of abortion for the first time. An 18-year-old Indiana University coed came into Coleman Hospital with lower abdominal pain. She related to me that she had been to New York City earlier that day to have a legal abortion performed at a clinic there. She had gotten on a plane at 8am at Indianapolis International Airport and flown to New York. She was taken to a legitimate clinic by a cab driver. She had believed she was two and a half months pregnant, but after the doctor had unsuccessfully attempted to abort the pregnancy, he told her she wasn’t really pregnant after all and sent her home. She returned to Indiana on the 4pm flight as planned.
When she returned home in terrible pain, she realized she was in trouble and for the first time, told her mother what had happened to her. Her mother contacted her own gynecologist, who in turn referred the patient to Coleman Hospital to be evaluated by the resident on call–me.
Even though I was still wet behind the ears, I know that this pale, frightened little girl was still 10 weeks pregnant and her blood count was only half of what it should be. The private, attending doctor came in and took the patient to surgery immediately that night, where he repaired the hole that had been torn in the back of her uterus, which had caused her massive internal hemorrhage.
Over the course of the next few days, infection set in which did not respond to antibiotics, and we made the painful decision to perform a hysterectomy. Tragically, the shock from the infection severely damaged her lungs and her course was steadily downhill. As I helplessly watched, she slipped into unconsciousness and a few days later she died.
I had difficulty putting the whole thing into perspective. Unfortunately, my conclusion was that there had to be a better way to perform abortions than to send patients off to a clinic in New York.
There was another kind of abortion being done at that time right in Coleman Hospital. These were so called “second trimester abortions” being done for “psychiatric” reasons. Although my textbook stated that true psychiatric indications for abortion were extremely rare, in practice it was relatively easy for a woman to get two psychiatrists to rubber stamp her abortion request for the price of a consultation visit. By the time all the paperwork was done, these pregnancies were more advanced and were classified as second trimester. Technically, these could be between 14 and 27 weeks, but usually they were 18 – 20 weeks along.
This type of abortion was then done by hypertonic saline injection. In laymen’s terms this meant injecting a very caustic salt solution into the amniotic sac which the baby swallows, causing his death. Labor begins 12 – 36 hours later, A well liked member of the teaching faculty would inject the solution and the patient was admitted to the gynecology ward to await delivery.
It was my job to go to the ward and pick up the dead baby from the labor bed and make sure the placenta had all come out. This was my least favorite duty as a resident, and again I concluded there had to be a better way.
Since hypertonic saline was so toxic if it was injected into the uterine wall instead of the amniotic sac; there was a constant search for the ideal drug. Prostaglandin has now become the drug of choice, but one of the early experiments was with hypertonic urea. The major disadvantage in using it, was the problem of live births. I remember using it on a patient that the psychiatric residents brought to us from their clinic from an institutionalized patient who really was crazy. I’ll never forget delivering her nearly two pound baby, and hearing her screams, “My baby’s alive, my baby’s alive.” It lived several days.
Later, I was taught by my chief resident that if I was delivering a defective baby, such as an anencephalic, I should place it in the bucket of water at my side and declare it a stillborn. I never did that, but I’ll always remember it.
The problem of live birth in second and third trimester abortions has been solved by the dilation and evacuation procedure, or D & E. The cervix is dilated with laminaria, which are pieces of dried seaweed which absorb water over a 12 hour period and stretch to 4 times their original size. The baby is then delivered piecemeal.
diagram of a D&E
When I rotated over to the county hospital, I became familiar with illegal abortions and their aftermath. Every woman who came in with even a routine miscarriage was suspected of having had a criminal abortion. We were trained to be suspicious because of the consequences of missing the diagnosis of a perforated uterus.
We were all indoctrinated with the almost legendary story of how one of our preceding residents, Dr. James Brillhart, had gone out of the hospital and tracked down an old, dying abortionist who had been responsible for the deaths of several patients. Ironically, Dr. Brillhart has been one of the leading abortionists in Indianapolis from Roe v. Wade to the present day. The actual number of criminal abortions was small and although I saw some patients who were pretty sick, I don’t recall any patients during my three years who died from a criminal abortion.
At the county hospital, we received patients from the other two private hospital residency programs when they didn’t want to take care of a particular patient. Consequently, we looked down on those residents and developed the mind set that we were to take care of every problem we encountered. We would not “dump” problems on others.
When I finished my residency, I covered my father’s practice for 6 months before beginning a teaching position at Indiana University. I recall asking my department chairman what I should do about abortions, since my father was pro-life. His wise advice was not to perform them in Anderson.
However, when I returned to the medical center, I was placed in charge of the outpatient OB/GYN clinics at the county hospital, now called Wishard Hospital. Since Roe v Wade was now the law of the land, Drs. Joe Thompson and Bob Munsick were both performing abortions at Wishard. I greatly respected both men. I was faced with the direct question, “Would I also perform abortions at Wishard?”
I had already bought the big lies that “Abortion is a logical extension of family planning services” and that “All people needed to prevent unwanted pregnancies is more information and better access to contraception.”
I might add at this point that I was not encumbered by any personal religious beliefs at that time. As a teenager, I had expressed to my future wife, that I had a desire to know God and had joined her church, but I didn’t have any conviction of sin and I didn’t come to a saving faith at that time.
After studying science, I had come to an agnostic position with respect to God. Without a foundation of absolute truth, and under the influence of my peers, and based on my own experiences, I decided to do what was right in my own eyes and perform first trimester abortions for poor women at Wishard. I would be a good soldier and do my duty. A doctor’s duty, I believed, was to do everything in his power to fix what was wrong with his patient.
I believed in applying this medical solution of abortion to a societal problem of unwanted pregnancy. I believed that if these women were unencumbered by unwanted children that they could rise above their poverty.
I still believe that I was not in it for the money. In my teaching contract, I only got to keep 25% of anything I earned in private practice. At age 28, I was idealistic, immature, and too inexperienced in the way of the world.
In making the decision to do abortions, I went against God’s Word, the beliefs of my father and violated my Hippocratic Oath.
Incidentally, the section of the oath stating “I will not give a woman a pessary to induce abortion” has been deleted from the oath when it is used by new physicians today. I’m not sure Hippocrates would understand,
Between January and May of 1974, I performed 23 “pregnancy terminations” at Wishard. That is a euphemistic way of saying that I killed 23 children. One definition of a euphemism is a figure of speech where a less disagreeable word or phrase is substituted for a more accurate but more offensive one.
The deception in the language of abortion is achieved through the use of euphemisms. “Pregnancy termination” rather than abortion. “Menstrual extraction” rather than early abortion. “Products of conception” rather than baby and placenta. “Tissues” rather than flesh and bones. It makes it sound more like a Kleenex than a baby. Even “fetus” and “embryo” are Greek and Latin words for Baby. “Chorionic Villus Sampling” rather than placental biopsy. “Selective Multi Fetal Reduction” rather than random killing of several babies in an attempt to save the remainder of the lucky ones.
All of these terms dehumanize what is being destroyed so that we deceive others — and ourselves.
One of my idealistic bubbles burst in about April of 74, when a patient whom I had aborted in January, returned to me for another abortion. She was using abortion for birth control.
In order to tell you why I finally stopped, I need to explain a little about the technique of suction curettage abortion. Incidentally, I did them under general anesthesia in surgery. Today, most are done under local anesthesia in a clinic.
First, the cervix, or mouth of the womb, is stretched open with pencil shaped dilators, until it is open enough to insert the suction curette, which is a clear plastic straw like tube. A vacuum source is then attached to the curette. After the curette is introduced into the uterus, the water is broken and is seen through the curette, followed by bits of flesh and blood, which is what remains of the baby and placenta. The procedure works well because the baby is small at 10 weeks and is not calcified, so that it fits easily through the narrow tube. All parts become almost indistinguishable in the mesh filter bag in the suction jar.
My 23rd abortion changed my mind about doing abortions forever. This patient was a little overweight and ultimately proved to be a little farther along than anticipated. This was not an uncommon mistake before ultrasound was readily available to confirm the gestational age.
Initially, the abortion proceeded normally. The water broke, but then nothing more would come out. When I withdrew the curette, I saw that it was plugged up with the leg of the baby which had been torn off. I then changed techniques and used ring forceps to dismember the 13 or 14 week size baby. Inside the remains of the rib cage I found a tiny, beating heart. I was finally able to remove the head and looked squarely into the face of a human being — a human being that I had just killed. I turned to the scrub nurse standing next to me and said, “I’m sorry”.
I knew then that abortion was wrong and I couldn’t be a part of it any longer. No one was critical of me for what I had done, nor for having stopped. But I had a lot of guilt about that abortion and had flashbacks to it from time to time. I sometimes dreamed about it. The guilt lasted about four years.”
Dr. Jarrett then discusses his conversion to Christianity and explains how it helped him resolve the guilt that he felt from doing abortions.
Here is Dr. Brewer’s speech given at the Meet the Abortion Providers convention which was sponsored by The Pro-Life Action League in Chicago.
“You know, when Mr. Scheidler came to our room last evening to give us the program for the day, when he walked in I had forgotten how tall he is. It’s really neat to be able to look pretty much right-on into somebody’s eyes instead of looking down. I guess my dear mother and father did real good with the prenatal vitamins and also all those vitamins that were in vogue back in the 1940s when I was growing up.
You know, we all wear different hats and I have a lot of different hats, too. I’m a husband, I’m a father, I’m a doctor (OB/GYN), and I’m a concerned citizen about political issues and other issues of our day–and I was an abortionist, and am now known as what we call a cross-over; one who’s made the change. That’s due to my Lord, Jesus Christ, because Christ made a change in my life, and I want to share what that part of my life was like before and then after.
People are not naturally against life. Kids love other kids. Teenage girls (and we have several) like children. Mothers of children like children. There are trying moments, but we love our children. Fathers and mothers love their children. So, you have to be trained to hate children. We have to be trained against life. When we go to church, we don’t hear the pro-abortion story. When we read in the Bible, we don’t hear the pro-abortion story. When we talk with our mother and father about how they feel about us, etc., we don’t hear the pro-abortion story. When I talk with my mother about her and my dad having me, I don’t hear that they considered abortion. So the point is that we have to be trained to hate. We have to be trained to be against life.
Dr. Hill shared a little bit about his experience, and he took some of my lines. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that two doctors who had done abortions before and went to different medical schools and trained in different areas of the country, and now are living and practicing in different areas of the country, would have a type of common beginning.
It happened after medical school as I began my residency in OB/GYN. You know, we learn on-the-job. A lot of medicine is on the-job training. A lot of medicine, including surgery, has a lot of skill that’s a mechanical, technician-type skill. Working on a car to fix it, putting in wiring in a home, doing plumbing, doing a Caesarean Section, doing a hysterectomy, taking a mole or a lump off, doing a D&C. A D&C is a common procedure that we use often in OB/GYN to get a sample of the lining of the uterus. For example, an older woman who is having trouble with bleeding, or a younger woman who had a problem with hormone balance or is/was having problems with her periods.
And so, as we learn that in residency, there came a time when we went to the clinic to learn about abortion. After all, abortion was just applying the technique of a D&C to a woman who was in a little different state–she was pregnant.
In 1973, when abortion was legalized, Dr. Hill mentioned New York (where I was trained, born and brought up) was one of the first states to go along with that. So I can remember in my training when they used to fly women from Ohio to New York to several of the doctors who worked at the hospital where I was training to have their abortions. Now there wasn’t a big local outcry in the community that I knew of, but I do know that as this doctor built a new house, funded partly by monies from these abortions, that his new home became known around town as “Abortion Manor.” So I began to understand that there was something about abortion that many people did not agree with.
We went to church as a family. We were taken to church, but we weren’t a Christian family. My parents weren’t Christians at that time; none of us were either. So as I went into residency, I didn’t have the type of moral and ethical background or preparation from the home that many people have. I didn’t have strong standards for myself.
I can remember that day watching the first abortion with the resident doctor sitting down and putting the tube in and removing the contents, and I saw the bloody material coming down the plastic tube and it went into a big jar. The first one. I’d never seen one before. I didn’t know what to expect. Well, it was my job afterwards to go undo the jar and see what was inside. It was kind of neat, learning about a new experience. I wasn’t a Christian; I didn’t have any views on abortion; I was in a training program; this was a brand-new experience. I was going to get to see a new procedure and learn, and that was exciting.
And it got more exciting as I opened the jar and took the little piece of stockinette and opened that little bag, and the resident doctor said, now put it on that blue towel and check it out. We want to make sure that we got it all. I thought, oh, that will be exciting hands-on experience, looking at tissue. And I opened the sock up and I put it on the towel and there were parts in there of a person. I’d taken anatomy; I was a medical student; I knew what I was looking at. There was a little scapula and an arm and I saw some ribs and a chest, and I saw a little tiny head, and I saw a piece of a leg, and I saw a tiny hand, and I saw an arm. You know, it was like somebody put a hot poker into me. I believe that God gives us all a conscience and I wasn’t a Christian, but I had a conscience and that hurt.
I checked it out and there were two arms and two legs and one head, etc., and I turned and said, I guess you got it all. That was a very hard experience for me to go through, emotionally. If I’d been a Christian against abortion it would have been simple–I wouldn’t have been there. And if I’d been excited and wanted to do them and excited about the money that I’d make later in practice, I would have been on the opposite end. But here I was with no real convictions, caught in the middle.
seven weeks
So I did what a lot of us do throughout our life, we don’t do anything. I didn’t talk with anybody about it. I didn’t talk with my folks about it. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t look in the Bible because I wasn’t a Christian, and so I did nothing, and do you know what happened? I got to see another abortion.
You know what? That one hurt, too. But I didn’t do anything again and kept seeing abortions, and do you know what? It hurt a little bit less every time I saw one. Do you know what happened next? I got to sit down and do one, because you see one, you do one, and you teach one, as Dr. Hill mentioned.
The first one that I did was kind of hard. It was like hurting again like a hot poker. But after a while it got to where it didn’t hurt.
I’m reminded of a summer when I was a 15-year-old boy, and, you know, when you’re 15 it’s tough, because you have to be 16 in New York State to get working papers, and so I wasn’t 16 yet and I wanted to earn some money and I couldn’t get working papers. I couldn’t work at a McDonald’s (I don’t even know if we had McDonald’s then!). But I couldn’t get a job and work in a place, so I decided to start my own little business. My dad had a lawn mower and I got a sickle and I had some trimmers, and went out and took care of people’s yards and had a little lawn and garden service. I did pretty well financially that summer. But, you know, the first couple of weeks, my hands hurt and I got big blisters. I was using tools that my hands were used to, all day, every day. That was like my heart when I saw and did abortions. But then you know, after a few weeks, I got calluses on my hands and pretty soon they didn’t look real good, but, boy, my hands could work all day and no blisters and no pain.
That’s what happened to my heart as I saw the abortions and then began doing them. My heart got callused. My heart was callused against the fact that I was a murderer.
That happens to us sometimes in life and it’s a hard thing. But I got so callused that when I was on duty at night some of the doctors who were in partnership with the doctor who lived in Abortion Manor would come in to do their saline abortions. These were women who were farther along, and they would do five in a night…line the women up all in one big room and put the needles in and put the salt solution in, and then there would be five therapeutic miscarriages, right? Five times 500 is 2,500. That’s not bad fifteen years ago for one night’s extra work. You do that a couple of nights a week and that’s a lot of money. But I really had no concept, having been through medical school even, of what was inside because when we got on the OB service we delivered normal, healthy babies most of the time. There weren’t very many miscarriages at four and five months. Once in a while we would see one.
16 weeks – at the right age for an early saline abortion
But once they began doing abortions and doing the saline abortions, and I would take my turn with the other residents being on duty, guess who came in at night to take care of the women when they had trouble delivering the babies or had trouble delivering the afterbirths? The doctor who did it and made the money? No. It was me and the other residents. So I would go to a room and a lady would be screaming and crying and walk in, and here was like the “candy apple babies” that you’ve seen all scarred and burned from the salt solution, and the placenta would be stuck and we’d have to work with them, and once in a while we’d have to take them to surgery and do a D&C. Boy, that was grim! That was a lot worse than a little sock, because somebody else had to look through the sock now that I was a big resident and doing abortions and they had to check for me, so I didn’t have to look in the sock anymore.
But one night, a lady delivered and I was called to come and see her because she was uncontrollable. I went in the room and she was going to pieces. She was having a nervous breakdown, screaming and thrashing. The nurses were upset because they couldn’t get any work done and all the other patients were upset because this lady was screaming and I walked in, and here was her little saline abortion baby. It had been born and it was kicking and moving for a little while before it finally died of those terrible burns. Because the salt solution gets into the lungs and burns the lungs too.
Like Dr. Hill, I began thinking and you just think that if you club somebody on the head enough with a big club, they’d wake up, but like him, I had a very thick head, I guess, too. But I saw that more and more. Every time it would begin to eat away, I would thicken that callous a little bit more. I wasn’t making any money because I wasn’t in private practice yet. So it’s not that I was in it for the money. I was just simply uncommitted, and that’s the way a lot of people today are. We’re uncommitted; we’re afraid to stand up; we’re afraid to speak out. Maybe we aren’t afraid; we just don’t have our own convictions settled yet.
20 weeks.
I remember another experience as a resident when I had an opportunity to help one of Abortion Manor’s partners on a hysterotomy. This lady was too far along for a suction D&C; we did not have prostaglandins in those days; we did not do D&Es very often in those days. So since she was in the second trimester and far enough along (four to five months), why she was going to have a hysterotomy. Well, that was kind of exciting to me, to see a Caesarian on a baby that young, so I helped on that surgery. I remember as we made the incision and got in and made the incision in the uterus, to see the baby move underneath the sack of membranes as the Caesarian incision was made before the doctor broke the water. The thought came to me, my God, that’s a person! Then he broke the water, and when he broke the water it was like I had a pain in my heart just like when I saw that first suction abortion. Then he delivered the baby and I couldn’t touch the baby. I wasn’t much of an assistant; I just stood there and the reality of what was going on was finally beginning to seep in to my calloused brain and heart. They simply took that little baby that was making little sounds and moving and kicking over and set it on the table in a cold stainless steel bowl. Every time I would look over while we were repairing the incision in the uterus and finishing the Caesarean, I would see that little person kicking and moving in that bowl. It kicked and moved less and less, of course, as time went on. I can remember going over and looking at that baby when we were done with surgery and the baby was still alive. You could see the chest moving as the heart beat and the baby would try and take a little breath, and it really hurt inside and it began to educate me as to what abortion really was.
What do we do when something gets so close to us that it hurts? We either fight it or we put it away. Either we fight it or we run. If somebody jumps out at me, I’m either going to run or I’m going to fight. I wasn’t equipped to fight, and so I ran. The way we run is by putting up barriers. My barrier was, well, boy, that really hurt; that was a living baby; now this abortion thing, I’ve got to deal with that somehow; I’m going to just have to decide something for myself here. This is not good. So I made a startling decision. I decided that, for me, life began when a baby could survive outside the uterus, and if I was involved in something like that, that would be an abortion. That was a nice smokescreen, wasn’t it? That meant that when I did the suction abortions I wasn’t killing anything. That meant that when I helped out on a saline abortion, and they said, do you want to do one? Sure, I’d like to try and see how the needle works and see how it goes. I wasn’t doing an abortion. That meant that the hysterectomy that I helped on was not an abortion because the baby couldn’t have survived outside. After all, it sat in the dish and died. So, for me, life began after 28 weeks and I continued doing abortions.
Then I saw more babies being born earlier and, you know, with our neonatal intensive care units and all of our modern technology. Back in 1973, we couldn’t do a whole lot other than on an anecdotal basis with babies that were even 28 weeks. But as technology increased, suddenly they were having luck with babies that were 28 weeks old, and then 27 weeks, and then 26 weeks. So I began to drop my smokescreen and I said, well, abortion then is after 27 weeks. Well, no, it’s after 26 weeks. Well, maybe it’s 24 weeks. Then I got to thinking maybe it’s 20 weeks. All I was doing was avoiding the problem.
The next smokescreen was, well, it’s really a baby when it’s all formed, so after 12 weeks it’s a baby so the first trimester abortions aren’t really abortions, and I can handle that. So I lived like that for a while.
I have big feet; I wear a size 14 shoe. All these different shoes I was trying on seemed big enough in the beginning, you know, but they were getting small real fast and they weren’t fitting. The next thing I knew I kept dropping my smokescreen back to where life occurred earlier and earlier.
When I became a Christian I realized that life occurs at conception. And once that startling discovery had been made, it was very simple to stop doing abortions. That decision and Christianity didn’t come during residency, however. After residency I went into the military for two years, and it’s hard for me to say these things because it took ten years for God to work in my life to where I was able to deal with the guilt that I felt for all the abortions that I had done. But when I went into the military, I used to take pride in the fact that if a woman came to me and she was pregnant and wanted the baby, I could take care of her. I had a fine training in OB/GYN. And, if a woman came to me and she did not want the baby, I took pride in the fact that I could take care of her as well by doing an abortion.
So, I was doing abortions in the military and we’d line them up. It was sort of like private practice, and we did a good number of abortions. At that time, my shoes had shrunk down to where now I had to wear the size that included just the first trimester.
What happened next in my life was that a very precious woman, who is now my wife, invited me to go to church. She wasn’t even a Christian at the time. But I went to church and guess what happened to me? What was I going to do with this girl who was coming in for an abortion, and I’ll tell you, that was a tough time for me. Because I had the feeling that if I did just the one more, then I wouldn’t have to do any again. I could just fulfill this commitment and do this last one, and that could be my last one.
But, you know, God reminded me of that calloused heart that I had developed, and that if I did one more, after making the commitment as a Christian, that I would get back into that same old problem again. So, by God’s grace, I told that girl that I couldn’t do it. I wish I had known what happened to her; I never did find out. But that was a turning point in my life and a very special time.
Now I’m going to stand here and tell you that I am a murderer. I have taken the lives of innocent babies and I have ripped them from their mothers’ wombs with a powerful vacuum instrument. And when they were too big to do it in that way, I’ve injected a concentrated salt solution into the bag of waters to slowly and painfully poison them, and then to cause labor to follow.
seven week-old unborn baby
This is how I got involved–and I want you to listen to this because this is how many people get involved. I began my residency in July 1971, and on July 7, 1971, one and one-half years before Roe v. Wade, I went into the operating room where my chief resident sat down on a stool, he performed an abortion, and then he said that I could do the next one–there were several lined up for that day. In medical circles that’s called “see one, do one, and teach one.” Simply stated, I’d seen one, I did one, and then I taught others to do them later.
After I performed the abortion, here are the words which I dictated, and this is what I want you to listen carefully to:
“The patient was prepped and draped in a sterile fashion in the dorsal lithotomy position with an IV with 15 units of pitocin and 1,000 ccs of dehydrogenase lactate running. Under satisfactory general anesthesia, the cervix was grasped with a thyroid clamp and dilated to a #10 hanks dilator. After sounding to a depth of 4 inches, a #10 curved curette was introduced into the uterine cavity and utilized to empty the uterine contents. Five units of pitocin were given IV at this time. A large, sharp curette was then introduced into the uterine cavity and the small amount of remaining tissue was curetted from the anterior uterine wall. The total fluid and tissue obtained was 125 ccs. Estimated blood loss for the procedure was 50 ccs with 200 ccs of dehydrogenase replacement. After insuring that there was adequate hemostasis on the cervix at the site of the thyroid clamp application, the anesthesia was terminated and the patient taken to the recovery room in satisfactory condition.” (End of Dictation)
In about as little time as it took to read this operative report to you, I had become a murderer….I did not consciously select the words I used in dictating the operative report, but my subconscious mind was obviously at work trying to protect my conscience mind through denial. As you were listening to what I said, you heard me say the words “uterine contents,” you heard me say the word “tissue,” “fluid and tissue,” and “procedure.” They are all words which denied what really happened that day.
The pathology specimen that we sent down was labeled, “Products, of Conception.” The operation performed was called a vacuum curettage. But on the operation request and report, under special circumstances, were found the words “living fetus.” The gymnastics which my mind performed that day in dictating that report could not totally erase the fact that something living was killed that day.
When I was in medical school, abortion was illegal; it was criminal; it was regarded as murder. I graduated from medical school in 1968, and we already had in 1968, however, the beginnings of the erosion of that Pro-Life ethic. In 1967, the State of Colorado passed a law which made it legal to perform an abortion under some circumstances. New York and California followed, and since I was in California during my training, abortion was legal under conditions which threatened the mother’s health, mental health and her life. In our institution there was actually some confusion about what steps we should take to justify the abortions, since we clearly had not come to the point of legally, at least, abortion on demand. So we sent some patients to the psychiatrist before they were aborted; some we did not. But we finally settled on a terminology which we put in the chart, and it went something like this: “Continuation of this pregnancy would be detrimental to the physical and emotional well being of this patient.”
In spite of these words, it was clear that most, if not all, of the abortions which we performed were done so that the patient’s life would not be interrupted by the pregnancy and delivery of a baby.
Early in my training I also had an experience in which I became acutely aware of the fact that there were a lot of patients who came in holding stuffed animals. I began to refer to this as the “teddy bear sign.” As these active-duty officers and active-duty enlisted, and dependent wives and dependent daughters would arrive at our hospital, not just a few of them, but many of them would be carrying some stuffed animal with them. It was not difficult for me to associate this with insecurity and immaturity on the part of these patients. This was in sharp contrast to the patients who were coming to the hospital for other types of surgery.
Another observation was that many of them came back for their second and their third abortions. I can stand here and tell you that during my time in training I never did encounter a true therapeutic abortion situation. One patient who had a therapeutic abortion for kidney disease was aborted at about 32 weeks. The baby weighed over 3 lbs. and even in that day would have had about a 70% chance for survival if the labor had simply been induced and abortion not performed.
In my training program we really made no attempt to counsel the patients concerning their abortions. Most of them had spent many hours and, in some cases, days being transported to the hospital. We limited our discussion with them to the medical aspects of the abortion procedure itself in order to obtain their consent. I recall one patient, however, who decided against having her abortion after she came. Somebody had talked her into having the abortion, and as we got her into surgery and the pentothal was injected, I was standing at the end of the table, and she raised her arm as she was going to sleep and waved it several times, and stated, I protest! At that point I ripped my gloves off, walked out of the room, and told them to wake her up. I wish I could stand here today and tell you that I decided to stop doing abortions in a single instant. But it didn’t happen that way. As you will see, my decision was, and perhaps still is, an evolving one, and we can get into a discussion about that. I did not feel right about doing abortions, but I made no effort to distinguish legal from moral at that time. My justification was that it was legal, the patients wanted it done, and they came from all over the world to Travis Air Force Base in California to have it done.
6 to 7 week unborn baby
It was easy for us to do the first trimester abortions because we were using the same procedure that you use if you remove the placental tissue after a woman has a miscarriage. The vacuum machine is used, and the vacuum tubing empties into a tidy little cheesecloth sack. That little cheesecloth sack is about this big and in it are the products of conception. That’s what we called it. We sent those down to pathology.
In my second year of residency I spent two months on a pathology rotation, which is an interesting thing, and I had to come face-to-face with the contents of those sacks. We were studying the embryology of the ovary. I was in an obstetrical gynecology residency and we were obviously interested in the embryology of the ovary. I, personally, then had to search through the jumbled-up mass of tissue to find the fetal gonads, to be sure to include them on the slide so that we could study them. The jumbled-up mass of tissue was easily identifiable as the torn and shredded body of a tiny human being. It was very obvious when we viewed the slides that we were also studying the embryology of the testes, because half of the aborted fetuses were males….Even though these discoveries made me uncomfortable, I continued to do abortions. There were times when I personally sat there and opened up containers, five, six, seven containers at a time, and would open them up and stand and look at the [contents].
Many of them [abortionists] had nightmares about their participation in the abortions. In my nightmares I would deliver a healthy newborn baby and I would take that healthy newborn baby and I would hold it up, and I would face a jury of faceless people and ask them to tell me what to do with this baby. They would go thumbs-up or thumbs-down and if they made a thumbs-down indication then I was to drop the baby into a bucket of water which was present. I never did reach the point of dropping the baby into the bucket because I’d always wake up at that point. But it was clear to me then that there was something going on in my mind, subconsciously.
second trimester – 16 weeks
I actually stopped doing the second trimester abortions at that time. There was no great clamor about my refusing to do the abortions, but it was interesting to me that there was a subtle understanding that my actions were causing the other residents to do more than their share.”
******
Dr. Hill eventually stopped doing abortions due to the influence of his wife. He later became a Christian and joined the pro-life movement.
This was from a speech at a conference sponsored by the Pro-Life Action League
Once I graduated from medical school, I returned to Memphis for residency in ob-gyn at the University of Tennessee. It had become a tradition within our residency program that the most lucrative and sought after moonlighting jobs were found in the three local abortion clinics.
You could make good money without having to leave town to work nights in hospital emergency rooms.
I knew there were good residents who chose not to do abortions for religious reasons, but I never really understood what one thing had to do with the other. My best friend in college had an abortion, and I had been very supportive of her decision at the time. We were thankful that the Supreme Court had made abortion legal the year after we started college. It seemed only logical that when I was offered the chance to provide those services that I had an obligation to do it. After all, if doctors who believed in a woman’s right to choose didn’t do abortions, who else would?
By the time I was a senior resident, I was medical director of one of the clinics and spent my vacation time at pro-abortion seminars and political functions.
It was not until I was pregnant myself that I began to really examine my feelings about the moral aspects of abortion. It had taken over a year for me to become pregnant with my daughter. The first time I saw the tiny little flicker of her heartbeat on an ultrasound screen I fell completely in love with her. I finally had to come to terms with the fact that the only thing that made my daughter any different than all those tiny babies I had terminated was the fact that I wanted her. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes and I was at last able to see what I had not allowed myself to see in all those years of doing terminations.
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Dr. Moore now conducts training sessions for volunteers at a local crisis pregnancy center about the medical and emotional complications of abortions.
“I got into my medical training. As part of the medical training, abortions became a necessary procedure, according to my chief of my department. This was in 1971. This was a few years before the law changed in the country, but it changed in New York a few years before, and the abortion law changed, and we were going to do abortions. After all, we needed to serve women. We needed to do it in a complete way. We needed to know all the procedures that we needed to do for women. We needed to know how to do them well; otherwise we weren’t considered effectively trained. Our chief said that if we didn’t do the abortions, we might as well get out of obstetrics and gynecology because we just wouldn’t be a complete physician. He was a very influential man. I remember that he would be up with us at night, very frequently, with patients.
He wasn’t an “ivory tower” sort of guy–distant from the other residents in my training program. He was there with us, so we respected this man. He was brilliant, but right there on the frontlines with us, so when we started doing the abortions, we had panels. I don’t know if any of you remember that, but there were panels that the women had to pass by before they had the abortion. They were made up of nurses, social workers, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like, to very carefully see if the women really were rather ill, medically or emotionally, before they had the abortion.
The abortions, when we started, were done by the D&C method–there was no suction then. This is where you dilate and curette–you actually scrape the lining. This took, sometimes, 15 to 20 minutes, even for an eight- or ten-week-size uterus, so it was kind of a bloody sort of thing. We didn’t really like it, doing it, when we started, really. one doctor was Catholic, so he was allowed by his beliefs not to do that, but the others of us went along with peer pressure.
We thought about it, though, and we felt uncomfortable about it, but we sort of did it. We knew we were going about it quite carefully, and we only did about five or six a week, so amongst 12 or so residents, that meant we only did one about every two weeks.
But things gradually changed–new technology came along; we developed the suction procedure, and things went much quicker. It wasn’t as bloody and it was quicker and it was a little bit easier to take. I can’t really say that any of us had nightmares about this thing at that time. We just felt kind of uncomfortable doing them. But when the suction came along, we did them quicker, and then we did five or six in a day. Then gradually, those panels dropped by the wayside.
We were doing too many to really have them go through this arduous, long process of evaluation, and then the reasons, of course, for abortion–the severity of the reasons, medically, became less and less, and then emotional problems needed to be less and less severe. It was a gradual desensitization, so to speak, or toleration of doing them, more and more and in larger numbers.
Then we advanced up along in pregnancy a little bit further. It used to be we didn’t go beyond about ten weeks. Then we want up to 12 and we kind of stayed there for a while.
The media was very active early on. It really probably was one of the major influences to us. It told us that abortion was number one, legal, that it was to serve women, it was to give women a choice, more or less give them a freedom to grow and to take their rightful place in society where they had been kind of pushed down prior to that.
We believed the lie that there were tens of thousands of women being maimed and killed from illegal abortions prior to the legalization of abortion law. It kind of made things feel a little bit better. By this time, since we were doing five or six a day, it didn’t bother us as much.
In my life at this time, too, I had become married and I had moved, back in 1973, from Albany down to Atlanta, Georgia, with the Army–Uncle Sam got me. I spent two years there at Fort McPherson in Atlanta Georgia. During that time, I had one baby; then I had another baby, and I have two boys. I also began working in abortion clinics. That was the newest thing. There were like seven or eight of them at that time in Atlanta.
I had been moonlighting at other times to make money to save to go into practice, because going into practice is expensive for a young doctor, and you needed to save your money in order to do that, so the clinics offered an easy way to make money.
Prior to that, I had to do insurance physicals, and I had to travel all over the countryside to do them, so that didn’t really pay off too well. I had to go down and work in Emergency Rooms a hundred miles away for 36, 48 hours at a time; up all that time working.
And they didn’t pay me, maybe a few hundred dollars for doing that, so that wasn’t going to amount to much. In the clinic, I could make $25.00 for each abortion case, but we did 20 or 30 of those some days, and I remember one day, when they really got going, we did 62. That was my high point, or, you might say, low point. So you could make a great deal of money doing the abortions, it became quite evident.
Through my industriousness and my skill, I was sort of appointed by the medical director of the clinic to more or less take over the running of the clinic from the medical perspective and I, myself, became the medical director of a clinic there.
Something was happening to me also at that time, emotionally, though. As it has been spoken about, I could do an abortion–rather, I could do several hours of abortions–and feel nothing. I was just a good technician. I think at the most, I would get a little bit of a charge out of the fact that women occasionally would thank me for doing the abortion.
They were really relieved of the pressure that that would have brought on to their lives. But, for the most part, I didn’t think much of it at all at that time. It wasn’t until I became divorced and began really searching for something more. It was sort of like, here I was a doctor; I was making a lot of money; but what did I have?
There must be more to life than this. I sort of had this searching feeling from inside of me. Something was not there. Something was missing. I thought at first it might be love, you know. So you take that to its natural extreme–I had a relationship with a woman outside the marriage–and the marriage broke up, and I became divorced.
The sad part, of course, was that two little boys lost a father in the case. But still, I was determined. I felt that this time, I finally had it made–here I was, a bachelor doctor in Atlanta, Georgia, with just everything before me. I got all the women I wanted, and all the good times, life in the fast lane, so to speak. I really felt that I had it made, but I still had this gnawing sort of emptiness inside.
What happened then was a Christian girl came into my life and influenced me, basically. The reason she came into my life to start with is because the only prerequisite that I had for dating somebody was that they looked good. She happened to look good. So with that great motivation, the Lord twisted that around. She broke up with me, but on doing so, she gave me two Scriptures.
Now that should have, under this influence, had absolutely no influence on this guy at all. You have to picture me now. I was a bachelor doctor; I had an Afro and a beard that made my face look rather round all the way; I had a leather jacket from K-Mart–it wasn’t really leather, but it looked good, and I looked tough and I took Karate to prove it. I had a motorcycle, too, of course. You have to have a motorcycle with a jacket.
So this is this person here. Why this Christian ever dated me, I have no idea, but God did. She gave me two Scriptures–Jeremiah 15 and Psalm 139:13-18, well known to a lot of people. I had not read the Bible for years–you know that–and I hadn’t. But for some reason, these Scriptures meant something to me.
Now, she knew I had done abortions and felt terrible about them and this was to hopefully change my mind, and I kind of laughed. But when I read them, I didn’t laugh because it was just as if there was a knife that went right through my middle and it made me realize that instead of serving women, I was killing babies. This slowed this super-macho guy down real quick. But, it didn’t stop me from doing the abortions.
What those Scriptures say, briefly, and meant to me, is that God knew us before we were conceived (me, before I was conceived–all the babies I ever killed, before they were conceived), He had plans for their lives and they became human beings to me, in the truest sense of the word–they became babies, they became children, really, in a deeper sense than ever before. So, what they did to me was they made me feel uncomfortable doing the abortions. I just plain felt uncomfortable doing them. The Lord knew this.
14 weeks – D&E abortions are usually done after this point
At the same time, He knew that I was going to be starting to do these D&E procedures, because just at that time the D&E procedures were starting up in the clinic. Now, as you have heard about these, the babies are bigger.
They are visible, they are fully-formed babies, and you are tearing them apart from below. I was experienced–I had done many, many thousands by then–so I was sent to Chicago to learn this procedure, and I did, because no one else knew how to do them safely. So, I did them and I started doing them, and then I really started feeling uncomfortable.
The other thing that was shocking to this science of fetology that may have been talked about today was well-developed now. Interestingly enough, almost parallel with the abortion movement, this (I am sure God set this up, of course) was to show everyone that at the same time we are killing babies to tell us that they really were babies.
I think the greatest thing there is– there are all sorts of details on babies feeling things and having brain waves and being so well-developed and almost indistinguishable really from us and our own sensitivities–but I think the greatest thing that got to us was the ultrasound. At that time, the ultrasound was a sound wave picture which was moving, called real-time ultrasound, to show the baby really on TV.
The baby really came alive on TV and was moving and that picture–that picture of the baby on the ultrasound bothered me more than anything else, because as I didn’t know then really, you bond with that picture. Women get those pictures even if they are still pictures, and boy, it’s their baby and they put it up on walls, they bring it in to show it to me, and they don’t even know what’s there, but they see head, arm, leg all typed out for them so they know what it is, but they know it’s a baby.
Anyway, the nurses had to help with this, had to look at this to stage how far along the D&E was, because you got paid more if it was 14, 16, more if it was 18 weeks and so on. In other words, the larger the pregnancy, the more you got paid, and the more the clinic got also. So it was very important for us to do that and to make sure they weren’t too large for us to do.
When we started, we lost two nurses. They couldn’t take looking at it. Some other staff was lost. The turnover got greater when we started doing the D&Es and mostly, as I said, the ultrasounds.
So I think the ultrasound was one of the keys there. The other thing, too, is because the women who are having the abortions are never allowed to look at the ultrasound, because we know even if they heard the heartbeat that many times they wouldn’t have the abortion, and you wouldn’t want that. No money in that.
So that science, my intellectual development, and my heart development were kind of running parallel at that time. Well, I was undaunted. I was going to still search for the “truth” so I decided to start giving a little bit more. I had kind of been a taker all my life–at this time of my life, I was quite a taker–so I was going to give back to people, so I joined the Lion’s Club, and I roared with the best of them. And I got plaques for doing good stuff, for myself, really–it made me feel good. But it didn’t–it still came up empty, so that didn’t work too well so I decided to become active in the medical community. I got active in the hospitals and got all sorts of boring committees and things.
Back in my earlier life, even in college, I was in the campus religious council, and we went out and painted churches and did all sorts of good stuff. It made me feel good. When I was in high school, we did some of those things, so I kind of went back to that. I thought maybe that would help this empty feeling. So I did that, and that came up empty. I was Vice President of the Medical Society–so what? It just didn’t come up getting me what I needed.
I even went out and got into searching for the truth in the occult. This was actually quite interesting. I got into astroprojection–this is where you lie in your bed with candles on, humming this funny stuff and vibrating one toe, and then the next and pretty soon your whole body and then– poof! You pop out. But beware, because getting back isn’t always as easy as going out, you know. So that was kind of cool.
But what that really did was leave me with this dreadful fear, such that this macho man with a leather jacket and a motorcycle had to sleep with his light on at night–a nightlight for macho man, you know.
That didn’t work, so I said I will try one more thing (I was getting desperate, by this time). I decided to try psychic surgery–this has got to be it! Psychic surgery is it! What I had to do was read a lot of this stuff–Mexico seemed to be a hotbed for this–so I was even going to go down there, but anyway, I started reading about this, and getting into this.
At the same time I was doing this searching which didn’t get me anywhere, obviously, God put in my life an activist…a Christian activist who worked for me part-time, but for God, full-time. He put her right in my office, I’ll call her Becky (that was her name). Becky was married and she did something very interesting.
She became a friend of mine partly because she took in foster children–hundreds of foster children. She adopted a couple a little later on, but see I appreciated that because I was in foster homes before I was adopted and I liked that, and God knew that. So, he put her in there and we became friends.
Now the key about Becky was that Becky, I knew, didn’t like abortions. Everyone knew Christians were those picket-line freakos, you know. They didn’t like abortions. She never judged me; she never put me down; she became my friend. She loved me.
Despite the fact that every week, a couple of times a week, I would go down to the clinic and do my abortions in great numbers. But she stuck with it. She also took me to church, a large church that believes in spreading the truth about the Gospel of Jesus Christ to everybody, every week, embarrassingly calling you up front to make a decision for Christ. Now, I knew about that, really. I knew about all that stuff I read in the Bible. I have plaques for reading the Bible.
I knew about that stuff and I even agree that it probably was true–a lot of that stuff. But I had chosen not to do that when I was around 19, just before I went off to college years ago. So I kind of listened for about a year and a-half.
Now I am coming back to my occult experience that I dropped off at before, and I was just about ready to get into psychic surgery. I had a course all lined up at the Foundation of Truth, I kid you not, that was their name–Foundation of Truth. I knew I had come down to the point where I knew I was looking for truth, and so I was all set to take this course down at this institution which was right around the corner from the abortion clinic. How convenient. After I finished the abortion Saturday, I could go down there and take my course. The course was cancelled; I missed out!
But at that same time, I became gradually convinced that what they said in church was truth–that God did come down here, in the form of Jesus Christ; that He did die for our sins; and that I wanted to have a relationship through God that would guarantee me getting into heaven–not upon what I could do, because I couldn’t do enough. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. So, I wanted to become a Christian, but I knew I couldn’t be a good Christian abortionist.
It just didn’t make sense. It’s sort of like being a good Christian gangster, as alluded to in Chuck Colson’s book–you can’t be a good bad guy. So I was on the fence.
Now, what kept me on the fence for a year and a half was money. I had become trapped by the money; not that I wouldn’t give up money, necessarily, for certain things, but not my whole life. And now I was getting divorced.
By the way, a divorced doctor is known as a poor doctor in Atlanta. The reason for that is that your ex-wife gets a whole lot of money. In my case, she got two-thirds of my income. Now half of my income was tied up in doing the abortions, and the other half in a gynecology practice. I mention a gynecology practice because I didn’t do obstetrics. I couldn’t deliver babies. I just didn’t do that.
I said I was giving up delivering because my abortions were my deliveries. Kind of a hard-hearted sort of a guy. You know, it was good not having to get up at night and so forth. It just worked out that way. So, here I was with two-thirds of my income having to go to support my ex-wife and fifty percent of my income, though, being involved with abortion.
Therefore I assumed that I would go immediately bankrupt. Now the reason I assumed that even more was my ex-wife was not friendly. It took nine hearings just to get divorced. I just knew it was going to be a terrible thing to do, so I had to come to grips with a little bit of an honesty within me that said, Yes, you can wait till you finish up paying your wife off–it was only like a year or so later that I would be finished making these enormous payments. But the voice said, Do it now. Do it now. It said, Trust Me. A lot of voices were also saying you’re going bankrupt; you’re going to have all sorts of problems.
So, on October 23rd of 1983 (it was a Saturday), I went and did my last abortions on just a few patients. That wasn’t my weekend to work so it was just a few patients. And I knew it would be the last day. And that evening, I said No to money and Yes to God, and I called up Becky. Now, Becky has a voice about 50 decibels when she gets excited. So she was excited and the next day I went down to church and opened my mouth and confessed with my mouth that Jesus was Lord and went right up to the altar and cried there with the best of them at the altar.
Then, on the way out of church, I saw this blue brochure for a crisis pregnancy center. I just looked at it and kind of felt that this was what I should be involved with. So I picked that up, and the next day I called up the center and said I needed to speak to the head of it. I told them I was a doctor in Atlanta and had done many, many thousands of abortions, and that I came to Christ the day before and now wanted to do everything to save babies instead of take their lives. Well, there was this silence on the phone. You could hear a pin drop, but what I did hear was his Adam’s apple going up and down. Is this guy for real?
Anyway, he kind of squeaked out, we’ve gotta talk, and so we went down by the lovely Chatahootchie River–a lovely river in Atlanta–and we talked. And he said, people are going to need to hear this. I am the world’s worst speaker–very fearful of speaking– and now I know exactly what he meant.
So that is what I have been doing since then. I think the centers were, at that time, parallel in my heart to what Becky did. They were one of a new wave of love that’s going on throughout this country, where they are loving the women who have abortions. They are presenting the Gospel to them; they are giving, sacrificially, in many cases, of their time, of their money, of their willingness to take them into their homes, regardless of whether they keep the baby or give it up for adoption or even abort the babies.
They will talk to them after the abortion, if they have problems–they just never give up on these women. And that non-judgmental, fully-accepting love I think is what really attracted me most to continue with those crisis pregnancy centers, and I think it is really what is going on here today and throughout the country.
Now, since then, what happened? Well, not only did God give me a new life, everything was completely different after that, and here is this guy who did all the abortions now talking to people about saving babies. What a twist, right? He also gave me gifts, and one of the greatest gifts He gave me was my wife, Patty, a lovely woman whom I met at church, and who had a ministry of her own with alcoholics, and who takes wonderful care of me.
What happened about my money? Well, things got a little pinched for a while, as you might expect. My ex-wife has never been known to accept any agreement for payback. We had to come up with an agreement to try to change the financial arrangements. She has never been known to accept anything, not only from me but from any of my attorneys or her six attorneys. Attorneys love me in Atlanta. My attorney uses my case as an example of what not to do.
Anyway, I had to come to grips with saying that I needed to pay back all my debts, even though I said it’s not fair. I am only making half of my income. How can I pay all of this out? So I had to come to grips with saying that, No, the Bible says that if someone asks for your cloak, you give them your tunic, too.
And when I came to that position and that feeling in my heart, the Lord just gave me a plan, and guess what she did? She accepted it. And I am paid up. It’s been a few years now.
On top of that, it took me about ten years, and perhaps more than that when you consider that rest of my life before that, too, to gain a certain estate amount–a certain amount of net worth and all.
Since I have changed my life, my net value or worth has increased by two times what I had before, and, as you notice, in one-third of the time. You have to remember that I lost everything that I had made before–well over a million dollars worth of real estate and everything. And that from basically nothing–I used to have to eat in the hospital because it was free–my wife gives a story of my inviting her over for dinner and having two slabs of cheese and water.
I was poor. And from that position, in just a short period of time, the Lord has done this. Also, I have a medical building–the land and the whole thing is mine–that’s another whole story I won’t get into, but the Lord set that whole thing up. I also have a new partner–a new partner who had to leave the hospital she was taking her life’s training at because she refused to have anything to do with abortion. The Lord has put that kind of person around me and that kind of person to be my partner. I never advertised for a partner–I didn’t have to.
I think there are two things that I’ll just briefly mention in the end. There are two things that are problems in any movement: apathy and disunity. Basically, apathy is saying something like: I am sick and tired of it all and I just don’t care about it anyway. It’s the type of thing that can be fought very easily. All you have to do is be available and be involved. If you are involved, you are influenced by others and the point of the whole thing is that if you don’t do something, the Lord is going to hold you responsible. Proverbs 24 was mentioned and it states quite clearly that if you know people are being led to slaughter, and if you don’t do anything about it, you are guilty of murder. And the other thing is, time is running out.
Martin Luther said, “If I knew the Lord was coming tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.” And I think that’s just a stimulus to you all. I know you are all active, but take that sense of urgency–we are running out of time.
Number two is disunity. The Surgeon General had talked to me a while back, and he had come over to Emory for a conference, and he had said that really, if we had gotten it all together and got united, we would have licked this thing a long time ago. The key to all that is we have to put down ourselves.
We have to put down our own denominations that might tend to separate us. We need to put down our traditions, put down our particular ministries, our maternity homes, our crisis pregnancy centers–whatever–that we all consider our own, really. They are not ours–they are God’s. And basically they make us interested in ourselves, and all this tends to really separate us.
But we need to be united in the humility of the servant, serving these women, and what they need most is love…the love that was shown to me by God, for forgiving me so that I can stand up here and talk to you all, and let you know what’s going on and what happened to my life. We need to love the pregnant women for sure, their little babies within them, their husbands, their boyfriends, their families. Love the abortionists; love their staff; love those that hate you. In the words of Mother Teresa also, “Give till it hurts, and then give some more” for life itself is at stake.
I would like to end with Scripture, Ecclesiastes 11:5:
Now our hope is in God. And even when we don’t know the way, He does. And the Bible says that God’s ways are as mysterious as the pathway of the wind. And as the manner in which a human spirit is infused into the body of a little baby inside its mother.
So keep on sowing your seed for you never know which will grow. Perhaps it all will. And the silent least of our society are blessed by youth.
Note: Religious beliefs expressed in testimonies are not endorsed by the website owner.
This testimony came from a conference held by The Pro-Life Action League
This is the testimony of Dr. Anthony Levantino at the Meet the Abortion Providers Conference in 1993, presented by the Pro-Life Action League.
“Good morning. I’m relatively new in the Pro-Life Movement. My wife, Cecelia, is here as well, and we live in Albany, New York. We didn’t really become active in Pro-Life until approximately the last year and one-half.
One of the people who is very active in Pro-Life in Albany, a man named Dennis Walterding (and a more dedicated person you’ve never seen), warned me when I first joined the group locally and started speaking, that I was going to become very well-known very quickly. I doubted it at the time, but a short time later I find myself standing in Chicago, and he was right.
My wife pointed out to me that I met Dr. Randall for the first time a couple of years ago at the New York State Right-to-Life Convention, and did not realize until today that he was also a graduate of the Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York. You are going to think that every abortionist in the country is trained there, but that’s not true.
I have practiced obstetrics and gynecology in private practice since 1980. My residency started in 1976, four years of residency until 1980, and then I went into private practice, first in Florida for a year, and then in New York State. As part of my training, I was taught to do abortions.
I’ve heard different things from different people about their training programs. Many people have asked me: Were you forced to do abortions? Were you pressured to do abortions during your residency? And the answer is no. Having spoken to other people, I found that was not the case at different institutions. Apparently, a lot of obstetrical and gynecologic residents are very, very pressured to do abortions, but that was not the case where I trained. In our group of seven, only one did not want to do abortions and did not. He currently practices in Boston.
Unlike some of the other speakers, I have never been involved in a large-scale abortion mill, a business (and it is a business, don’t kid yourselves) that was set up for the sole purpose of performing abortions. My experiences are perhaps a little more universal in terms of obstetricians and gynecologists in the country who were trained to do abortions during their residencies and then continued doing so as a part of their private practice, but not even the major part. Certainly it was never a major part of our private practice.
My partner and I, however, were relatively important in the Albany area for one infamous fact, which to this day I regret. Our group was just about the only group that was performing late abortions, D&E procedures, Dilatation and Evacuation.(He describes this type of abortion in detail here.) And we received referrals from all over the area in our part of the state from not only just the doctors in Albany and Schenectady, but from neighboring counties 70 to 80 miles away. We had a lot of patients.
I’ve never actually counted. I’m glad I can’t say that I’m responsible for 50,000 plus [D & E] abortions, but I know I’ve done hundreds of the procedures, and that’s direct, hands-on involvement, as Mr. Scheidler said, with the forceps in your hand, reaching into somebody’s uterus and tearing out a baby.
People ask, why do doctors do abortions? Many of the reasons have come out already, and I am going to amplify them. It’s profitable, a lot of money in it! One way to make abortion less available is to make it unprofitable, and there are probably a lot of ways you can do that.
I am curious to talk to some of the other speakers in terms of the issue of liability insurance. I don’t know what the laws are like someplace else, and it’s an interesting tack to follow. But in New York State there’s no insurance penalty at all that I’m aware of. You pay one flat rate; it’s a high rate, I can tell you. But you pay one flat rate for your insurance and then you can do anything. You can do radical surgery for cancer; you can do deliveries; you can do abortions until they come out of your ears. There’s no insurance penalty in New York State.
Why do doctors do abortions? Why did I do abortions? There’s a philosophical thing that comes first. As I’m fond of telling people, if you are pro-choice or what a lot of people like to say, morally neutral on the subject (if there is such a thing, and I don’t really think there is), if you are pro- choice and you happen to be a gynecologist, then it’s up to you to take the instruments in hand and actively perform an abortion. It’s the most natural association in the world. And you do that as part of your training. There’s a lot to learn from abortion. It sounds awful, but it’s true. There’s a lot of medical things you can learn by doing abortions that even translate into the rest of your practice… how to do a good D&C; how to do a good D&C under difficult circumstances. A D&C during abortion is more dangerous than a D&C done for any other purpose. I was taught to do saline abortions during my residency. I am going to assume that most of the people here are fairly sophisticated and know what these procedures entail. When I give talks at home, I have a slide presentation because a lot of people don’t know what abortion is about. They don’t know what is being aborted, and they don’t know how it is being done. But doing a saline abortion teaches you how to do a good amniocentesis. I think I do the best amniocentesis in town, and I learned it doing abortions.
In any case, if you are of a persuasion that, yes, women have a choice; if you’ve been sold that bill of goods and you believe it, and you’re a gynecologist, then you do them.
Along the way you find out you make a lot of money doing abortions. Now you can make a lot of money being a doctor anyway, and I’m not going to try to snow you and say that’s not true. I make a very good living. I hope I always do. But I won’t make another dime doing an abortion! It’s not worth it to me.
There’s a very big discrepancy in the kind of fees that doctors collect. They’re not always figured out in any kind of logical way. I’ll give you an example. When I am going to deliver a baby, I’m going to have that woman in my office for seven to eight months; she will have unlimited office visits. I get calls all hours of the day and night. More often than not, I’m getting up in the middle of the night. In Eastern New York I can tell you, at this time of year, it’s not a particularly fun thing to do: to go out in a blizzard and drive to the hospital, sit by a bedside for hours watching somebody in labor, accomplishing the delivery, hoping to God that everything works out well, as it usually does. And then following her afterwards; follow-up visits in the office. Then you wait and you expect that everything’s over. Usually it is over, but sometimes it’s not. Six or seven years later you suddenly get a request from a lawyer that they want the medical records because the baby has a problem of some sort. That doesn’t mean you’re responsible, but this nation is set up in such a way that families, if they have a deformed or an unhealthy child for any reason, and healthcare costs being what they are, when you have a disabled child (anyone here who has one can tell you), your medical costs are going to be in the tens of thousands, easily, and can run up to very high numbers. You have no recourse; you have no source of funds, other than going back and suing the people who did the delivery in the first place. It’s a big responsibility. I could be an ophthalmologist and I could take a cataract out; it would take me about 30 minutes and I’d make $2,000. There are discrepancies in the way those fees are figured.
Or I can do an abortion. I can work in an abortion clinic, I work 9:00 to 5:00; I’m never bothered at night; I never have to go out on weekends; I make more money than my obstetrician brethren. And I don’t have to face the liability. That’s a big factor, a huge perk.
In my practice, we were averaging between $250 and $500 for an abortion, and it was cash. That’s the one time as a doctor you can say, either pay me up front or I’m not going to take care of you. It’s totally elective. When a woman comes to me and is pregnant, and her husband’s lost a job, and maybe their insurance isn’t in effect, we won’t turn her away. But when somebody’s going to have an abortion, it’s an elective procedure. Either you have the money or you don’t, and they get it.
You can go in on a Monday morning, do three or four abortions (the procedure itself doesn’t take five or six minutes), clean up the room, make room for the next patient, put her in. I’ll be out of there in two hours; be out in time for lunch; nobody’s going to call me at night; and I almost never, never have to worry about her lawyer ever bothering me. And I’m going to make the same amount of money as if I did one delivery with all those months of work. Now, who’s the fool? The Pro-Life obstetrician or the abortionist?
There are other reasons; they’re perhaps no less important. I’ve heard many times from other obstetricians: Well, I’m not really pro-abortion, I’m pro-woman. How many times have you heard that one? The women’s groups in this country, they’re not alone, but they’ve done a very good job of selling that bill of goods to the population. That somehow destroying a life is being pro-woman, but a lot of obstetricians use that justification to themselves, and I can tell you, a lot of them believe it. I used to. It’s not hard to be convinced of it.
At least once a week–sometimes twice–I would be the resident whose turn it was to sit down and do the four, or five, or six suction D&C abortions that morning. When you finish a suction D&C the doctor has to open a little suction bag and he has to literally reassemble the child. You have to do that because you want to make sure he didn’t leave anything behind.
I had complications, just like everybody else. I have perforated uteruses. I have had all kinds of problems– bleeding, infection–Lord knows how many of those women are sterile now. I remember getting called down to my chairman’s office because a young lady that I had done an abortion on showed up, interestingly enough in Troy, New York (where I now work), and the abortion had been incomplete. I had not done my job right, and she passed an arm or a leg and she freaked out because she didn’t realize what had happened.
My discomfort came at that point because there was this tremendous conflict going on within me. Here I was; I was doing my D&Cs five and six a week, and I was doing salines on a nightly basis whenever I was on call. The resident on call got the job of doing the salines and there would usually be two or three of those, and they were horrible because you saw one intact, whole baby being born, and sometimes they were alive. That was very, very frightening. It was a very stomach-turning kind of existence. Yet, I was doing that at the same time that my wife and I were trying to have a child, and we were having difficulty with that. We had been married a couple of years at that point–and no baby. Suddenly, we realized that we had an infertility problem. I kept doing abortions; I didn’t stop. But it was tough. We were going crazy trying to find a baby to adopt because once the work-up was done, we found out, as the infertility specialist said (who was a good friend of ours), I never tell anyone they are not going to get pregnant, but don’t count on it. So we started desperately looking for a baby to adopt, and I was throwing them in the garbage at the rate of nine and ten a week. It even occurred to me then: I wish one of these people would just let me have their child. But it doesn’t work that way. So the conflict was there. There are other conflicts that make the run-of-the-mill gynecologist/obstetrician uncomfortable.
Most of the time in our practice was not spent doing abortions. It was providing obstetrical care for people who wanted their children. It is very common for your obstetrician to have an ultrasound machine. I bet the majority of obstetricians now have ultrasound machines in their office. We use that ultrasound machine on a daily basis. As a doctor, you know that these are children; you know that these are human beings with arms and legs and heads and they move around and they are very active. But you get reminded–every time you put that scanner down on somebody’s uterus–you are reminded. Because you see the children in there–hearts beating, arms flinging. We have a ball with it. It is a lot of fun. I showed a mother two days ago her baby sucking his thumb. It was so clear; it was obvious what was going on–14 weeks. You can see them earlier than that. We have people coming in who have bleeding and who are afraid they may have a miscarriage–now this is someone who wants to have their child. There is no better news for me than to put that scanner on them at seven and eight weeks and show them a heartbeat and say: Your baby is okay. You do that as an obstetrician all the time. And then, an hour later, you walk into an operating room and you do an abortion. It’s hard. If you have any heart at all, and I don’t pretend to be a particularly good or moral person, but if you have any heart at all, it affects you.
We were lucky. My wife and I were very fortunate because we had gone through all the usual adoption agencies and social services and state agencies trying to find our child. We ran up against one road block after another, until I suddenly got the bright idea (and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner), that I know 45 obstetricians on a first-name basis in this town. You can’t tell me that one of them is not going to have a baby available for a private adoption. So, we advertised. We talked to every obstetrician in town and we struck pay dirt. It still took four months. But one day we got a call. I was in the operating room and I will never forget it–I was not doing an abortion–I was assisting an attending gynecologist with an operation. Somebody tapped me on the back of the shoulder and I turned around and he said: Call so-and-so right away. That was all the message said, but I just knew what it was. For us, we were very fortunate; we were blessed. Three days later we had adopted a healthy little girl. We were satisfied. We called her Heather.
After graduation, I went to Florida for a year. Nice weather, but it was not a place for a young couple with young children–at least the place where we had settled–so after a year, we left there. I think I did two abortions all year and that’s because there was an older population there. There was not much of a demand, at least in the area that I was in.
I found myself back in the Albany area. We went back there because that was where our roots were. My partner did D&E abortions. In fact, he was the referral center for D&E abortions in the area. I had only done one D&E abortion as a resident, and it was with him because he was, at the time, just exploring the idea of doing it. Normally, the residents did not assist the attending physicians when they did their abortions. I said, “Gee, Bill, I would like to see just one of those things.” He said, “Well … why don’t you do it and I’ll show you how it works, because it’s different; it’s not like the other abortions. It’s very different.” No more with this saline. You trade one kind of brutality for another. I will tell you one thing about D&E, you never have to worry about a baby being born alive. That’s one positive aspect of it, perhaps, if you want to put it that way. If any of you don’t know what D&E is all about, I am not going to describe it other than to say, as a doctor, you are sitting there tearing, and I mean tearing–you need a lot of strength to do it–arms and legs off of babies and putting them in a stack on top of a table. If any of you don’t know what a D&E is or what it looks like, I am going to strongly refer you to Dr. Nathanson’s film, Eclipse of Reason. I think it is an absolutely superb piece of work, and when that film is over, you are going to know what D&E is all about.
As a resident, I did one D&E with my partner-to-be. I had no idea we would be partners in the years to come. I started the procedure. I followed his directions and in three minutes, I perforated the uterus. It is very easy to do. We were able to complete the D&E and, except for the infection she got afterwards, she did okay. I do believe that the lady had some children afterwards, for which I am grateful. That was my first experience with D&E.
So, I learned to do D&E abortions. Now I had a family of my own, and there was no pressure to adopt a child anymore. As often happens, although the books say it is not supposed to, (not that it is not supposed to but it doesn’t statistically make any difference) after we adopted a child, after years of trying, we had a child of our own. So we had a boy and a girl, and we were perfectly happy with that.
We can talk about why doctors do abortions, and I think that the reasons tend to be more or less universal. But why doctors change their mind, my guess at least, is very personal. It is going to be very different from one doctor to the next. We all respond to different kinds of pressures. Our office was picketed. Our hospital was picketed. It is very uncomfortable to have people milling around all the time and you know they are directing it at you. They are not as nice as Mr. Scheidler. They did not put our names on the banners or anything. That would have made it all the worse. It was bad enough. It is a drag driving your Mercury through a line of people who are handing you leaflets through the window. But, we did. There was a Fundamentalist church down the road that had organized this thing and they were there every blessed day–rain, sunshine, cold, snow–they did it. They got the hospital to stop doing abortions. I will give you a hint. They had an administrator who was sympathetic. But they also got to the nurses in the operating room. You know, a doctor cannot do an operating room abortion without an assistant, and when they got all the assistants, and all the women in the OR who didn’t want to do them anyway, to say, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” there weren’t any assistants left. Ergo–no abortions. The hospital did not do any more abortions. They succeeded in that regard, but we just took our business down the road. You have to get to them all at once. It is difficult.
In this atmosphere, we just went along–fat, dumb and happy for several years. As I said, my reasons for quitting were a lot more personal, but maybe, I hope, you could draw something from it.
Life was good until June 23, 1984. On that date, I was on call, but I was at home at the time, and we had some friends over, and our children were playing in the back of the yard. At 7:25 that evening, we heard the screech of brakes out in front of the house. We ran outside and Heather was lying in the road. We did everything we could, and she died. (Please excuse me–I have never talked about this at a conference before.)
I went to a Catholic conference in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago. I gave my usual talk and didn’t go into the whys, and one of the bishops came up to me afterwards. He said to me: You haven’t told me why you quit. I kind of avoided it. I told him, and he was the one who encouraged me by saying, you should tell that story. You should let people know.)
Let me tell you something. When you lose a child, your child, life is very different. Everything changes. All of a sudden, the idea of a person’s life becomes very real. It is not an embryology course anymore. It’s not just a couple of hundred dollars. It’s the real thing. It’s your child you buried. The old discomforts came back in spades. I couldn’t even think about a D&E abortion anymore. No way. I kind of carried on business as usual because you try to get on with your life’s business as usual when somebody dies, and I still did just the office abortions for the next few months.
My wife has said many times that she wishes she had videotapes of me during that time. We were under enough strain as it was, but if I knew I had an abortion scheduled in the office the next day, I got very surly. I was hard to be around. I was getting very, very rough with the staff in our office. Every time somebody came up to me and said “I have a patient who needs an abortion. Can you do her on Thursday morning?” I became very angry. I began feeling that people were doing something to me. This was ridiculous–I was doing it to myself. After a few months of that, you start to realize this is somebody’s child. I lost my child, someone who was very precious to us. And now I am taking somebody’s child and I am tearing him right out of their womb. I am killing somebody’s child.
That is what it took to get me to change. My own sense of self-esteem went down the tubes. I began to feel like a paid assassin. That’s exactly what I was. You watch the movies; somebody goes up to somebody, pays them some money to kill somebody. That’s exactly what I was doing. And when my own sense of self-esteem went down the drain, that was all it took.
It is still “old habits die hard.” But it got to a point, and Cic and I talked about it together, that it just wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth it to me anymore. The money wasn’t worth it. I don’t care. This is coming out of my hide; it is costing me too much. It is costing me too much personally. For all the money in the world, it wouldn’t have made any difference. So I quit. I slept a lot better at night after that. It really made a difference.
There may be the key there. Not every abortionist is going to lose a child or have something profoundly affect their lives; but therein, perhaps, lies the key: If you can make doing the abortion cost the obstetrician/gynecologist more than he is getting from it. What he is getting from it is money. I can tell you, he doesn’t really get anything else. We don’t get any great feeling of accomplishment–at least, I never did. Even if you believe the pro-woman line, I just somehow never got some warm glow because I thought I was helping women out. All he gets from it is money. And as a doctor, he can make money lots of ways. He doesn’t have to do it this way.
British abortionist Dr. Vincent Argent stated, in an article in the British publication “The Telegraph” that the legal limit for performing abortions should be 16 weeks. He describes some of the later abortions that he has performed:
“There are two main types of procedure; the medical type, which kills the baby via medication, meaning that the woman miscarries a stillborn. If the baby is 22 weeks or older, it will be given a lethal injection in the womb, to ensure it is not born alive. Alternatively the surgical procedure uses instruments to remove parts of the dismembered body from the uterus, limb by limb. It is hard to describe how it feels to pull out parts of a baby, to see arms, and bits of leg, and finally the head.”
He then goes on to say:
“Given the nature of this experience, it greatly concerns me how lightly some of these decisions are made.
For every woman who comes late to the clinic because she did not realise she was pregnant, there will be another who feels it is simply their right to have an abortion whenever they like, and feels no need to explain herself at all. A third will seek a late abortion because her circumstances have changed. It might be a change of job; a relationship has broken down; her partner is now in prison; perhaps money is tight. For me, these are no reasons to carry out such a distressing procedure.
Recently, one woman came to me at the age of 42. After years of IVF treatment, she had finally conceived for the first time. Yet, when she found out she was carrying twins she wanted to have one aborted.”
“A British Abortionist Argues for a 16 Week Time Limit” The Telegraph May 2008
