Clinic worker Sallie Tisdale discusses of dealing with work at an abortion clinic in this article from Harper’s Magazine:
“Privately, even grudgingly, my colleagues might admit the power of abortion to provoke emotion… Its uncertainty lies in specific cases: retarded women and girls too young to give consent for surgery, women who are ill or hostile or psychotic. Such common dilemmas are met with both compassion and impatience: they slow things down.”
Sallie Tisdale “We Do Abortions Here” Harpers, October 1987
Other clinic workers are troubled by the nature of the abortion act itself. this abortionist felt conflicted when she was pregnant he did an abortion, and felt her baby kick at the moment she was tearing a leg off the fetus.
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.
“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)
After giving a graphic description of how to check body parts to make sure everything is out after an abortion, Dr. Don Sloan, abortionist, says the following:
11 week legs
“Want to do abortions? Pay the price. There is an old saying in medicine: if you want to work in the kitchen, you may have to break an egg. The stove gets hot. Prepare to get burned.”
Don Sloan, M.D. with Paula Hartz, Abortion: a Doctor’s Perspective, a Woman’s Dilemma (New York: Donald I Fine, 1992) 239 – 240
Rachel M. MacNair wrote a book on the stress individuals deal with when they regularly commit violent acts. Her book discusses the experience of soldiers during wartime, and it also has a chapter on abortion. She recounts hearing about one abortionist’s bizarre behavior, which she attributes to work-related stress.
In a telephone conversation, a woman who worked for a doctor in Louisiana for a few months recounted an incident:
“The one thing that sticks out in my mind the most, that really upset me the most, was that he had done an abortion, he had a fetus wrapped inside of a blue paper. He stuck it inside of a surgical glove and put another glove over it. He was standing in the hall, speaking with myself and two of his assistants. He was tossing the fetus up in the air and catching it. Like it was a rubber ball. I just looked at him and it’s like doctor, please. And he laughed. He says, “Nobody knows what this is.”
Rachel M. Macnair, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002)
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
Joy Davis left the abortion business and testified before a medical board against Dr. Tucker, the abortionist she once worked with after he killed a woman. She says she was labeled an “axe grinding opportunist.” But she says:
“I was making $115,000 salary at the clinics. Now I don’t earn a fraction of that. But you know what? I don’t care. I like who I am now. I can live with my conscience.”
Celeste McGovern Alberta Report/Newsmagazine “Why Doctors are Fleeing the Carnage” November 21 1994 Vol. 21, Issue 49
14 weeks. Abortions in America can be done until birth in some states, and all through the second trimester in every state
“The first time I attended a late termination it was upsetting. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t sometimes question what I was doing. But above all I believe that the woman must come first. In fact, I feel so strongly about this that when I was 20 weeks pregnant, I assisted in a [late] termination when all my colleagues refused on moral and religious grounds….
I don’t look at it as the taking away a life because embryos cannot sustain life outside the womb. If women could not have abortions, what would happen to the thousands of unwanted babies? “
Clinic Worker Pippa Jenkins
Ann Barrowclough “Abortion: This is What Our Nurses Really Think” Sunday Mirror August 18, 1996 p 16
“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.”
19 week old unborn baby
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
“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.”
26 weeks sonogram of an unborn baby
Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic. (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick) 1996, p
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