Commenting on the high percentage of breakups in relationships after abortion, researchers said:
“If your partner was supportive of your decision to have an abortion, and then is surprised to find himself feeling angry, depressed or grief stricken, you may feel guilty. You also might find yourself feeling angry, betrayed and confused… You may be feeling guilty about hurting your husband or boyfriend because you did talk to him about the pregnancy and he wanted to keep the baby.”
Torre—Bueno A. Peace after Abortion (San Diego, California: Pimpernel Press, 1997) 45, 44
20-22 weeks. Typical age for this type of abortion
“It is, in my experience and my opinion, less risky to put a hole in the base of the skull. Because the contents of the skull are liquid the skull contents may often drain out spontaneously as soon as there is a hole in the skull.”
Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, abortionist, in sworn testimony in National Abortion Federation, et. al. v. Ashcroft, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, April 2, 2004. She is describing a partial-birth abortion, where the skull is punctured in the brains are drained or sucked out. This procedure is now illegal, and abortions at that stage are done by dismemberment D&E
“In our city, garbage is collected early in the morning. Sometimes the bang of the cans and the grind of the truck awaken us before our time. We are resentful, mutter into our pillows, then go back to sleep. On the morning of August 6, 1975, the people of 73rd St. near Woodside Avenue do just that. When at last they rise from their beds, dress, eat breakfast, and leave their houses for work, they have forgotten, if they had ever known, that the garbage truck had passed earlier that morning. The event has slipped into unmemory, like a dream.
They close their doors and descend to the pavement. It is mid-summer. You measure the climate, decide how you feel in relation to the heat and humidity. You walk toward the bus stop. Others, your neighbors, are waiting there. It is all so familiar. All at once you step on something soft. You feel it with your foot. Even through your shoe you have the sense of something unusual, something marked by a special “give.” It is a foreignness upon the pavement. Instinct pulls your foot away in an awkward little movement. You look down and you see… a tiny naked body, its arms and legs flung apart, its head thrown back, its mouth agape, its face serious. A bird, you think, fallen from its nest. But there is no nest here on 73rd St., no bird so big. It is rubber, then. A model, a… joke.. Yes, that’s it, a joke. And so you bend to see. Because you must. And it’s no joke. Such a gray softness can be but one thing. It is a baby, and dead. You cover your mouth, your eyes. You are fixed. Horror has found its chink and crawled in, and you will never be the same as you were. Years later you will step from a sidewalk to a lawn, and you will start at it softness, and think of that upon which you have just trod.
Now you look about; another man has seen it too. “My God,” he whispers. Others come, people you have seen every day for years, and you hear them speak with strangely altered voices. “Look,” they say, “it’s a baby.” There is a cry. “Here’s another!” and “Another!” and “Another!” And you follow with your gaze the index fingers of your friends pointing from the huddle where you cluster. Yes, it is true! There are more of these… little carcasses upon the street. And for a moment you look up to see if all the unbaptized sinless are falling from limbo.
Aborted baby: 24 Weeks
Now the street is filling with people. There are police. They know what to do. They rope off the area, then stand guard over the enclosed space. They are controlled, methodical, these young policeman. Servants, they do not reveal themselves to the public master; it would not be seemly. Yet I do see the pallor and the sweat that breaks upon the face of one, the way another bites the lining of his cheek and holds it thus. Ambulance attendants scoop up the bodies. They scan the street; none must be overlooked. What they place upon the litter amounts to little more than a dozen pounds of human flesh. They raise the litter, and slide it home inside the ambulance, and they drive away. You and your neighbor stand about in the street which is become for you a battlefield from which the newly slain have at last been bagged and tagged and dragged away. But what shrapnel is this? By what explosion flung, these fragments, that sink into the brain and fester there? Whatever smell there is in this place becomes for you the stench of death. The people of 73rd St. do not then speak to each other. It is too soon for outrage, too late for blindness. It is the time of a unresisted horror.
24 weeks
Later, at the police station, the investigation is brisk, conclusive. It is the hospital director speaking “… Fetuses accidentally got mixed with the hospital rubbish… Were picked up at approximately 8:15 AM. By a sanitation truck. Somehow, the plastic lab bag, labeled Hazardous Material, fell off the back of the truck and broke open. No, it is not known how the fetuses got in the orange plastic bag labeled Hazardous Material. It is a freak accident.” The hospital director wants you to know that it is not an everyday occurrence. Once in a lifetime, he says. But you have seen it, and what are his words to you now?
He grows affable, familiar, tells you that, by mistake, the fetuses got mixed up with the other debris. (Yes, he says other, he says debris.) He has spent the entire day, he says, trying to figure out how it happened. He wants you to know that. Somehow it matters to him. He goes on:
Aborted fetuses that weigh 1 pound or less are incinerated. Those weighing over 1 pound are buried at a city cemetery. He says this. Now you see. It is orderly. It is sensible. The world is not mad. This is still a civilized society.
Aborted sometime in the second trimester
There is no more. You turned to leave. Outside on the street, men are talking things over, reassuring each other that the right thing is being done. But just this once, you know it isn’t. You saw, and you know.
And you know, too, that the Street of the Dead Fetuses will be wherever you go. You are part of its history now, its legend. It has laid claim upon you so that you cannot entirely leave it – not ever.”
Richard Selzer “Abortion” Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976) 153 – 155
Testimony of Steve Calvin, M.D., specialist in maternal – fetal medicine, before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism, and Property Rights, Senate Judiciary Committee, Hearing on “The 25th Anniversary of Roe vs. Wade: Has It Stood the Test of Time?” January 21st, 1998:
“… At the time of the Roe V Wade decision, ultrasound during pregnancy was largely experimental. During the 70s and 80s the beneficial uses of ultrasound in pregnancy multiplied…
Current ultrasound imaging techniques reveal the marvelous complexity of prenatal growth and development… However, the use of this wonderful window on the womb has become increasingly disconcerting for some who would rather view the fetus as pregnancy tissue or the product of conception….
3-D sonogram – 12 weeks
We are clearly in a new era of obstetrics because of ultrasound and the expanding concept of treatment of the fetus as a patient. Yet there is an inescapable schizophrenia when modern medicine works under ethical rules which say that a fetus is a patient only when the mother has conferred the status.”
Quoted in Mei Ling Rein. Abortion: an Eternal Social and Moral Issue (Wylie, Texas: Information Plus Reference Series, 2000)
Detroit News survey asking women if they would have an abortion in the first trimester if the baby had down syndrome. One answer:
“it should be a mandatory abortion–at a minimum of $4million per child society cannot continue to pay for every unhealthy baby that a parent wants but wont take financial responsibility for–let parent birth them if they agree to sign over their tax returns, and 100% of assets to the people or abort them”
“When a pro-life candidate ran television ads showing aborted babies, people were outraged. A CBS Evening News reporter declared the abortion debate had reached a “new low in tastelessness.” Strangely, there was no outrage that babies were being killed… only that someone had the audacity to show they were being killed.”
Randy Alcorn Why Pro-Life? Caring for the Unborn and Their Mothers (Hendrickson Publishers, 2011)
People are often enraged when encountered with the horror of abortion. This has led some pro-lifers to feel that pages of aborted babies should not be shown to the public. They worry that this will make people more entrenched into their positions because they cannot process the horror of what they are seeing and instead take their anger out on the messenger. However, people are often swayed by the pictures when they see them on the Internet. Read some testimonies here.
Pro-choice author Rosalind Pollack Petchesky writes about how poor minority women are sometimes pressured to have abortions:
“Especially in locales with large concentrations of poor blacks, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, Chicanos, and Native Americans, a more serious problem regarding abortion may stem, not from its denial, but from its forced imposition.… They [minority women who became pregnant] report that poor women of color may find that a positive pregnancy test automatically results in an aggressive attempt to persuade them to undergo abortion. Instead of being offered a choice, they are presumed to be too poor or too young or to have too many children already to bear a child. This is in part a function of the population control mentality, but it also reflects economic interests. In profit-making abortion establishments, Medicaid reimbursement and unregulated fee schedules operate as an incentive to some doctors to process as many abortion cases as possible.”
Rosalind Pollack Petchesky Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality & Reproductive Freedom (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990) 161
From an interview with pro-life activist Joe Scheidler:
Q: When you debate leaders on the proabortion side, and you show them these pictures of what are clearly dead, and mutilated corpses of unborn children, how do they respond?
A: They say, “You have broken the rules. We’re not supposed to show pictures.” They say that we paint these pictures, or that it was really a baby that was killed and some other way. They’ll try anything when confronted with it to try to divert attention from it. If you get on a television talk show, they will not let you use the pictures, but I always have them lying there are in a folder nearby to keep them nervous.”
David Kuperlian and Mark Masters “Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet” New Dimensions, 1990
