Dr. Dennis Conneen, emergency room doctor in Orange County, California:
“The disadvantage girls have that go to a clinic for an abortion is the clinics close at 5:00 PM. Some girls travel to other counties to have abortions, and it’s difficult for them to get help from that clinic after hours if problems arise. So those women who do have complications come in on evenings and weekends into the emergency room.
Almost every month in the emergency room where I work, we see a woman coming in with a medical complication resulting from abortion. Out of those cases, I would say that one out of three requires hospitalization or a minor surgical procedure called a D&C. In some cases, the abortion is incomplete and there are pieces of the fetus in the uterus. These women usually experience a couple of weeks of cramping and bleeding after the abortion and decide to come in. Sometimes all they need is some blood and other fluids. Other times they need a D&C to scrape the uterus out.
One case involved a 24-year-old woman who came into the emergency room complaining of bleeding and cramps related to an abortion that she had had one week prior. She called the doctor who performed the abortion, and he said the abortion was complete and there should be no problems. He figured that the amount of tissue that he removed was sufficient for the age of the fetus. But sometimes, women do not give the correct conception date to the doctor who is performing the abortion. I took a look and saw the fetus’s head still inside of her. The baby’s head was as large as a golf ball! So I pulled it out.… You could see the trauma caused to the fetus by the abortion process. It was really beat up.”
Julia C Loren The Note on the Mirror: Pregnant Teenagers Tell Their Stories (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1990) 86 – 87
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