Dr. Stephen Foley, a doctor who performed emergency surgery on a woman who still had part of the baby left inside her after a botched abortion
“It is not acceptable to refer your patients to the emergency department and assume the on-call doctor will take care of any complications and assume all the risk associated with the complications. No practicing physician can maintain privileges to practice and perform surgery if they do not provide specific coverage for their patients, in case of a complication. It is considered abandonment of your patient.”
Richard and Rhonda White Confronting Abortion Distortions (Xulon Press, 2013) 127
“I wanted to have a clear idea of what I was doing. A couple of weeks (the time between the moment when I missed my period and the test to make things clear) I turned the library upside down in my search for books that described gestation. I wanted to see with the fetus looks like in its various stages of development, what organs it already had developed, how its metabolism functioned, and so on. I learned that the point of a pregnancy at which an abortion takes place makes no difference: it is always a question of killing something. This became quite clear to me, but it didn’t at all change my decision.… I was also astonished that the idea of killing didn’t strike me as intolerable…”
Commenting on this, the author of the book says:
“To find one’s way through this state of mind, without telling oneself that abortion is nothing special, consciously accepting the idea of killing: such an attitude merits respect and the suspension of conventional judgments.”
Eva Pattis Zoja Abortion: Loss and Renewalin the Search for Identity (London: Routledge, 1997) 73 – 74
One woman who had an abortion said that the father of the baby wanted to marry her.
She says:
7 week ultrasound. Most abortions happen after this time
“… He woke me up in the middle of the night telling me that maybe he wanted to give up acting and wondered if we should get married. I said, “Why don’t we break up instead?” Does he think that because I accidentally got pregnant I’m supposed to sort of accidentally get married?
It’s out of the question. There’s no way I want to marry Rick or to have a baby with him. First of all, we can barely survive ourselves. But more than that, he just can’t handle it. He’s not ready to be a father and certainly not ready to help me to have an abortion. Does he have any idea of what it’s like for me?
I’ll pay for the abortion myself… I’ll keep him informed; I guess he deserves that much. But who needs his hassles in addition to everything else?”
Myron K Denney, M.D. A Matter of Choice: An Essential Guide to Every Aspect of Abortion (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1983) 87
Walker Percy, novelist, who was trained as a physician at Columbia University:
“It is a commonplace of modern biology, known to every high school student… That the life of every individual organism, human or not, begins with the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that henceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism.”
Walker Percy Signposts in a Strange Land, edited by Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991) 341
“So far no one has firebombed a Right to Life headquarters, no one has firebombed a Birthright headquarters, no one has firebombed a Roman Catholic headquarters, but that does not mean that persons are not contemplating the possibility.”
“Catholic Church Spurs Violence, Pro – abortionist Says” Cleveland Plain – Dealer, February 20, 1981, 1
“[Abortion] counselors also have difficulty coping with their own feelings about women who have late second trimester abortions for no apparent reason.”
Warren M Hern Abortion Practice (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: JB Lippincott Company, 1990) 89
Abortion clinic workers see the violence of 2nd trimester abortions, and the torn off arms and legs of the babies. When they see women having 2nd trimester abortions without good reason, it upsets them– At least some of the time
24 weeks
This is the most common abortion method in the late 2nd trimester:
The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology published an article on an experiment done at Stanford University Hospital by Dr. Robert C Goodlin where the chests of aborted babies were cut open while they were alive to observe their beating hearts. The babies were kept in incubators.
“The thorax [chest] was opened and the heart was observed directly. When the heart was beating, the fetus was returned to the chamber and the experiment was resumed.”
The longest any of the babies survived was 11 hours.
Robert C. Goodlin “Cutaneous Respiration in a Fetal Incubator” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 86 (July 1, 1963): 574
Such experimentation on living aborted children was made illegal in the US, though it may still go on in other countries.
A midwife for almost 9 years, I can testify that babies born from late abortions (case of abortion on medical grounds) without feticide, usually between 20 and 24 weeks gestation, may be born alive. The medical team is then often uncomfortable and either puts the baby in a tray in a separate room until he stops showing signs of life, or asks a gynecologist, anesthetist or pediatrician for a morphine injection in the cord that some accept … or not. For my part, I have already proposed to concerned couples that if the baby was alive at birth, to lay him on the woman’s stomach for him to die with dignity. Two couples agreed.
I recently decided not to participate in abortions on demand or abortions on medical grounds and to apply my conscience clause, which I can do because I am incumbent. I will probably leave the relevant services, including the delivery room. Those contractual employees who would apply their conscience clause are threatened with not having their contracts renewed.
In my experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to protect the right to abortion, an embryo or fetus is considered to be a person by medical practitioners under two conditions:
1. The child must be wanted by the parents and
2. The child must be “normal” and not “disabled” (with all the risks that such a subjective term permits).
As soon as the fetus fails to meet these conditions, it is just considered to be waste… It’s terrible to say, but that is the truth.
