Category: Quotes

Carol Everett Describes Abortion Counseling

From former clinic worker and clinic director Carol Everett:

“It was always difficult to find and train telemarketers who could call themselves “counselors” while selling abortions.

“We’re helping women,” I had to remind them constantly. Those who didn’t buy my pitch quickly left.

I started to believe my own rhetoric. I had to be convincing in order to persuade my telephone counselors, but each time I met with Chuck, I was quickly snapped back to reality. We were in the business of making money, a lot of it.”

Carol Everett with Jack Shaw, Blood Money (Oregon: Multnomah Press Books, Questar Publishers, Inc., 1992) Quoted in Rachel M MacNair, PhD. Achieving Peace in the Abortion War (New York: iUniverse, 2009) 54

10 weeks

See a picture of what this baby looks like after abortion.

Read Carol Everett’s full testimony here

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Providers And “Emotional Strain”

Dr. Warren Hern looking at emotional reactions of his own staff

“Six respondents denied any preoccupation… outside the clinic. Several others felt that the emotional strain affected interpersonal relationship significantly or resulted in other behavior such as an excessive need to talk about the experience.”

Warren M Hern and Billie Corrigan “What about Us? Staff Reactions to the D&E Procedure” Boulder Abortion Clinic. Advances in Planned Parenthood 15 (1): 3\ – 80, 1980  Quoted in Rachel M MacNair, PhD. Achieving Peace in the Abortion War (New York: iUniverse, 2009)11

 

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Study Shows That Clinic Workers Experience Troubling Symptoms

A study published in 1974:

noted that “obsessional thinking about abortion, depression, fatigue, anger, lowered self-esteem, and identity conflicts were prominent. The symptom complex was considered a “transient reactive disorder,” similar to “combat fatigue.”

Marianne Such–Baer, “Professional Staff Reaction to Abortion Work,” Social Casework, July 1974 Quoted in Rachel M MacNair, PhD. Achieving Peace in the Abortion War (New York: iUniverse, 2009) 9

Although this study was old, it reveals how abortionists and clinic workers struggle to cope with seeing the dead bodies of aborted babies and performing abortions on a daily basis. There have been more recent studies that show this. Also, many former clinic workers and doctors discuss the emotional trauma of performing abortions. You can read some of their stories in the former abortionist and former clinic workers categories.

from an aborted baby at seven weeks – abortionists and clinic workers see these babies daily
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Women Walked out of Clinic after Seeing the Ultrasound

From abortion clinic worker Joy Davis:

10 week ultrasound

“If the patient ever saw the ultrasound, they could see a baby. It would be sucking its thumb, most of the time, or moving its hands, or whatever, and it was a very cute thing to see, on the ultrasound. And so, as a rule, Dr. Tucker would always tell us to keep that screen turned away from the patient and never let them see it. So I just took it on myself to start showing them the pictures, and most everyone I showed the picture got up and walked out, and changed her mind. I did that for a good while. But basically, Dr. Tucker never found out I did that. He started noticing that I was having a lot of people change their mind, and he questioned me, why are they changing their mind? I would tell him I didn’t know.”

Rachel M MacNair, PhD. Achieving Peace in the Abortion War (New York: iUniverse, 2009)136

Joy Davis eventually left the abortion business and became a pro-life speaker. Read her full testimony here.

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Clinic Worker Supports Repeat Abortions, Abortions for Birth Control

Clinic worker supports multiple abortions as “birth control”:

Sometimes, just to feel people out, I ask, “How do you feel about repeat abortions?” Some people will answer, “One is OK, but more than that is just irresponsible,” which I may use as a teaching opportunity, or I might just walk away. It depends on my mood. But one person answered, “It’s an expensive type of birth control, but if that’s a woman’s preference, that’s fine with me.” That counted as a good answer.

This comes from the blog “The Abortioneers” found here

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American Medical Association’s Committee on Criminal Abortion

11 weeks – legal to abort in every state

The American Medical Association supports legalized abortion, but it didn’t always.

“Physicians have now arrived at the unanimous opinion that the fetus in utero is alive from the very moment of conception… The willful killing of a human being at any stage of its existence is murder.”

Dr. Horatio Storer, Head of the American Medical Association’s Committee on Criminal Abortion.

Horatio Storer and Franklin Heard, Criminal Abortion: Its Nature, Its Evidence and Its Law (out of print); cited in Stephen Krason, Abortion: Politics, Morality and the Constitution (Lanham, M.D.: University Press in America, 1984), 171.

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Abortionist: 14-year-old Abortion Patient Should Have Support

Although most abortion providers and pro-choice activists fight against laws requiring parents of teenagers to be notified about their children’s abortions, one abortionist admits:

“I don’t want a 14-year-old coming to my clinic alone for an abortion and walking out alone after she has it. What kind of provider am I if I permit this?”

Quoted in Marion Faux. Crusaders: Voices from the Abortion Front (New York: Birch Lane, 1990) 262

Read a former clinic worker’s testimony supporting parental notification

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Lancet Study Shows Abortion Problems

A study in the Lancet of 1182 legal abortions found that 9.5% of their patients require blood transfusions, 4.2% with cervical lacerations and in 1.2% the uterus was perforated. one researcher commented:

“The incidence of the complications described and the severity of some of them are disquieting. Some may claim that termination of pregnancy is much safer in their hands. If so, they are to be congratulated. The present figures represent the combined experience of five consultants and a series of experienced lecturers, senior registrars, and registrars. It is perhaps significant that some of the more serious complications occurred with the most senior and experienced operators. This emphasizes that termination of pregnancy is neither as simple nor as safe as some advocates of abortion on demand would have the public believe… It is disquieting that post-abortive infection, which is one of the most common causes of death after criminal abortion, should have occurred in 27% of this series. Septicemia, peritonitis, and paralytic ileus are potentially fatal complications and the risk of death increases if they occur after the patient is discharged from the hospital and there was a delay in diagnosis.… The fact remains that none of these situations may be the result of negligence. They are complications which, though well known to, and well-documented by, those with wide experience of an operation which is neither simple nor safe, are seldom mentioned by those who claim that abortion is safe and merely an extension of contraceptive techniques.”

Thomas W Hilgers “the Medical Hazards of Legally Induced Abortion” from Abortion and Social Justice edited by Thomas W Hilgers and Dennis J Horan (Kansas City, Missouri: Sheed & Ward, 1972)

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On Watching Handicapped Babies Die

Dr. Anthony Shaw, who allows disappointed parents of handicapped newborn children the right to have them deprived of medical care and thus eliminated, reports:

“As a surgeon whose natural inclination is to use the scalpel to fight off death, standing by and watching a salvageable baby die is the most emotionally exhausting experience I know. It is easy at a conference, in theoretical discussion, to decide that such infants should be allowed to die. It is altogether different to stand by in the nursery and watch as dehydration and infection whither a tiny being over hours and days. This is a terrible ordeal for me and the hospital staff – much more so than for the parents who never set foot in the nursery.… It seems to me that a society which does not provide for its defectives is less than humane.”

Anthony Shaw, “Doctor, Do We Have a Choice?” New York Times Magazine January 30, 1972 P 54

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Clinic Worker on Ultrasound

From a woman who works in an abortion clinic.

“A lot of it is the politics around ultrasound, I think. That, I mean, maybe that’s why some of the abortion stuff is changed, that now you can see that it’s a fetus and it looks like a baby, and it sucks his thumb, and it, you know kicks around, just like newborns do… And so it’s like we can personify the fetus as opposed to, like, relating to this woman.”

Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 79

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