Dr. David Paintin of St. Mary’s Paddington said, 1n 1986:
“We can manage nearly all pregnancies today, medically. That is, if the woman wants to continue it. Of course, if a woman with a chronic condition such as heart disease or diabetes wants a termination, she will immediately qualify on medical grounds. But if she really wants the baby, we can usually bring her through.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 123-124
“One woman I interviewed tried to communicate with her foetus… But her foetus would not talk back. And the fact that the foetus was so unresponsive helped her decide not to continue the pregnancy. If the foetus had “spoken” to her, she would have continued.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 59
An 18-year-old woman was interviewed right before her abortion:
Legs of preborn baby at 11 weeks
Q: When do you think it becomes a human life?
A: Well, it’s at the moment of conception, and it really – it’s hard for me now, because I started thinking of him as being a human now, because I know he’s probably almost developed and stuff, and its’s really sad for me to think of it. I guess I’m being really selfish about it. I just don’t want anybody to know. It is [just] the social pressure….So- I don’t know, it just seems the easy way out, the only way to do it without anybody knowing, you know, just to get rid of it before it gets big. …It really upsets me, because it’s kind of against my morals, I mean – I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think I really had a good reason to, because it does seem like it’s a human life…It would just look really bad, I think. Well, not just that, but it’s just not right for right now…because it would be a deterrent right now to both our careers…it’s too bad it happened, and it won’t happen again.”
Judith G. Smetana Concepts of Self and Morality: Women’s Reasoning about Abortion (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1982) 67-68
A 21-year-old woman became pregnant, and her husband’s health problems made her arrange an abortion.
“Three years ago, my boyfriend, Darren, was diagnosed with testicular cancer. While radiation treatment saved his life, he was told it might cause serious problems in his reproductive future. He was warned that his future children might be born with deformities and the mother of his children might be harmed by the pregnancy.
It was heartbreaking to be so paralyzed by fear over something my boyfriend and I would otherwise be excited for. Everyone around me was saying abortion was my only option, so I scheduled an appointment.
When we arrived at the clinic, Darren and I couldn’t help but notice a large bus parked in the parking lot. It advertised free ultrasounds and pregnancy tests. I was curious and knew I would need an ultrasound before I had an abortion, so we poked our heads in.
The Stork Bus was parked outside the clinic. It was staffed by pro-lifers hoping to save children whose mothers had scheduled them for abortion.
We explained our situation to the nurse in the bus. She listened to our fears and concerns with deep sympathy.
I laid back on a reclining leather chair, where the nurse gave me my ultrasound. We had no idea that I was already 18 weeks along. It was moving around and waving its hands! The nurse said the baby looked totally healthy. Darren and I both started to cry.
We are so thankful that we chose to get an ultrasound in the Stork Bus. If we hadn’t, we might have never learned that our baby was actually completely healthy. We realized that we could not let the difficulties in our pasts define our future. We can’t wait to be a healthy family of three in a little over a month!”
Author Mary Kenny describes going to an abortion clinic and witnessing a late term abortion.
First, she went to the clinic. In the OR, the doctors were casually starting their day.
The atmosphere in the operating theatre was clean, busy and professional. Several young male doctors, gowned for the [operating room], were standing around when I entered, talking cheerfully about the cricket score. There was no hint, here, of life-and-death drama – it was just another day, another hospital [operating] session.
Then she describes actually witnessing a late term abortion:
The procedure began. About half a litre of amniotic fluid flowed from the woman’s body as the dilators were inserted. The cord was extracted – the last lifeline of the foetus. Dr. Paintin did this abortion. The forceps went into the uterus, quite roughly this time. Fluid and blood continued to fall into the bowl underneath the table. After some vigorous action he started to extract the foetus. First came an arm, perfectly formed, a tiny, baby’s hand, fingers curled. A limb was extracted. Then two limbs lay in the bowl. Dr. Paintin worked away and pieces of the trunk emerged. The intestines, brain tissue, liver, lung, came away. Last of all – the most difficult part – was the cranium. The skin was torn, and there was not much more than a skull. After all the parts had come away, the suction was inserted, and the uterus cleanly evacuated.
20 weeks. She describes witnessing a late term abortion of a baby older than this one.
Yet the abortion workers had no reaction to the horror they were committing:
The men did not seem to mind doing the abortions and showed no signs of distress. … Overall, there was a very perceptible atmosphere of relief that the day’s work was done. The sense of relief was so strong that Dr. Paintin and I talked light-heartedly, gossiped a little, made a joke.
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 154, 156, 158-159
“In another case, a forthright and confident Italian woman – an active member of the Communist Party, utterly without hang-ups of an emotional or religious nature, and rather dismissive of “sentimentality” in general – used abortion fairly regularly as a form of birth control. She had a daughter from a first marriage and was married again. She simply didn’t like any form of contraception – the Pill made her ill, the IUD made her bleed, the diaphragm was uncomfortable – so she decided that the “rational” thing to do was to have an abortion whenever she needed one. By her middle 30s she had had “three or four” abortions…
The woman then consulted her daughter on what to do in a subsequent pregnancy:
But at 37 she became pregnant once again and, as usual, she decided to have the abortion. She arranged it and was talking to her husband about collecting her daughter – now aged 13 – from school that day, when something suddenly occurred to her: perhaps her daughter was now old enough to be consulted? So she asked the young girl if she would like to have a baby sister or brother. The girl’s eyes lit up. “Oh, Mama,” she said, “I’ve been secretly hoping and hoping and hoping I might someday have a baby brother or sister. Oh, it would be so wonderful!” The mother canceled her appointment for the abortion.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 87 – 88
How would the daughter react if she knew that “three or four” of her siblings have been killed by abortion?
8 weeks – most abortions are done around this time or laterShare on Facebook
A woman who was characterized as “brilliant” and a college professor had an abortion because her astrologer. She aborted because of a horoscope. Mary Kenny recounts:
“Another curious case was that of a brilliant woman academic head of a department at a provincial university who was in her 30s and having an affair with an artist – a moody, melancholic yet pleasing man, married, though not very happily. She… became pregnant. She was at the same time very pleased and very sad. She would have greatly liked to have had the child, but she thought the relationship impossible. So she took herself off to an astrologist and had her horoscope cast. The astrologist was disturbed at what he saw in her future, and warned her to try and avoid an event which might happen “about eight or nine months from now.” That clinched it: she knew it was a sign that she must have an abortion. So she did. Some eight months later her lover committed suicide. So it may not have been the birth of the child, but the suicide of the man, that the astrologist had presumably foreseen. The woman was, naturally, very distressed, though she stood by her decision, and felt the suicide of her lover would have been a bad omen for the child anyway. Later, she became obsessively keen to have a child and even considered artificial insemination by donor (AID), though, up to the time of writing (some five years after the original abortion) without success.
What is significant about this case is that it shows how a highly intellectual and rational person can use what some would consider a quirky and superstitious method to help her make a decision about abortion.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 56 – 57
It is sad that this woman chose to kill her baby because of a horoscope. This anecdote shows that even a woman who is well-educated and presumably intelligent can make a decision to abort her child based on faulty reasoning. She seems to regret her abortion and desires another child, possibly to replace the one she has lost.
Most abortions are done on babies that look like this, and are over seven weeks of ageShare on Facebook
“One friend was particularly good. She had recently had an abortion herself, and really nannied me along. Looking back, I now wonder if in some curious way she wanted me to have an abortion because she had had one. I don’t mean this maliciously; I think her help was genuinely well-intentioned, but human nature being what it is, there is always this pressure to make you conform: the married want you to be married, the divorced want you to be divorced. Mothers want you to have babies, abortees want you to have an abortion.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 53
Former abortion clinic director Abby Johnson estimates that 70% of all women who work at abortion clinics have had abortions themselves. Does this play a role in their desire to see other women have abortions?
From an article in Psychology Today. showing that a preborn baby in the womb enjoys being read to:
A new wave of research suggests that the fetus can feel, dream, even enjoy The Cat in the Hat. The abortion debate may never be the same.
One psychologist weighs in on how a preborn baby moves:
Heidelise Als, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist at Harvard Medical School, is fascinated by the amount of tactile stimulation a fetus gives itself. “It touches a hand to the face, one hand to the other hand, clasps its feet, touches its foot to its leg, its hand to its umbilical cord,” she reports.
Preborn baby at 10 weeks after conception- within the time frame that most abortions take place
The article goes on to say the following about unborn babies:
Along with the ability to feel, see, and hear comes the capacity to learn and remember. These activities can be rudimentary, automatic, even biochemical. For example, a fetus, after an initial reaction of alarm, eventually stops responding to a repeated loud noise. The fetus displays the same kind of primitive learning, known as habituation, in response to its mother’s voice, Fifer has found.
But the fetus has shown itself capable of far more. In the 1980s, psychology professor Anthony James DeCasper, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, devised a feeding contraption that allows a baby to suck faster to hear one set of sounds through headphones and to suck slower to hear a different set. With this technique, DeCasper discovered that within hours of birth, a baby already prefers its mother’s voice to a stranger’s, suggesting it must have learned and remembered the voice, albeit not necessarily consciously, from its last months in the womb. More recently, he’s found that a newborn prefers a story read to it repeatedly in the womb – in this case, The Cat in the Hat – over a new story introduced soon after birth.
DeCasper and others have uncovered more mental feats. Newborns can not only distinguish their mother from a stranger speaking, but would rather hear Mom’s voice, especially the way it sounds filtered through amniotic fluid rather than through air. They’re xenophobes, too: they prefer to hear Mom speaking in her native language than to hear her or someone else speaking in a foreign tongue.
16 weeks, Legal to abort.
By monitoring changes in fetal heart rate, psychologist JeanPierre Lecanuet, Ph.D., and his colleagues in Paris have found that fetuses can even tell strangers’ voices apart. They also seem to like certain stories more than others. The fetal heartbeat will slow down when a familiar French fairy tale such as “La Poulette” (“The Chick”) or “Le Petit Crapaud” (“The Little Toad”), is read near the mother’s belly. When the same reader delivers another unfamiliar story, the fetal heartbeat stays steady.
Another scientist said:
Birth may be a grand occasion, says the Johns Hopkins University psychologist, but “it is a trivial event in development. Nothing neurologically interesting happens.”
