New York Times editorial around the time of Roe versus Wade:
“The court’s verdict on abortions provides a sound foundation for final and reasonable resolution of a debate that has divided America too long.”
“Respect for Privacy” New York Times, January 24, 1975
Quoted in Ramesh Ponnauru The Party of Death (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2006) 96
Obviously, the New York Times underestimated the commitment of pro-life individuals. It is 41 years after Roe vs. Wade, and the abortion battle continues. Pro-lifers have been very successful in recent years and passing restrictions against abortion, and they are not stopping anytime soon
Opening Statement of Douglas Johnson, Legislative Director of the National Right to Life Committee, at the Joint Hearing before the Senate Judiciary committee And the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House Judiciary Committee, March 11, 1997:
“We need to remember that “birth” and “full-term” are 2 very different things. My own youngest son Thomas, who is here with my wife Carolyn today, was born 13 weeks before full-term. He weighed only 1 pound, 12 ounces.
After his delivery – by emergency Cesarean section – as he lay fighting for his life in the intensive care neonatal nursery, he looked as small and hairless as “a skinned squirrel,” as my father, a Wisconsin outdoorsman, said later.
But that same “fetus,” born so terribly prematurely, now runs to hug me when I return home from work. He likes to engage in all manner of wordplay. He embraces every aspect of life with insatiable curiosity and relentless enthusiasm.
He is one-of-a-kind.
But so are they all.
Mei Ling Rein. Abortion: an Eternal Social and Moral Issue (Wylie, Texas: Information Plus Reference Series, 2000)
“I long for the day that justice will be done and the burden from all of these deaths will be removed from my shoulders. I want to do everything in my power to help women and their children.”
Norma McCorvey (the former Jane Roe ofRoe v. Wade), quoted in”Activism: Norma McCorvey,”American Feminist, Summer 2003, 22-23
Dr. Alec Bourne, who had successfully challenged the abortion law in England by performing an abortion on a teenage rape victim. He later wrote:
“Those who plead for an extensive relaxation of the law [against abortion] have no idea of the very many cases where a woman who, during the first three months, makes a most impassioned appeal for her pregnancy to be ‘finished,’ later, when the baby is born, is thankful indeed that it was not killed while still an embryo. During my long years in practice I have had many a letter of the deepest gratitude for refusing to accede to an early appeal.”
A. Bourne, A Doctor’s Creed: The Memoirs of a Gynecologist, London, 1963
Not all babies who are initially unwanted stay unwanted.
20 week old unborn baby, at the same age as the baby McCormack killed
An article in The New Republic described how Jennie Linn McCormack aborted her late term unborn baby with pills she purchased online. She did not want to pay for an abortion in a clinic, which cost about $400 to $2,000, (depending on how far along she was) so she found cheaper drugs online. She delivered her dead aborted baby. The baby was fully developed and between 19 and 23 weeks.
She hid the body in a box but it eventually began to decay and attracted attention. According to Detective Brian McClure, who saw the dead baby:
“We see dead bodies, daily, weekly, in all different stages…But seeing a recognizable baby in a garbage bag, frozen, outside, in a garbage pile, decomposing ….”
Detective Val Wadsworth, a father of four, said:
“I wouldn’t wish anyone to that scene or investigation…We unwrapped it and released it to the funeral home, and the next day was the autopsy…When they had it thawed out and laying on the table, it was just sad. Sad feeling. Sad little pathetic face. It was just terrible.”
Jennie Linn McCormack “The Rise of DIO Abortions” The New Republic Dec 21, 2012
Abortions at five months are legal everywhere in the United States. Babies are regularly aborted at this age, often with the technique below, the D&E abortion.
Here are some ads from clinics advertising abortions at 20 weeks and beyond
Jeanie, a 40 Days for Life leader in Syracuse, New York, told of a woman who came out of a Planned Parenthood clinic in tears. Jeanie and the people praying with her were able to talk to her and found out that she had been kicked out of Planned Parenthood and denied a pregnancy test because she was not considering abortion. According to Jeanie:
“We offered her support and assisted her to the pregnancy care center next door.”
According to Jeanie, this was not an isolated incident:
“One couple we offered assistance to told us as they were leaving that Planned Parenthood would not even give them a pregnancy test if they were not planning to have an abortion,” she said, “and the couple said they had insurance.”
Volunteers also spoke to a mother and daughter on the sidewalk outside. “The daughter was pregnant and angry at Planned Parenthood for not being willing to provide any pregnancy care whatsoever if she didn’t plan on aborting the baby,” Jeanie said.
She simply needed help filling out insurance forms. They were directed instead to the pro-life pregnancy care center to get the assistance they needed.”
Shawn Carney “Planned Parenthood tells couple: no pregnancy test without abortion – 40 Days update” LifeSiteNews Nov 04, 2011
Planned Parenthood has been accused of pushing abortion in their clinics. The fact that they were completely unwilling to help women who did not want abortions but instead wanted help raising their children, or even just wanted a simple pregnancy test, shows their proabortion mentality. I hope that if any other pro-lifers outside Planned Parenthood’s have had a similar experience, they will come forward and share it.
From former abortion clinic director Abby Johnson:
“Something that has always struck me when I go out to clinics, and I watch the women who come out who’ve had an abortion. I’ll see the sidewalk counselors reach out to them, and I see the compassion on their faces and I hear the compassion in their words, and it’s fantastic. It’s so wonderful to see that. They extend such love to those hurting women.
But then I see clinic workers come out, and that compassion just evaporates. And it’s wrong. 70% of clinic workers have had abortions themselves. They are in need of healing just as much, if not more, than the women who come to that clinic. No one grows up wanting to work in an abortion clinic. It’s a series of heartbreaking, regretful, painful choices that lead them there. We don’t see it because they show their hurt with anger — they yell at us and curse at us because they are hurt. Yet our compassion is somehow diminished toward them.
I want people to know this community of clinic workers have not been embraced by the pro-life community, yet they could literally be the demise of the abortion industry! There are 4 major pending lawsuits against PP, for billions of dollars, all brought by former PP employees. If these suits are successful, God-willing, these large affiliates could shut down. This could be a domino effect. This could be the beginning of the end!
These workers coming forward with information we would not have any other way. The beauty of this is these are real people with real stories of real clients and real things happening that can be brought to court and prosecuted. These clinics really can be shut down because of it. This is what the pro-life movement has been missing for 40 years.”
Ted Merrill, who has performed some abortions himself, talks about how students in one of his classes started to rethink their views on abortion, just because they were able to witness the development of chicken embryos. He says:
“Extreme positions may be easier when the argument is intellectual. But they don’t hold up at close range. I noticed this in my interactions with college students in an anatomy and physiology class I taught. The nine students in this all-female class were unequivocally in favor of abortion rights when we started the section on reproduction. But something changed when they studied live chick embryos.
I had explained to them that all vertebrates closely resemble one another during early development. Then we open fertilized eggs at various stages. Under a microscope, eggs that have incubated for 36 hour show the first rudiments of an embryo, and a crude tubular structure rhythmically twitching in the center. At 48 hours, you can see an elementary – but definitely formed – heart pumping red blood cells through a looped network of tubes. You can recognize an eye. Just a day later, there are limbs, a face, and a brain that looks like linked sausages.
As the young women looked at these early-stage embryos and watched that amazing little heart beating, they were moved. “If we closed up the shell and put it back in the incubator, would it still grow?” one of them asked me. Another said, “It’s going to die in a little while under the microscope, isn’t it?” A third student declared, “I don’t think we should be doing this.” And while some of my students couldn’t wait to see how the embryo progressed through the later stages of development, others became upset and refused to open any more eggs.
When I brought the talk around to abortion again, I noticed that their feelings were no longer clear-cut. They all upheld a woman’s right to choose, but felt that other factors had to be considered, too.”
Ted Merrill “Abortion: Extreme Views Ignore Reality” Medical Economics, July 15, 1996
So often, people have views on abortion based on impersonal sound bites and slogans they have heard. They do not consider the reality of the unborn baby. Even seeing the embryos of chickens started these students thinking about the reality of life in the womb.
One female lawyer made an interesting comment back in 1990. Commenting on how many of the female lawyers in the American Bar Association have had abortions:
“I’m practically the only one of my friends who hasn’t had an abortion. We’re talking about lots of women in this room…”
Sandra J P Dennis
Richmond Times – Dispatch August 11, 1990
It’s true that this quote is dated, but it makes one wonder. how has the high abortion rate affected the way these lawyers argued about cases relating to abortion? Are the statistics similar in 2014?
This is how a woman became an abortion clinic escort.
First, she attended a pro-choice march.
“My participation in the pro-choice march was motivated by boredom and restlessness as much as by a desire to be of service. I had thought about getting involved in some kind of cause, but I didn’t know which one. Having been too young in the 60s to participate in the peace movement, I looked forward to attending a real political march. I didn’t attend the antichoice march held the same day because the newspaper letters to the editor with “pro-life” views seemed too cold, uncaring, and judgmental; one letter even said that any woman who died from an illegal abortion deserved to die.”
….
“One woman speaker at the post-March rally asked for volunteers to assist clients entering the Women’s Health Organization, the only women’s health care facility performing abortions in northeastern Indiana. First trimester abortions are performed at this clinic by an out of city physician (any local doctor doing abortions will be blackballed by the community in Fort Wayne, known as “the city of churches”). As coordinator of clinic defense, the woman arranged for escorts to help those with appointments get past the antiabortion protesters. The escorts, both men and women, were volunteers with no official connection to the clinic. From her speech, escorting sounded like an exciting kind of service: necessary, different, dangerous, and more stimulating than stuffing envelopes. As a Christian, I also felt an obligation to work for justice and equality.”
Anne Eggebroten, ed Abortion: My Choice, God’s Grace (Pasadena, California: New Paradigm Books, 1994) 160
This shows that pro-lifers who say judgmental and cruel things about postabortion women drive people away from the movement. Had this person not been turned off from the pro-life cause, she might have ended up on the other side of the picket line.
