“What makes a late abortion disturbing is that the fetus is big now–like a fully formed child. Two of my obstetrician friends, both strongly pro-choice, told me that, even when it is a mother’s life at stake and abortion is absolutely necessary, doing the D and E feels “horrible.” We imagine, as we look in the fetus’s eyes, that there is someone in there.”
Michael Grobsmith, chief of the Illinois Department of Public health division of hospitals and clinics, commented on the death of an abortion patient who bled to death after being sent home from the clinic:
“It’s unfortunate, but it’s happening every day in Chicago, and you’re just not hearing about it.”
Ann Saltenberger Every Woman Has a Right to Know the Dangers of Legal Abortion (Glassboro, New Jersey: Air Plus Enterprises, 1982) 27
Legalizing abortion did not end abortion deaths. Go here to read about a few of the cases of women who died after legal abortion.
Even pro-abortion sources sometimes acknowledge that abortion is hard for women. In the famous book Our Bodies, Ourselves, the authors say the following about abortion:
“Even the most positive feelings afterward tend to be mixed with negative ones.”
The Boston Women’s Health Collective, Inc. Our Bodies, Ourselves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 234
Dr. Warren Hern does 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions at his clinic in Boulder. This is from an interview:
16 weeks. Hern aborts babies at this age every day
Q. Does it bother you that a second trimester fetus so closely resembles a baby?
A: I really don’t think about it. I don’t have a problem with believing the fetus is a fertilized egg. Sure it becomes more physically developed but it lacks emotional development. It doesn’t have the mental capacity for self-awareness. It’s never been an ethical dilemma for me. For people for whom that is an ethical dilemma, this certainly wouldn’t be a field they’d want to go into. Many of our patients have ethical dilemmas about abortion. I don’t feel it’s my role as a physician to tell her she should not have an abortion because of her ethical feelings. …Facing the situation of abortion is a part of that passage through life for some women–how they resolve that is their decision. …it. My role is to provide a service and, to a limited degree, help women understand themselves when they make their decision. I’m not to tell them what’s right or wrong.
Discharging the Committee on the Judiciary from Further Consideration Of the President’s Veto of HR 1833, Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1995
24 weeks
September 9, 1996 Capital Words, A Project of the Sunlight Foundation volume 142 , number 130
In her article in Harpers magazine, Tisdale talks about her work in an abortion clinic:
“A twenty-one-year-old woman, unemployed, uneducated, without family, in the fifth month of her fifth pregnancy. A forty-two-year-old mother of teenagers, shocked by her condition, refusing to tell her husband. A twenty-three-year-old mother of two having her seventh abortion, and many women in their thirties having their first. . . .Oh, the ignorance . . . .Some swear they have not had sex, many do not know what a uterus is, how sperm and egg meet, how sex makes babies. . . .They come so young, snapping gum, sockless and sneakered, and their shakily applied eyeliner smears when they cry. . . .I cannot imagine them as mothers.”
She talks about lying to women about their unborn babies:
12 weeks
“I am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about ‘the tissue’ and ‘the contents’ when the woman suddenly catches my eye and asks, ‘How big is the baby now?’. . . .1 gauge, and sometimes lie a little, weaseling around its infantile features until its clinging power slackens.
But she knows the reality of abortion:
But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside. . . .I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. . . .”
Quoted in Jason Deparle, “Beyond the Legal Right; Why Liberals and Feminists Don’t like to Talk about the Morality of Abortion,” Washington Monthly Apr. 1989,
Dug up this old quote from Planned Parenthood about sex selection abortions.
“… once the state of the fetal diagnostic art moves from second to first trimester, so abortion falls within the menstrual extraction.. Planned Parenthood will increasingly connote planning the sex as well as the spacing of offspring.”
Planned Parenthood spokesman, quoted in Lisa Andrusko “a Fact of Life: What Are Sex Selection Abortions?” March 14, 1985
“About 80 percent of late-term abortions are done by D and E. A couple of days ahead, small, absorbent rods are put in the pregnant woman’s cervical opening to expand it gradually. Then, for the actual procedure, she–and the fetus–are given heavy sedation or general anesthesia. The doctor breaks her bag of water and drains out the fluid. The opening won’t let the fetus out whole. So the doctor inserts metal tongs, physically crushes the head, and dismembers the fetus. The pieces are pulled out and counted to confirm that nothing was missed.
Partial-birth abortion is, if anything, less grotesque. The fetus is delivered feet first. To get the large head out, the doctor cuts open a hole at the base of the fetus’s skull and inserts tubing to suck out the brain, which collapses the skull. Often, but not always, the fetus is injected lethally beforehand. The procedure is used for a very small percentage of late abortions, and nothing makes it especially necessary over D and E. “
Here is a chart of a D & E operation:
D & E abortions are usually done in the second trimester, when one out of ten abortions take place. This adds up to many thousands a year.
Here is a picture of a 16 week old unborn baby, a candidate for this kind of abortion.
“Although human life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed. … The combination of 23 chromosomes present in each pronucleus results in 46 chromosomes in the zygote. Thus the diploid number is restored and the embryonic genome is formed. The embryo now exists as a genetic unity.”
(O’Rahilly, Ronan and Müller, Fabiola. Human Embryology and Teratology, 2nd edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996, pp. 8, 29).
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, whose has spoken to many former clinic workers, said:
“Former workers in the abortion industry have told us stories about playing games of toss with aborted babies in the hallway. Your mind has to invert what is going on: to make it a game, a joke, something positive. It’s the only way to keep from going crazy — and some of them do.”
“The one thing that sticks out in my mind the most, that really upset me the most, was that he had done an abortion, he had a fetus wrapped inside of a blue paper. He stuck it inside of a surgical glove and put another glove over it. He was standing in the hall, speaking with myself and two of his assistants. He was tossing the fetus up in the air and catching it. Like it was a rubber ball. I just looked at him and it’s like doctor, please. And he laughed. He says, “Nobody knows what this is.”
Rachel M. Macnair, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002)
It’s hard work to have a baby! Then two years of slave labor and 16 years of responsibility! You never have a moment’s freedom! The simplest trip to the grocery store has to be planned like a military campaign! From the moment you decide not to have an abortion, that kid is going to determine your life!
Chin Lyvely and Joyce Sutton “Abortion Eve” booklet given out at Planned Parenthood, pgs 14 and 15, cited by The American Life League, Abortion Encylopedia
