An anonymous abortion provider discusses how he is uneasy with repeat abortions:
”For some it is definitely a kind of birth control…’These women are on their sixth one. They have a troubled family situation, and you feel it’s in the best interest for the possible future child….In some ways I do feel that — but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant.”
Legs of a baby at 14 weeks – legal to abort in every US state and in Canada
Another doctor at the same facility said:
”Some days you just want to shake these people. ‘Why didn’t you take your birth-control pills? Why didn’t you get your Depo-Provera shot?’ ”
Jack Hitt “Who Will Do Abortions Here?” New York Times Jan 18, 1998
“In most clinics, the doctor is pretty much the technician. We do the counseling, we do the blood testing we do the sonogram, and then the doctor sees the patient for the abortion. And for many reasons that’s cost effective, and you need to do that in order to keep the cost low. It does mean that the doctor’s interaction with the patient is very limited. So they don’t get a lot of the goodies that you get when you’re in a relationship. They get to go inflict pain on someone for five minutes. That’s a tricky piece.”
Interview with Charlotte Taft by Jane Reynolds of Project Choice quoted in Mark Crutcher “Lime 5: Exploited by Choice ” (Denton, Texas: Life Dynamics Incorporated, 1996) 185
In the article “Induced abortion: An ethical conundrum for counselors” the writers discuss how many counselors do not acknowledge how painful abortion can be for their patients. they cite two studies:
“….[One study] discovered that counselors sometimes are not sensitive to grief issues surrounding abortion and encourage clients “to move on.” The development of grief that is socially negated (i.e., denied or suppressed by oneself and others) can complicate issues for counselors as well as clients. Grief, when not recognized, accepted, and resolved, can result in masked maladaptive behaviors, such as lack of appropriate affect and damaged interpersonal relationships.”
Millner, Vaughn S; Hanks, Robert “Induced abortion: An ethical conundrum for counselors” Journal of Counseling and Development January 1, 2002
“At the present time, the fetus is sent down the sewer, without any form of farewell, and the operation obeys the rituals of medicine. In many cases, abortions are serial operations, and it may happen that not one word is addressed to the women, except to verify that she has fasted and filled out 4 copies of the bureaucratic forms. Perhaps she does not even see the doctor’s face, for she has already been given sedatives. She is stretched out on her back with her legs apart when the doctor, passing from one table to another, proceeds with the next abortion. He opens the neck of the uterus, often provoking a flood of emotion to which no one pays any attention… What happens to all the fear, the guilt, the pain, the solitude and the suffering? The guilt, and sometimes revolt, may be crushing and unjust, in so far as the woman bears alone a burden that belongs to all of us.”
Ginette Paris “Pagan Meditations” (Dallas: Spring publications, 1986)
Quoted in Mark Crutcher “Lime 5: Exploited by Choice ” (Denton, Texas: Life Dynamics Incorporated, 1996)
This quote is an example of pro-choicers acknowledging what a difficult experience abortion is for most women. When pro-lifers work to provide women with other options and help them choose life, we are often saving them from heartache. Read about abortion’s psychological effects here. Read women’s stories here.
Abby Johnson runs a pro-life outreach to abortion clinic workers. And Then There Were None provides emotional and sometimes financial support to clinic workers who want to leave their jobs. Anyone following ATTWN’s updates has seen how many of the clinic workers who leave are single mothers. Former clinic worker Joy Davis describes how abortion clinic owners make an effort to hire single mothers who they can more easily control:
“If the doctor had somebody come and apply for job whose husband was a big hot shot that made a lot of money, then he didn’t want her working for him. But if they were single, and had children, that’s the one he wanted. He could control them. And he controlled me probably most of all. I had two children, I had a son that had severe problems… And he preyed on that. Because when I started getting into such financial problems with my son’s medical care, that’s when he started making all the demands on me. That’s when he really started pushing on me hard, to change records and to treat patients, and to be a doctor and not get paid a doctors wage. And it wasn’t just me, he did that to a lot of people… I can refer to [the abortionist] like I can an abused woman, and I’ve seen this with a lot of abused women, where their husbands abuse them and they make them think it’s their fault, and they won’t leave their husband even though he beats them… I find that to be true with [the abortionist]. He will abuse his employees, mentally, just put them through the ringer, then turn around and do something very wonderful for them, to make them think he really cares about them… He was always doing things for me that made me feel obligated to him.”
Clinic worker Joy Davis in an interview cited in Mark Crutcher “Lime 5: Exploited by Choice ” (Denton, Texas: Life Dynamics Incorporated, 1996)
Pro-Choice columnist Linda Gorov of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about the public display of aborted babies that had been found in the trash:
“All the antiabortion pickets in the world cannot convey the loss you feel when you look at it 10 week old fetus in the bright sun light. You can be for abortion or against abortion. It doesn’t matter. You look and you look away and you feel lousy for a long time afterward.”
Monica Migliorino Miller Abandoned: the Untold Story of the Abortion Wars (Charlotte, North Carolina: St. Benedict Press, 2012) 135
A woman who became pregnant with twins while using in vitro aborted one twin and kept the other. She said:
“If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner – in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me – and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”
Ruth Padawer “The Two Minus One Pregnancy” New York Times Magazine, August 2011
They put me on hold for 30 minutes, didn’t return promised phone calls & generally treated me like meat. Yes, you can get free birth control from them but believe it or not there are OTHER free clinics where you’re not just a number. They just take a little more digging to find.
In anticipation of a pro-life rally schedule that one of her clinics, the owner says:
“It’ll be a circus. There will be pro-choice escorts, but there will also be those pro-choice crazy ones that just like to go to a demonstration. There’s crazy groups in pro-choice: socialists. I mean, it will bring out every crazy in the world.”
James D Slack Abortion, Execution, and the Consequences of Taking Life (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009) 48
