Linda bird Francke, author of the book The Ambivalence of Abortion, in which she interviewed numerous women who have had abortions, was always pro-choice. Yet she felt grief and distress when she went in for her abortion. In the book she describes how she felt in the waiting room of the abortion clinic:
“Suddenly the rhetoric, the abortion marches I’d walked in, the telegrams sent to Albany to counteract the Friends of the Fetus, the Zero Population Growth buttons I’d worn, peeled away, and I was all alone with my microscopic baby…
Though I would march myself into blisters for a woman’s right to exercise the option of motherhood, I discovered there in the waiting room that I was not the modern woman I thought I was.”
She told the abortionist to stop after he dilated her, but he told her it was too late and completed the surgery
“What good sports we women are. And how obedient. Physically, the pain passed even before the hum of the machine signaled that the vacuuming of my uterus was completed, my baby sucked up like ashes after a cocktail party.”
Linda bird Francke The Ambivalence of Abortion (New York: Random House, 1978) 63
She came to realize that abortion killed a baby, and her explanation to the way she acquiesced to the male abortionist seems to hint about how women are exploited by abortion. She still maintains her pro-choice stand, but her story is not a positive one. Later in the book, she would describe her regret, and seeing, in her mind’s eye, a tiny baby “ghost” which she thought about at times.
“After 25 years in practice, I became an abortion provider. Like many others, I find the work enormously satisfying and feel pleasure that my professional activities now match my pro-choice words.”
Diana Koster, Abortionist in Albuquerque, NM
Here is a diagram of a first trimester abortion. Is this really work that someone should “love”?
And here is a diagram of a second trimester abortion
Here are the remains of the baby aborted in the first trimester (nine weeks)
In an article entitled “What Happens to Unborn Babies After Abortion? Pathologists Share the Horrors” in LifeNews, writer Jonathon Van Maren reveals a horrible conversations that took place on a forum board for pathologists. Pathologists deal with the remains of surgeries, and these ones have had to inspect during their careers. The quotes were taken from the message board here.
From one pathologist:
16 weeks – legal to abort all over the country
“Anyone get tripped on these? I’m talking especially the big ones, where you can actually make out facial expressions like they knew they were being hacked the hell up (im serious). I almost went bonkers once over one, that is some scary crap. Am I the only pathologist who freaks when a 0.5 cm eye ball comes rolling out of bag and stares right at you…I know we are thinking this, just no one in pathology is talking about it.”
He/she also said:
“One incident really freaked me, it was a boy fetus, at least 3+ pounds, around 24+ weeks. It sat decomposing because the rest of the staff was AFRAID of it, Im not joking. Then the chief of staff told me to deal with it because I was the FNG (f-kcin new guy) so I went to work. Pulled out 2 well formed arms and then the torso, headless. The head was at the bottom of the container, when I pulled it, he had this expression of such utter horror it flipped me wayyyy out, my PA saw it and ran, literally left work and went on disability (Im serious here). It was like a headless screaming baby, like it had been born at least for a split second to realize it was screwed and let out one agonal yelp. The story of this reverberated around the department, someone actually accused me of doing what should have been a ME case and threatened to call the medical board! Im not joking, I woke up once shortly after that in a cold sweat with piss running down my leg….not pretty.”
24 weeks
Another:
Baby at only eight weeks – no perfectly formed arms and legs, complete with fingers and toes
“Totally trippy man. We get a fair number of fragmented fetuses from abortion procedures and they come in a container with formalin. The fact that they’re all hacked up is disturbing to begin with. Of course, there is the whole eyeball issue which freaks me out as well.”
He/she also says:
Well, all you can say in a lot of these final diagnosis reports are that the fetus is fragmented, you don’t know what the sex is (unless you’ve found the gonads and histologically they’re confirmed as balls or babymakers), you’ve identified some organs, and you give the estimated gestational age based on foot length. I dunno what else really…I haven’t had too many of these cases but all of these reports with my name on it are pretty simple writeups.
Foot of a baby aborted at 16 weeks
A third pathologist said:
“Most of my abortion-path anecdotes come from my PSF. Here one of the residents grosses most of them in as part of some project he is doing, and we are more than happy to let him.
1) Anencephalic baby, otherwise intact. Those are disturbing to look at. Saw quite a few and they never really get comfortable to look at.
12 week hand
2) When doing one POC that was about 12-15 weeks, somewhere around there, I put through the entire hand into a histology block, so that I could see what a developing hand looked like. The histotech freaked out when she saw it and I wasn’t allowed to do that again. So I stuck later to doing things that weren’t recognizable, such as the full cross section of the 8 week fetus anencephalic head, and the full larynx, etc.
3) The strangest are when you get the macerated contents, and you are able to recognize a few parts here and there – usually a leg or an arm, sometimes the heart. But it’s odd when you can’t find a large portion of it.
Visible parts of aborted babies from 6 to 14 weeks
4) There was a stillborn birth at about 12 weeks or so and it was sent to the morgue for some reason, and never claimed. A couple of months later the family decided they wanted an autopsy. So I had to do an autopsy on a mummified 12 week fetus. They had bothered to put the little bonnet on its head, but otherwise it was shriveled and brown.
16 weeks
5) 16 week or so fetus, the POC is sent down as one specimen, and there is a second specimen labeled “heart.” They wanted us to identify if there were any clear cardiac anomalies. It was about the size of a marble. I took it to the dissecting scope and found the PFO but that was about all I could tell.
6) about a 12 week fetus, sent down POC and wanted to know if it was an imperforate anus.
Unborn baby at only seven weeks after conception
On a related note though, eyeballs are the specimen that freaks me out the most. Cutting into an eye makes me squeal. I remember doing it the first time in anatomy lab and I felt like I was sticking a knife into my own eye.”
….
“I usually like chow down on White Castle while my trusty lab assistant has to stack all the baby body parts, limb amputations and reduction mastectomies into the incinerator. It has almost a Nazi concentration camp feel it all sometimes, one of my assistants today tried to joke about this leg and aborted fetus we were transporting, I snapped “have some f-ing respect!!” then started laughing too, you cant help it. Its so unbelievably insane. Nothing med school prepares you for.
Leg of aborted baby at 12 weeks
….
Another pathologist:
I had a holoprosencephaly case too, with the proboscis. I handle the aborted fetuses okay; the only thing I really dislike is having to stick my finger in the mouth to check for cleft palate. That gives me the willies.
One pathologist (the fifth one quoted) had no sympathy for the aborted babies and was not horrified by what he saw:
In any case, no, abortions don’t freak me out whatsoever. Maybe if a twin IUFD case showed up and one was giving the other a Dirty Sanchez, well, perhaps then I would take pause. Until then, no amount of googly eyeballs or tiny jaws dislocated “mid-scream” does anything to humanize the little sacks of neverweres for me.
There are quite a few things that I find disturbing, but few of them spill directly out of the womb.
Dr. Warren Hern, who is been performing abortions for more than 35 years, discusses how many women are ambivalent about whether or not to have an abortion:
“Most women who consider having an abortion have many questions about the procedure, as well as mixed feelings about their choice.”
Warren Hern Abortion Practice (Philadelphia: J Lippincott, 1990) 64
This is why the counseling at abortion clinics can have a huge impact on whether a woman goes through with an abortion. Counseling at clinics is often very biased. This is also why pro-lifers have convinced so many women not to have abortions just by offering them literature at abortion clinics. Women do change their minds. One study showed that up to 55% of women are unsure about having their abortions even up to the moment they submit to the operation.
A letter a crisis pregnancy received from a young woman:
“My abortion is something I wish I had never done. I can remember looking at the doctor when it was done, and saw him putting my baby in a plastic bag and then, throwing it away in a garbage bag. Do you know how that feels?… Have you ever lost something you loved dearly? I did, and I’m not proud of it… If I had a place to go and people who cared about my baby and me, maybe my baby would be born and alive… You people are against abortion, but are you willing to help young girls and women who don’t have the money or a place to live?… Some of us women and girls are not killers. We’re human too. And I tell you, having an abortion is killing me slowly.”
Quoted in Paul B Fowler Abortion: Toward an Evangelical Consensus (Portland, Oregon: Multnomah Press, 1987) 167 – 168
The pro-life answer to this heartbroken woman’s question should ALWAYS be yes. Give to crisis pregnancy centers as well as charities that help the poor. Many poor people are single mothers who are at rick for abortion if they get pregnant again. No one should abort because they have no where to go.
Dr. Charles Hartshorne, professor at the University of Texas (as of 1987) and self-proclaimed Christian:
“Granted that a fetus is human in origin and possible destiny, in what further sense is it human? The entire problem lies here. If there are pro-life activists who have thrown much light on this question, I do not know their names…
It [the unborn baby] cannot speak, reason or judge between right and wrong. It cannot have personal relations, without which a person is not functionally a person at all, until months – and not, except minimally, in 2 years – have passed….
Of course, an infant is not fully human… Persons who are already functionally persons in the full sense have more important rights even than infants.”
Charles Hartshorne, “Concerning Abortion: an Attempt at a Rational View,” The Christian Century, January 21, 1981, 42 – 45
“And they need to know that the reason I continue to go to work every day is that I love the work I do, that there is nothing I would rather be doing and that I truly feel there is nothing better I could be doing for the women and families of this country.”
Physicians for Reproductive Health “Why I Provide Abortions”
Professor Mary B Mahowald of Case Western Reserve University, has written that it is “morally defensible” to remove organs or tissues from “nonviable” fetuses (in the first 6 months of development in the womb) while they are still alive,
20 weeks
“if dead fetuses are not available or are not conducive to successful transplants.”
Mahowald acknowledged “added concerns” because of the children’s “possible sensitivity to pain,” but said that “this concern may be satisfactorily addressed on a practical level using anesthesia.”
Mahowald Mary B., J. Silver, R. A. Ratcheson “The Ethical Options in Transplanting Fetal Tissue” Hastings Center Report 17 (1). P 11
