Category: Abortion Providers Speak

“I was brought up a Roman Catholic to believe that life was sacred, but I have no qualms about abortion… However, there are times when the reality of it all hits you. When you are at the operation, particularly with the later terminations, it can be difficult. You might think: “Oh God, that’s a potential life.” But you learn to distinguish between the procedure itself and the need to support the woman’s right to choose…You see a lot of trauma and tragedy. It’s awful when girls come to you when they have gone over the 24-week limit.”

Marie Stafford, Nurse who works in an abortion clinic

Ann Barrowclough “Abortion: This is What Our Nurses Really Think” Sunday Mirror August 18, 1996 p 16

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“There’s lots of days when it’s really, really hard…I don’t know what makes it so much harder at twenty-six weeks than at thirteen weeks. I don’t know what makes handling the tissue so much harder….To know that she’s not going to have that baby. For me, there’s a lot of probably some hidden guilt that I’m not willing to look at about my adoption. That could have been me. You know, had my natural mother had access to abortion, this easily could have been me. And when you’re, you know, putting a fetus’s feet in over its head in a baggie, there’s just that brief moment of “this could have been me,” which I fundamentally believe is okay. She should have had a right to choose that, and I, being a religious person, believe that things happen for a reason. And that I would have found, you know, this soul would have found another body to come too… But there’s some gut level reaction when you are handling 26 week tissue …It’s much more difficult when you see a 26th week face.”

Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic. (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick) 1996, p
p 84

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“I feel some sadness [about second trimester abortions]…And I think part of the problem is that we don’t talk about that…Do you see what I’m saying- that somehow your pro-choice stand is compromised by saying the word “baby.”…We don’t allow ourselves to say or think that word…

When a woman says, you know, “Does the baby go through there?”, we just, you know, alarm bells go off and, “Oh God, is she ambivalent?” … And… it’s like “Yes!” Celia’s [another clinic worker] saying, you answer the woman, “Yes, the baby goes through that tube.” We’ve been trained to say, “Yes, the tissue goes -” … It’s using this language  that’s in complete denial of the fact that to this woman “baby” doesn’t have to mean that she’s ambivalent. It can mean that’s the word she knows. … We’ve lost that. It’s something that we’ve had to give up because the antis [pro-lifers] have claimed that word.”

Clinic worker Mira

Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic. (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick) 1996, p 79

The clinic where Mira works does abortions up to 26 weeks.

 

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“Seeing the fetal tissue and seeing the blood and cleaning up can be kind of unsettling, especially seeing larger fetal tissue. At nine weeks…you start seeing fetal parts. And by the second trimester, it’s, you know, it’s a baby, and by the eighteenth week it’s definitely a baby. And by, like, you know, twenty-two weeks you go in and you watch someone do a sonogram, and you’re like, “Oh my.” There it is just moving, moving around. And it’s really, really hard because I always thought of abortion in terms of just the woman, just her body… And I never even allowed myself to think, you know, isn’t it a shame that there’s something alive inside her that’s not going to be alive anymore if she has an abortion.”

Clinic worker Carrie

Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic. (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick) 1996 p 81

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“So by it looking like a baby, you’re associating it with yourself because…you used to be a baby, you used to be a fetus.”

Clinic Worker

Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic. (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick) 1996 83

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Clinic worker “Diana” was comfortable with handling late-term aborted babies until she saw one with hair:

“Sterile room is so fast-paced. And I’m a person who’s really into learning….And so, okay, now I’ve got the technical down, so now I can, like, get lax in my thought processes. You know, it becomes more robotic. And I think that what happened one day [was] I stepped back inside of myself, and I was just like, “Oh my God, what are you doing? When I saw the hair…”

Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic. (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick) 1996, p 72

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You’re going from dealing with people to dealing with what most people here at the Center consider a real hurdle, to do sterile room, because you have to deal with the actual abortion tissue. And for some people that’s really hard. They can be abstractly in favor of abortion rights, but they sure don’t want to see what an eighteen-week abortion looks like.”

Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic. (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick) 1996 69

 

 

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“It was disturbing for me to see recognizable body parts in the removed tissue, usually an arm or a leg. My intent is not to be gruesome, but there is a reality behind all the political jargon that I believe I allowed myself to ignore until this experience. I have images now that accompany phrases such as, “Potential for life” and I understand the emotions that drive pro-life forces.”

Medical student working at Planned Parenthood

“Abortion Action Guide” Medical Students for Choice, National Abortion Federation, September 1993. Quoted at Deathroe

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The pro-choice author of one book on abortion stated that clinic workers told her “they never look at the face” when processing ’tissue’ from abortions.

Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic. (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick) 1996, 86-87

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