Abortionist Warren Hern, in his textbook on how to perform abortions:
18-week-old unborn baby
“[at 18 weeks post fertilization age] it can be a significantly more difficult procedure accompanied by unnerving hemorrhage. Forceps use must be sure and relatively rapid. There is frequently not much time for exploring the nuances of different tissue sensations. Grasping and collapsing the calvaria [upper domelike portion of the skull] are often difficult. Stripping the calvaria of soft tissue is sometimes the first step in successful delivery of this part, followed by dislocation of parietal bones… [From 19 to 22 weeks post fertilization age] A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus, since it may be impossible to apply forceps or to do so while avoiding the thinned out cervix.”
“A frequent problem at the beginning of this series was difficulty in removing the fetal skull from the uterus. The incidence of this declined with experience, with more aggressive use of laminaria in dilatation, and with acquisition of new and more satisfactory instruments for performance of this procedure. It still occurs occasionally, and it is managed by completing the procedure under direct ultrasound visualization or having the patient wait in the recovery room for one or two hours. The part being sought invariably migrates to the lower uterine segment and is easily grasped and delivered.” (emphasis editor’s)
But sometimes the reality of the procedure shines through. Here is an example of the clinic worker relating in abortion:
“First Roger [the abortionist]locates the approximate location of the fetal heart, makes an X with the sonogram jelly, turns off the machine, and injects the anesthesia. Then he takes a bigger sort of tube needle and puts that into the same spot where he injected the local, turns the sonogram back on and finds the heart, and then put in the digoxin. The women are lying down and can’t see the sonogram. The heart looks like a flashing light. The woman who was really frightened held my hand: Hallie had the job of holding the ultrasound device still on the women’s belly for Roger. Afterwards, when Roger had left, the woman said she felt the fetus moving around. She said, “This is what kills the baby, right?” And started to cry before either of us could answer.”
20 week-old unborn baby – legal to abort in every US state
This was an abortion in the second trimester. This particular clinic does abortions up to 26 weeks. Digoxin is sometimes used as a poison to stop the fetal heart. it can be injected directly into the fetal heart, stopping it instantly, or can be injected into the amniotic fluid causing the baby to be poisoned and die slowly over the course of several hours. Most clinics inject it into the amniotic fluid.
Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996) page 74
“Following first trimester abortions, sterile room workers strain the contents of the aspirator jar and cannulae to isolate the fetal tissue,… After eight weeks gestation, weight should increase according to the doctor’s estimate of gestational length, and sterile room workers look for fetal parts. If they did not find evidence of the spine, skull, and upper and lower extremities, the client was called back into the examination room for a reaspiration.”
Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996) page 70
An article in The Weekly Standard discussed the phenomena of abortionists and clinic workers who quit. After remarking on studies that showed that clinic workers are often emotionally drained by their work, it said:
“Such studies are few. In general, abortion providers have censored their own emotional trauma out of concern to protect abortion rights. In 2008, however, abortionist Lisa Harris endeavored to begin “breaking the silence” in the pages of the journal Reproductive Health Matters. When she herself was 18 weeks pregnant, Dr. Harris performed a D&E abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. Harris felt her own child kick precisely at the moment that she ripped a fetal leg off with her forceps:
“Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.”
Harris concluded her piece by lamenting that the pro-choice movement has left providers to suffer in silence because it has “not owned up to the reality of the fetus, or the reality of fetal parts.” Indeed, it often insists that images used by the pro-life movement are faked.
(Pro-choice advocates also falsely insist that second-trimester abortions are confined almost exclusively to tragic “hard” cases such as fetal malformation. Yet a review of the literature in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that most abortions performed after the first trimester are sought for the same reasons as first-trimester abortions, they’re just delayed. This reality only intensifies the guilt pangs of abortion providers.)”
18 week old fetus
Despite this disturbing experience, Dr. Harris did not stop performing abortions.
In December 1999, the Nebraska University Regents board met to discuss partial-birth abortions, which were being performed by Dr. Leroy Carhart at the University of Nebraska medical center.. A reading of the testimony was taped and played a local radio program the following Monday, introducing it into the public arena. Dr. Carhart was under oath.
“Are there times when you don’t remove the fetus intact?
Carhart: yes, Sir.
Can you tell me about that – when that occurs?
Carhart: That occurs when the tissue fragments, or frequently when you rupture the membranes. An arm will spontaneously prolapse through the os… We talk about the forehead and the skull being first. We talked about the feet being first, but I think in probably the great majority of terminations, it’s what they would call a transverse lie; so really you’re looking at a side profile of a curved fetus when the patient’s uterus is already starting to contract, and they are starting to miscarry, when you rupture the waters, usually something prolapses through the uterine, through the cervical os, not always but very often an extremity will.
What do you do then?
Carhart: My normal course would be to dismember that extremity and then go back and try to take the fetus out either foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first.
Unborn baby 22-24 weeks
How do you go about dismembering that extremity?
Carhart: Just traction and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get a hold of which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the os, using the internal os as your counter traction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be. Sometimes you will get one leg and you can’t get the other leg out.
In that situation… Are you… When you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?
Carhart: Yes.
Do you consider an arm, for example, to be substantial portion of the fetus?
Carhart: In the way I read it, I think if I lost my arm, that would be a substantial loss to me. I think I would have to interpret it that way.
And then what happens if you remove the arm? You then try to remove the rest of the fetus?
Carhart: Then I would go back and attempt to either bring the feet down or bring the skull down, or even sometimes you bring the other arm down and remove that also and then get the feet down.
At what point is the fetus… Does the fetus die during that process?
Carhart: I don’t really know. I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see the fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.
The Court: counsel, for what it’s worth, it still is unclear to me with regard to the intact D&E when fetal demise occurs.
Okay, I will try to clarify that. In the procedure of an intact D&E where you would start foot first, with the situation where the fetus is presented feet first, tell me how you’re able to get the feet out first
Carhart: Under ultrasound, you can see the extremities. You know what is what. You know what the foot is, you know what the arm is, you know what the skull is. By grabbing the feet and pulling down on it, or by grabbing a knee and pulling down on it, usually you can get one leg out, get the other leg out, and bring the fetus out. I don’t know where this… All the controversy about rotating the fetus comes from. I don’t attempt to do that – just attempt to bring out whatever is the proximal portion of the fetus.
At the time you bring out the feet, in this example, is the fetus still alive?
Carhart: Yes.
Then what’s the next step you do?
Carhart: I didn’t mention it. I should. I usually attempt to grasp the cord first and divide the cord, if I can do that.
What is the cord?
Carhart: The cord is the structure that transports the blood, both arterial and venous, from the fetus to the back of the fetus, and it gives the fetus it’s only source of oxygen, so that if you can divide the cord, the fetus will eventually die, but whether this takes 5 min. or 15 min. and when that occurs, I don’t think anyone really knows.
Are there situations where you don’t divide the cord?
Carhart: There situations when I can’t.
What are those?
Carhart: I just can’t get to the cord. It’s either high above the fetus and structures where you can’t reach up that far. The instruments are only 11 inches long
Let’s take the situation where you haven’t divided the cord because you couldn’t, and you have begun to remove a living fetus feetfirst. What happens next after you have gotten the feet removed?
Carhart: We remove the feet and continue with traction on the feet until the abdomen and the thorax come through the cavity. At that point, I would try… You have to bring the shoulders down, but you can get enough of them outside, you can do this with your finger outside the uterus, and then at that point the fetal… The base of the fetal skull is usually in the cervical canal.
What do you do next?
Carhart: And you can reach that, and that’s where you would rupture the fetal skull to some extent and aspirate the contents out.
At what point in that process does fetal demise occur between initial remove… Removal of the feet or legs and the crushing of the skull or – I’m sorry – the decompressing of the skull?
Carhart: Well, you know, again, this is where I’m not sure what fetal demise is. I mean, I honestly have to share your concern, your honor. You can remove the cranial contents and the fetus will still have a heartbeat for several seconds or several minutes; so is the fetus alive? I would have to say probably, although I don’t think it has any brain function, so it’s brain-dead at that point.
So the brain death might occur when you begin suctioning out of the cranium?
Carhart: I think brain death would occur because the suctioning to remove contents is only two or 3 seconds, so somewhere in that period of time, obviously not when you penetrate the skull, because people get shot in the head and they don’t die immediately from that, if they’re going to die at all, so that probably is not sufficient to kill the fetus, but I think removing the brain contents eventually will.”
Testimony of Leroy Carhart, M.D. Quoted in Randy Alcorn “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments” (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000) page 207-208
“[Abortion] hasn’t had any effect on me at all. Really. I don’t look on an abortion in a strange way. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a male, but when I leave here I don’t feel worried, as if I’ve done something wrong. It’s like any other type of surgery, I just consider it a job. I once did say to myself, “Gee, suppose I’d one day have a dream and see thousands of fetuses running after me.” I just think it’s because we were talking about abortions and how it’s in the dark, you know. People still sometimes feel kinda funny about it. They don’t want openly speak about it ….I feel funny sometimes taking on a fetus by D&C even, when you can see the heart beating. Even with D&C’s you get these feelings that you are doing something wrong. Especially when you see arms and legs coming out. It comes out in so many pieces. We had nurses that couldn’t adjust to this type of work. Many of them quit.”
10 week unborn baby, typical age for abortions
Magda Denes, PhD. In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital (New York: Basic Books inc) 1976 236 – 237
Gayla Ennis, a nurse at an abortion clinic, describes one late-term abortion that she witnessed:
“It (aborted baby) looked about 28 weeks, I was shocked and after that one I didn’t help him anymore with anything. Sid (the abortionist) had a few special instruments that he had special ordered, they were 12 to 14 inches long, had a 1- to 2-inch head with sharp teeth on the forceps part that he used to break up body parts.”
“Doctor Investigated In Abortion Allegations, Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, OK): ” July 15, 1992. Quoted by Life Dynamics.
In some states, there are no laws banning abortions at this age. Even in states that have laws on the books, loopholes in the laws allow for abortions this late in pregnancy.
Here are some pictures of unborn babies at 28 weeks
I recently read this book:Mark Crutcher “Lime 5: Exploited by Choice ” (Denton, Texas: Life Dynamics Incorporated, 1996)
It has some very interesting quotes in it. Here is one by an abortionist who has been practicing for decades:
“On some mornings, I leave my office, and if I turn right I go down the hallway to the [abortion facility] and terminate. I am a destroyer of pregnancies. If I turn left down the same hallway, I go toward the nursery and the labor and delivery unit and take care of the myriad of complications in women who are in the throes of problem pregnancies- and I do things to help them hold on. It’s all so schizophrenic. I have a kind of split personality.”
Quoted from Don Sloan with Paula Hartz “Abortion: A Doctor’s Perspective/A Woman’s Dilemma.” (New York: Donald Fine INC, 1992)
It is easy to imagine that experience of having to save the life of a wanted unborn baby an hour after killing an unborn baby of the same age would bring confusion and a lot of cognitive dissonance. The effectiveness of a doctor who saves babies and yet performs abortions may be decreased by the fact that an hour after saving a fetus, he is planning to destroy another fetus. On the one hand, we have a child that the mother wants desperately to her, it is her baby. Then on the other hand we have another baby, no different, whose life is disposable and who is just a “fetus” – ultimately headed for the incinerator. One wonders of a doctor can be truly dedicated to saving the lives of wanted babies when he used to killing them. It would seem likely that the duality of his role would take it’s toll and make him less compassionate and diligent in fighting to save premature children or at risk unborn ones. Perhaps this is a good reason why women should ask their doctor performs abortions before choosing a gynecologist.
You have to wonder how a doctor can transition from murdering children to preserving their lives.
unborn baby at 16 weeks- legal to kill in every state in the US.
“The D&E is performed by breaking the bag of water with a pointed instrument thrust through the partly dilated cervix, then inserting grasping and tearing instruments into the womb. The fetus is then quartered, the torso isolated and disemboweled. The head is crushed and extracted in pieces. The placenta is located and scraped off the wall of the womb. This completes the procedure save for the abortionist reassembling all the removed parts on a side table adjoining operating table. The fetus must be reconstructed to verify that all the vital parts have been removed with nothing of significance left within the womb to perpetuate bleeding and or become infected. Such late abortions – by whatever means – are no small matter surgically and carry a death rate equal to or exceeding that associated with childbirth that term.”
Nathanson, Bernard N, M.D The Hand of God: a Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing Inc, 1996) 99 – 100
