From the brief of Dr. LeRoy Cahart Et. Al. In Steinberg V. Carhart:
After a portion of the fetus has been removed, other parts of the fetus remaining in the uterus will sometimes be alive. J.A. 258 (Stubblefield) The district court found out that sometimes the embryo or fetus is brought into the vagina while it is still living and intact. S.A. 9, 28. Physicians know that suctioning a pre-viable fetus or embryo out of the woman’s uterus will inevitably kill it.
“It is advisable to use the biggest forceps that you can get through the cervix to morcellate the fetus…[the need to] “visually check the parts as they are retrieved” “is necessary to ensure complete evacuation but is part of the reason that second trimester abortion is not popular among surgeons. All those here who do second trimester abortions will agree that the most difficult ones are those between 14 and 16 weeks. In those, there is a tendency for the uterus to form an ‘hourglass’ and the head and part of the trunk to be trapped in the upper part and difficult to retrieve. The passage of large, recognizable fetal parts by the woman some hours or days later is extremely distressing for the woman and her family.”
Abortionist Dr. Cope
.Celeste McGovern “Fourteen Week Olds Cost 250- Cash” The Report. February 28, 2000
Reporters spent a day at the abortion clinic of Dennis Christensen. They described one of the abortion procedures this way:
12-week-old unborn baby
Christensen performed two abortions that day on women who were at the end of the first trimester. In each case, the tissue was suctioned into a large glass jar, filling the bottom half inch. Christensen later poured it into a straining basin and examined it “to make sure we removed all of it.”
At one point, he picked up a tiny foot and placed it against a ruler. “Thirteen millimeters,” he announced, “which is consistent with 12 weeks of actual pregnancy.”
Later he held a tiny head. Its brain tissue will be sent to the National Institutes of Health for research on brain tumors.
Women Need Control over Birth Choice, Physician Says” Wisconsin State Journal. March 4, 2001. Quoted by Life Dynamics
“I was watching the doctor struggle with the cannula, trying to pull it out,” she said. “I didn’t understand what the resistance was all about. And I was very alarmed and all of the sudden the doctor pulled the cannula out and there, as I was at the woman’s side, I looked down at the cannula and there was a foot sticking out. I will never forget the feeling I had in my chest as the doctor pulled that cannula out. And it almost took the breath out of me. Because the reality of this was very hard for me…This sounds terribly cavalier, I suppose, but within about a month, like everything else we do after a while, it just becomes pretty routine and it has never bothered me since then.”
foot of unborn baby at 12 weeks
Nurse from a Seattle Abortion Clinic
M. Gianelli, “Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts,” American Medical News, July 12, 1993
Abortion clinic worker “Celia” discusses late term abortion. Her clinic injects Digoxin into the hearts of the babies before dismembering them:
22 to 24 week-old unborn baby
“It’s going to be weird now because you’re going to see the sono. You’re going to see the heart beating – little hearts, you know- and then, all of a sudden, you’re going to put this cardiac medicine in it to make it stop- to kill it. I won’t kill it, the doctor will kill it …It’s just a harder reality check of what we’re doing…It’s like rationally I know this is going to be much better because, God, you know, if it can make a twenty-three-week skull come out easier, you know bless this digoxin.”(21)
.Wendy Simonds Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswich, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) p 73
Clinic worker “Karen” describes a 21 week abortion:
“You’re looking between the woman’s legs; you’re seeing, you know, what the doctor’ s doing. And it’s what a lot of people would call kind of, I guess, gruesome – that’s not really the word because – it’s identifiable. I mean, when he… Takes the forceps and pulls out a foot, you can see the foot, and my reaction – because I feel so strongly that women who want to have a 21 week abortion should be able to have that – but I mean when I looked and was just like, you know my first reaction was you know, I was pretty horrified. And I immediately denied that, and I said, you know, “no, that can’t be my reaction. I’m here for the woman,” and just really sort of squashed that down, that what I saw really freaked me out. And it stayed with me, you know, and really upset me. I mean, I’d be in the shower, you know, washing my feet, you know, and… The picture would come to me… I just got to the point where… I just really needed to sit down and cry, and, like, deal with it.”
20 week-old unborn baby
Wendy Simonds Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswich, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 82
“Because it looks like a baby. That’s what it looks like to me. You’ve never seen anything else that looks like that. The only other thing you’ve ever seen is a baby…You can see a face and hands and ears and eyes and, you know…feet and toes…It bothered me really bad the first time…”
Wendy Simonds Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswich, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 88
“And, in the beginning, yes, I remember standing behind this woman’s shoulder [as she performed an early second trimester abortion] and thinking, I can’t do this …Features are discernible, you can count five fingers on a hand, and five toes on a foot. You know, all the organ systems are formed. You know, you can see ears as structures, and the nose and eyes as structures…I think the destruction is hard.”
Clinic worker “Sarina”
Wendy Simonds Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswich, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 96-97
