Stephanie Monegro, a 17-year-old New Yorker, was two months pregnant and seeking an abortion. She went to a crisis pregnancy center by mistake. The counselor showed her her baby on an ultrasound screen.
“She said I would always regret it. [abortion]. [Then] I saw my first sonogram of the baby, and I burst into tears. I thought: Why would I want to kill something that’s living?”
One woman complained about the three days she had to wait between finding out her baby would be disabled and having the abortion she wanted (She couldn’t schedule it for any earlier) :
“Maybe it gives you time to think about it – but at the time, you feel a baby, you become attached to the baby, and every time it moves it reminds you that you’re going to put an end to its life and it’s very hard to imagine taking more time. It really is.… You imagine your baby. This is your baby. Hard to think of it as a fetus – you say fetus, but you imagine a baby. It moves and you become attached to it. Every time it moved those three days, I said, “Please don’t move.”
Barbara Katz Rothman. The Tentative Pregnancy: How Amniocentesis Changes the Experience of Motherhood (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1993) 193 – 194
Pro-choice politician, Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple, D-Arlington, on a bill passed that would regulate abortion clinics:
“It is purely discriminatory. It makes me heartsick.”
Virginia passed legislation that would require clinics that provide first-trimester abortions to meet the same standards as other surgical facilities. The requirements could include anything from expensive structural changes like widening hallways (to allow stretchers to pass through) to increased training and mandatory medical equipment the clinics currently don’t have.
“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
‘…I fear the power of choice over life or death at human hands. I see no human being whom I could ever trust with such power–not myself, not any other. Human wisdom, human integrity are not great enough. Since the fetus is a creature already alive and in the process of development, to kill it is to choose death over life. At what point shall we allow this choice? For me the answer is–at no point, once life has begun. At no point, I repeat, either as life begins or as life ends, for we who are human beings cannot, for our own safety, be allowed to choose death, life being all we know.”
Novelist Pearl S. Buck
Foreword to Robert E. Cooke and others, ed.,The Terrible Choice: The Abortion Dilemma(New York: Bantam Books, 1968), ix-xi,x.
In this video, Citizens for Pro-Life society show you what was thrown in the dumpsters at two abortion clinics in Michigan.
I’m sure that going through the dumpster was something the pro-lifers hated doing. I’m sure they felt dreadful gathering up the remains of these aborted babies. These children, so carelessly discarded, deserve more than a filthy dumpster as their private resting place, though. The babies found here would be buried. The video is to show the reality of abortion in all its hideousness.
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.
Today, it is illegal to perform experiments on living aborted babies in the US. The issue of fetal experimentation has faded into the background. But it wasn’t always that way. There was a time, shortly after Roe V Wade, when babies who survived abortion not only were allowed to die, they were sometimes experimented on until they died. And experimentation on living aborted babies is legal in some countries.
Dr. Jerald Gaull, then chief of pediatric research at New York State Institute for Basic Research in Mental Retardation on Staten Island, was quoted defending this practice:
“Rather than it being immoral to do what we are trying to do, it is immoral it is a terrible perversion of ethics to throw these fetuses in the incinerator as is usually done, rather than to get some useful information.”
“Operations on Live Fetuses.”San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 1973, page 20.
The book the article was cited in gives the following information:
Dr. Jerald Gaull, …was making periodic trips to Finland “to experiment on aborted but still-living fetuses.” He severed the nerve connections between brain and body, then surgically removed the brain, lungs, liver and kidneys for study and dissection.
Beyond Abortion, A Chronicle of Fetal Experimentation* by Suzanne M. Rini, (Avon, NJ: Magnificat Press, 1988) pp.32
22 to 24 weeks – a baby capable of being born alive and experimented on
I encourage anyone who wants more information on this to read Rini’s book.
Rayna Rapp, a former abortion clinic worker, interviewed women getting genetic testing to find out if their babies would be disabled or have a genetic problem. Here are some things that people said about why they would abort a down syndrome baby:
“The bottom line is when my neighbor said to me: “Having a “tard,” that’s a bummer for life.”
…
“I have a cousin, my mother’s sister’s son, he’s retarded and 38. Oh, it isn’t Down’s, it’s something else. He’s done fine, he’s likely to live a normal life, to die at 80. But it’s really messed up the rest of the family. My aunt give up a lot of her life… I’m not that selfless, I don’t want to live like that.”
…
“I would have a very hard time dealing with a retarded child. Retardation is relative, it could be so negligible that the child is normal, or so severe that the child has nothing… All of the sharing things you want to do, the things you want to share with a child – that, to me, is the essence of being a father. There would be a big void that I would feel. I would feel grief, not having what I consider a normal family.”
…
“I have an image of how I want to interact with my child, and that’s not the kind of interaction I want, not the kind I could maintain.”
…..
“I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t be that kind of mother who accepts everything, loves her kid no matter what. What about me? Maybe it’s selfish, I don’t know. But I just didn’t want all those problems in my life.”
Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999)
To some, they may seem like good reasons. But keep in mind that abortions of down syndrome babies are usually late-term abortions, performed after 16 to 20 weeks. Below is a picture of a 16-week-old unborn baby. A baby like this would be completely torn apart in an abortion procedure
A “potential life” at eight weeks after conception
From clinic owner an administrator Merle Hoffman, on counseling women for their abortions:
“Choice” is sometimes not a choice at all. It is an outcome determined by the economic, physical, sociological, and political factors that surround women… At times this reality would move me profoundly as I sat opposite the women I counseled prior to their abortions, acutely aware of the potential lives growing inside them that would soon cease to exist. I began to think critically, to come to terms with what was going on. Each time I did that, I came out of that process more committed than before. I had no conception, either religious or philosophical, that “life was sacred.”
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) 108 – 109
She uses the term “potential life” to describe the unborn babies, but readily admits that she has no belief that life is sacred. Perhaps deep down she realizes that what happens in her clinic dozens of times a day is the taking of actual, not potential, human life. However, by thinking “critically” she can come to terms with this fact, or at least repress it.
