Category: Quotes

Abortionist: Most People Could Not “Get Their Hands Dirty” with Abortion

An abortionist, after explaining the stigma attached to providing abortions, explain the following:

“Definitely then, and even maybe more so today, the academic people saw you couldn’t afford to get your hands dirty with this stuff unless you were an extremely powerful person and just happened to be enough of humanist…”

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 152

He was talking about how performing abortions could ruin a person’s reputation and lead to persecution.

 

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Abortionist on Why His Colleagues Won’t Do Abortions

Dr. Barry Messinger, abortionist, discusses one of the reasons why there are so few abortion providers:

“I knew that not very many of my academic colleagues were interested or willing to put time into doing abortions… I also became aware of the fact that the technique was rapidly becoming simple and one would not be able to write a lot of papers about its complexities and advances and permutations – things like that. So from that point of view, it’s not a very intellectually challenging deal… I think that limited the kind of academic people who would be interested in it.”

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) Page 151

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Providers Who Dealt with “Unpleasant” Aspects of Abortion Have Less Positive Outlook

A body of research that was done in the first years of legal abortion:

researchers found

“that attitudes toward abortion work were more positive among groups such as social workers and lay counselors who had extended verbal contact with the patient than among physicians and nurses. The argument is that those who had more experience with the “whole” woman were more likely to focus on her and see the procedure in light of her particular situation – in contrast to doctors and nurses who dealt with the more physically unpleasant aspects of abortion, without any mitigating sense of the individual patient.”

Judith Bourne, “Influences on Health Professionals’ Attitudes Towards Abortion,” Journal of the American Hospital Association 46 (1972): 80 – 83; FJ Kane et al. “Emotional Reactions in Abortion Services Personnel” Archives of General Psychiatry 28 (1973): 409 – 411; Howard D Kibel, “Staff Reactions to Abortion,” Obstetrics and Gynecology 39 (1972): 128 – 133; and Marianne Such–Baer, “Professional Staff Reaction to Abortion Work,” Social Casework 55 (1974): 435 – 441

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To Save Money in Abortion Clinics, Patient Contact with Doctors Is Limited

One abortionist explained the rationale behind why doctors see patients for such a short time in clinics:

“They [doctors] are expensive tools and should be used for what only they could do, and everything else should be done by people that cost less.”

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 149

He did not comment on how this lack of doctor-patient contact affected the quality of abortion care. Here we also see that abortion clinics or unlike any other business, to maximize profits.

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Doctor: The First Abortion “Accident” Would Be the Toughest to Defend

Shortly after abortion was legalized, abortion clinics were set up throughout New York City. Many of them were not run by qualified providers, in fact, many of the back alley abortionists simply hung up their shingles and started performing abortions legally. The state did not take any role in regulating these clinics. One abortionist and abortion-rights crusader said the following:

“What I realized was that the first accident would be the toughest to defend, and the longer we could put off the first accident, the first death, the first perforation, the first infection, and get more experience and credibility under our belt, the better off we were going to be.”

He knew it wasn’t a matter of whether there would be complications, but a matter of when.

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995)

 

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The State And Health Department Have No Say in the Quality of Abortion Care

Charles Swenson was concerned about the poor quality of abortion clinics after abortion was legalized in New York state, and the fact that so many clinics were badly run and dangerous to women.  He went went to the New York state attorney general, and told him that because of the new law they needed to start talking about the quality of care, of shaping up the clinics. The attorney general said:

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, there’s nothing in the law that says the state will play any role in the quality of care.”

I said, “you’ve got to be kidding.”

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 139

There are still very few regulations that abortion clinics have to meet in order to operate. Many dangerous clinics continue to operate unlicensed and unregulated, and many clinics are rarely or never inspected. Pro-choice groups fight against laws that would make abortion safer. Read about some of these bad abortion clinics here.

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Doctor Describes Botched Abortion

A doctor describes an abortion complication that he witnessed:

“What happened was this guy perforated; he thought it was the cord and pulled out – they measured in the laboratory – 8 feet of small bowels… He panicked and blew his cool. He got the 8 feet out know what he did? He cut it with scissors and then he put it in the bucket and then he called me.

So she’s in the hospital. She had a bowel repair, and the general surgeon finished and everybody’s telling me to do a hysterectomy on this 17-year-old kid from Birmingham, Alabama, no children. I decided no. She had a hole in the top of her uterus; I opened it up and removed the fetus… We sewed up the uterus… The patient had a very stormy course but she left the hospital with her pre-reproductive organs and she was okay… What I do want to know, and I’ve always wondered about these many, many years, was whether this kid never had any children.”

Dr. Rothstein

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 119

Learn about other botched abortions here.

And read about some woman who died in botched legal abortions.

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Abortionist Describes the Difficulty of a D & C

An abortionist describes a D&C, an abortion procedure in which the  lining of the uterus is scraped to remove the baby and placenta. Now most early abortions are done by the suction curettage method, but in most cases the uterus is still scraped to remove remaining tissue that the  machine doesn’t suction out. So this quote is still relevant to the way abortions are performed today.

“I always used to tell medical students it was like being blindfolded and trying to scrape wet cotton balls out of a wet paper bag and getting all the balls without tearing the bag… The uterus was so soft, it was very easy to poke something through the uterus.”

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) page 58

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Stigma of Abortion Persisted after Roe Versus Wade

On how the medical community did not support those who performed legal abortions after Roe:

“Academic departments of obstetrics and gynecology [did not] welcome skilled abortionists to their ranks. Even though abortion now was legal, a stigma remained on those who had earlier performed illegal abortions.”

Philip Darney, “Training Physicians In Elective Abortion Technique in the United States” in U. Landy and S. Ratnam, editors, Prevention and Treatment of Contraceptive Failure (New York: Plenum, 1986) P133 – 140

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Doctor: Abortionist Is a “No More Than a Technician”

From pro-choice author Carole Joffe in Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995)

 “[influential physician Robert Hall said that women should have counseling before an abortion] Then if she still wants the abortion she should have it. When it comes to the doctor, I think he’s eventually going to be no more than a technician. This may be humiliating to him. But it is his unavoidable plight if we are to grant women their inherent right to an abortion.”

This may be part of the reason why abortionists are so hard to come by in United States. They often turn out abortions on an assembly line, seeing the woman only long enough to perform the operation and developing no rapport with her as a patient.

Often abortion clinics have very substandard counseling. Read about abortion counseling here.

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