“This can burn you out very, very quickly…not so much by the physical labor as the emotional part of what’s going on. When you do an ultrasound, particularly if you have children, and you see a fetus there, kicking, moving, living, doing things that your own child does, bringing it’s thumb to its mouth, and things like that- it’s difficult. Then, after the procedure, sometimes we have to actually look at the specimen, and you see arms and legs and things like that torn off…It does take an emotional toll.”
Abortionist Dr. Ed Jones, who had worked at a Planned Parenthood Clinic for 4 years at the time of the interview
Nancy Dey. Abortion: Debating the Issue (New York: Enslow Publishing 1995)
Medical student Lesley Wojick learned how to do a suction abortion by practicing with the instruments and a papaya.
Of the real abortion she witnessed, she says:
“It was definitely gruesome. You could make out what a fetus could look like, tiny feet, lungs…”
She goes on to say:
“It’s a lot more invasive than I thought. A papaya doesn’t bleed and scream.” Women do.”
Patricia Meisol “A Hard Choice: A Young Medical Student Tries to Decide if she has What it Takes to Join the Diminishing Ranks of Abortion Providers” New York Times. Sunday Nov. 23, 2008. W08
A pro-choice medical student wrote in her blog that she was shaken after observing abortions at Planned Parenthood.
Here is a quote from her blog “Pudu Overload” (now down):
“The third patient was a girl my little sister’s age whose pregnancy was much farther along than the others I saw. Coming into the room, she was shaking and scared and the doctor took ten minutes (twice as long as the actual procedure) to make sure she was ready and sure about her decision. Once the patient calmed down and was anesthetized, the nurse hooked up ultrasound to help with the more difficult case. This time I could clearly make out a head and arms on the screen, and I sat down and had to look away during most of the procedure.
first trimester ultrasound
Afterwards, the nurse brought me to the back room again and I saw some things I can’t get out of my head. Leaving the clinic through a waiting room full of upset pregnant teenagers, I felt respectful of and impressed by the doctors I met, both of whom have been stalked and threatened many times because of what they do. At the same time, I’m incredibly freaked out by the whole thing and don’t know how to think about it. It simultaneously seems like a small and an enormous thing.”
From the blog “Pudu Overload” (now offline) Quoted in Dawn Eden’s blog The Dawn Patrol October 19, 2008 “I saw some things I can’t get out of my head: Med student ‘incredibly freaked out’ after day at Planned Parenthood
This is a pro-choice columnist’s comments on a letter she received in response to her stand on late term abortion. The letter was written by a nurse who works in the abortion field:
unborn baby at 21 weeks
“Every so often, a letter arrives in a columnist’s mailbag that throws a hand grenade right into the middle of a long-held view. That happened to me last week following my article in which I urged caution before lowering the time limit on abortion from 24 to 20 weeks. The letter came from a Registered General Nurse named Kay who works on a gynecological ward that regularly deals with late abortions. She apologized for the “unpleasant and upsetting aspects of her letter” but felt her points needed to be said. I agree, and felt it also warranted a wider audience. Apparently, at 20 weeks, tablets can be given to kill the fetus prior to expulsion. But at 24 weeks it is sufficiently strong to survive the treatment and many are born with signs of life. “It is all too easy for people to picture a clump of cells or mush. People don’t want to picture perfectly-formed miniature babies and I don’t blame them. I was once the same. But having cut the umbilical cord on one who survived, then had to watch him gasp for breath for ten minutes on the side of a sink before he died, the sight will haunt me forever.
The reason given in this particular termination was that the mother’s current boyfriend had a toddler son who might get jealous of a new baby. It took them 21 weeks to come to that conclusion.”
A British abortionist who has over 30 years experience providing abortions, but later argued for a sixteen-week limit, has this to say about late abortions:
“There are two main types of procedure; the medical type, which kills the baby via medication, meaning that the woman miscarries a stillborn.
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.”
The doctor in this next quote is described performing a second trimester D & E abortion. He is reaching for the unborn baby’s severed head:
20 weeks – legal to abort in every US state
“Dr. Johnson handed the suction tube back to Leslie and once again used forceps to probe for the head. I saw the muscles of his right arm tighten and knew what that meant: He had located the head and was crushing it. Harvey used to joke about getting tennis elbow from this technique, and his right arm was actually slightly bigger than his left.”
Carol Everett and Jack Shaw. Blood Money: Getting Rich off a Woman’s Right to Choose (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Press, 1991) p 11-12
“The first time I witnessed a second trimester abortion on a 14 year old girl and I wrote, “Now the ‘abortion issue’ comes home to me…It’s not just ‘blood and tissue’ anymore.”
Merle Hoffman, abortion clinic owner (CHOICES)
14 week-old unborn baby, the beginning of the second trimester
Merle Hoffman, “The Issue” Abortion On the Issues Magazine On the Issues Online Archive Vol. XII 1989 “Abortion” From Life Dynamics
People who observe abortion procedures or abortion remains usually come away with little doubt that abortion is killing a human being. In this passage, author Verlyn Klinkenborg, who visited an abortion clinic, recounts his feelings upon seeing the remains of a ten week-old aborted baby:
ultrasound of baby at 10 weeks
“I felt a profound and unmistakable kinship with the foot and hand in the tray, a kinship so strong it was like the rolling of the sea under my feet…I was surprised by my own sadness, by the sense of loss that I felt…I found it so much easier to be moved by the sight of the disembodied hand the size of a question mark gleaming under fluorescent lights….In that tiny, naked hand there was the imputation of innocence.”
Violent Certainties” Harper’s Magazine January 1995 p 47
