British abortionist Dr Kate Paterson expresses frustration at the shortage of abortion doctors in England:
“There are an awful lot of doctors already working helping women to get pregnant in the NHS and in the private IVF sector. There are a hell of a lot less who want to help women when they are pregnant and can’t cope. There is a desperate need for this kind of work and women can be in really extreme situations.”
Seems like the shortage of abortionists is not just an American problem. Perhaps many doctors find ripping apart babies distasteful, despite the money there is to be made.
James Pendergraft is a late term abortionist, who performs abortions up to 28 weeks.
28 week old unborn baby
He works in Florida. From an article about him:
“Pendergraft also isn’t bashful about making money in his line of work. He says he went into a profession he believes in, and it happens to be profitable… He will not reveal annual revenues, but he says his clinics are “very economically viable.”
…
“His in-your-face salesmanship leaves many – including other clinic operators – uncomfortable. They wonder how much of his professed altruism is just a marketing pitch. Maggie Gifford, a spokeswoman for the Florida coalition of Independent Abortion Providers, for nearly 20 years, has run Alternatives of Tampa, a small abortion clinic… Gifford calls Pendergraft, who once worked for her “a new breed of cat”… “
She]says areas where the Pendergraft opens has his clinics are already well served by other clinics
“They say when Pendergraft opens his doors in a new city, such as Tampa, he drops prices to spur competition.”
[Pendergraft answers] that “he goes into new markets aggressively to attract patients who will respond to the level of care in his clinics and spread the word. He says he chooses locations based on evaluations of long-term supply and demand.”
He describes himself as a “God loving Christian.”
Cynthia Barnett “The Specialist” Florida Trend Archives June 1999
Pendergraft’s licence has been suspended four times for shoddy conditions in his clinic and botched abortions. Read more about this here.
“The size of the conceptus at this stage in pregnancy [Post 24 weeks gestation] makes D&E technically problematic… Delivery of a fetus after 24 weeks gestation will frequently result in an infant capable of survival…”
Joe Leigh Simpson, M.D. and Sherman Elias, M.D. Essentials of Prenatal Diagnosis (Churchill Livingstone, 1993) 327
The baby below was aborted intact at 24 weeks. He or she was most likely injected with poison before being delivered, This method was used because dismemberment with forceps would have been difficult.
Peter Korn, who wrote about an abortion clinic called Lovejoy and how it functioned, said the following about the head nurse’s job:
“Lovejoy has gone through 5 head nurses in 4 years. The job is a difficult one, at least partly because of the nature of the 2nd floor operation. On certain days as many as 25 first trimester abortions might be scheduled in one operating room. Women coming in for abortions are often suffering great emotional stress; of those that appear, it is not unusual for half to be late for their appointments, some by as much as 2 or 3 hours. The head nurse must keep the surgical area running efficiently in the face of such unpredictability. At one moment pre-op, the operating room, and postop can be functioning smoothly and on time. Then 6, 7, or 8 women will arrive simultaneously for their abortions.”
Peter Korn Lovejoy: A Year in the Life of an Abortion Clinic (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996) 11
It’s easy to imagine that because of the volume of abortion patients and the emphasis on getting women in and out for their abortions, women may have been rushed through the procedures and may not have had their needs met needs met or received quality care.
In all, this clinic sounds like a factory, churning out abortions on an assembly line.
Dr. Martin Haskell, an abortionist, said the following:
“It’s not unusual at the start of D&E procedures that a limb is acquired first and that that limb is brought through the cervix … prior to disarticulation and prior to anything having been done that would have caused the fetal demise up to that point.”
Sworn testimony given in US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin (Madison, WI, May 27, 1999, Case No. 98-C-0305-S), by Dr. Martin Haskell,
Dr. Haskell is describing dismembering a baby alive. He brings one arm or leg down into the cervix and dismembers it before proceeding with the rest of the abortion. You can see this in a diagram below
Here is a leg left behind from one such abortion at 16 weeks:
Tony Kerridge spokesman for Marie Stopes, Britain’s biggest private provider of abortions, is trying to explain why there are so few doctors becoming abortionists:
“It’s not glamorous work for doctors which may partly explain the increasing difficulty in recruitment over the last five or six years, and younger people no longer understand or recall the time when abortion was illegal.”
Dr. Julius Butler, then professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said the following about abortionists:
“Remember, there is a human being at the other end of the table taking that kid apart. We’ve had guys drinking too much, taking drugs, even a suicide or two.”
Dr. Julius Butler, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School
Quoted from the Philadelphia Inquirer In Melody Green and Sharon Bennett “The Crime of Being Alive: Abortion, Euthanasia & Infanticide” last days ministries 1984 Publication 10 – 84
Note that he refers to a baby being aborted as “that kid” and not “that tissue” or “that collection of cells.”
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
From Merle Hoffman, the founder and owner of an abortion clinic, on witnessing her first few abortions:
“What I saw a running through those vacuum tubes when I first started my work was only blood and tissue, unformed and messy. It was easy to imagine the fetus as a bunch of cells that one could define as one wished. But even in the beginning I had an inkling that this mentality was the easy way out, that it didn’t go far enough to do justice to the experience of abortion.”
Merle Hoffman Intimate Wars: the Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room (New York: Feminist Press, 2012) 107
At just seven weeks, the baby has arms and legs, fingers and toes. (see aborted babies at 7 weeks here) At this stage the baby is delicate and may be torn apart completely in an abortion. Abortions done before the baby is formed are still killing a life.
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)
