“The first time I attended a late termination it was upsetting. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t sometimes question what I was doing. But above all I believe that the woman must come first. In fact, I feel so strongly about this that when I was 20 weeks pregnant, I assisted in an NHS termination when all my colleagues refused on moral and religious grounds. …
I don’t look at it as the taking away a life because embryos cannot sustain life outside the womb. If women could not have abortions, what would happen to the thousands of unwanted babies?”
A man whose partner had an abortion a month before said the following:
Since the abortion we have separated. We constantly argue. She constantly looks at baby things. She desperately wants to become pregnant again. I want our baby back.
Catherine T. Coyle and Vincent M. Rue “A Thematic Analysis of Men’s Experience With a Partner’s Elective Abortion.” Counseling and Values October 2015
The baby has a brain. It has a nervous system. It has nerve endings. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put the dots together that obviously the baby has the capacity to feel sensation and pain. In fact, when we do ultrasounds on many of these babies, when we want to try to get it to move, we’ll jostle the woman’s abdomen and the baby does feel the sensations of movement and encouragement to move, and it, in fact, responds to that. Studies have also shown that the baby responds to music, it responds to sound. This is all a function of the baby’s nervous system. So yes, the baby does feel, and can feel pain.
“The Truth about Abortion.” Coral Springs Ministries pro-life video quoted in
Abortion has been harming women for a long time. The woman quoted below had an abortion in 1971, when abortion was only legal in several states. She describes her experience:
“They said the whole procedure would take between eight and ten minutes. We were told we would have severe cramps, such as we might have during menstruation… What they should’ve told us was that we would have pain like nothing we had ever known before. The pain of childbirth was beautiful. You can’t compare the two.
The doctor came in and introduced himself. Losing no time, he inserted an instrument to dilate the cervix. I knew in advance I would get Novocain, but he failed to describe how painful it would be. He said it would “pinch.” But he should’ve said it would feel as if he inserted a hot poker…
Then, he started the vacuuming process. Believe me, this was nothing like menstrual cramps. The pain was horrible, indescribably horrible. It was over in 8 to 10 minutes. The nurse left with multiple bruises on her arms from my clutching hands. And I aged 10 years.”
Minneapolis Star August 3, 1971, Quoted in Paul Marx The Death Peddlers: War on the Unborn (Collegeville, Minnesota: St. John’s University Press, 1971) 184 – 185
Abortion clinic owner Norma Goldberger spoke of a conversation she had with a nurse anesthetist in her clinic who told her how about something he did to prolifers outside.
“He said he was so angry that he poured urine from the second floor window onto the demonstrators below. It was childish behavior on his part but he had reached his limit. Since pregnancy tests were done on first morning samples of urine, clinics had a ready supply of urine.”
Norma Goldberger Abortion Confidential: Secrets of an Abortion Clinic Owner (CreateSpace , November 23, 2014) Kindle Edition
“Among the most memorable conversations I have had are with practicing abortionists. A number of them have admitted to me that they know they are killing a child, but they justify it by saying, “I don’t know when the child receives a soul.” I was stunned upon first hearing this and replied, “If you don’t know when the child receives a soul, then you don’t know whether the newborn has a soul. Does that and give you the right to kill the newborn?”
Rev. Frank Pavone Abolishing Abortion: How You Can Play a Part in Ending the Greatest Evil of Our Day (Nashville, Tennessee: Nelson Books, 2015) 19 – 20
“We choose people to work here based on their political commitment as well as their medical capabilities. We can teach people what they need to know medically, but we cannot teach them political commitment; we can encourage it, but we can’t teach that as well.”
Patricia Launneborg Abortion: A Positive Decision (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1992) 189
From a resident who was in training to become an abortionist, but decided against performing abortions as a career:
10 weeks
“When I started residency, I was open to the possibility of providing terminations. I was and remain uncertain about when life begins… Increasingly, I have found myself caught up in an endless array of rhetorical questions. Is there not a more profound difference between 10 and 20 weeks than between 20 and 30? If my first task as a physician is to do no harm, how can I justify harming a fetus? I do not pretend to know the answers to these questions, but given what I perceived to be an abyss of ambiguity, I chose not to provide elective terminations…
20 weeks
Discussions with co-residents have helped me consider the individual woman who has the courage to request an abortion. Since opting out, I have realized that my line of thinking has been feto-centric at best and over-intellectualized at worst. Nonetheless, in the absence of a clear moral understanding of abortion, I can only do no harm.”
Below is an except from the blog The Left Hand of Feminism where a woman describes the two abortions she had followed by a pregnancy she kept.
She first got pregnant as a teenager:
“Of course I was going to have an abortion. My parents were certainly not going to let me have a baby, and I knew I wasn’t ready. I had taken care of my sister since she was born and had a very good grasp of how much work, money, and commitment was involved, and I knew I wasn’t old enough to take it on by myself. Being pregnant felt a lot like being infected with a horrible disease. I was sick and wanted the source of the nausea out, fast. I didn’t think I had a “baby” inside of me. I knew very well that, at about six weeks, what was growing was a mass of cells about 1/6 of an inch long and presently much more like an insect or a worm than a human being.
6 weeks
My parents were Seventh-Day Adventists from a medical family who themselves had come from pragmatic farm folk. An abortion of a human fetus in the first trimester was not a lot different from the abortion of an unwanted litter of kittens: regrettable and sad, but necessary. Unfortunate, not tragic. My parents made me and my boyfriend pay for the procedure to teach us to be more careful in the future.
Not a kitten
I was, for the most part. But I was also extremely fertile, I guess, because I got pregnant again, at college,… I did not choose lightly or cavalierly, but also did not think that I had been immoral or that it terminating it was anything like murder. I had been thinking a lot about infanticide, ironically, since I was currently reading all of Euripides and had become especially enthralled with Medea. I toyed romantically and self-destructively with the idea of myself as a Medea but never really believed my own hype….
It would have been far worse to give birth to a child and release him or her into the uncertain fate of adoption, or try to take care of a kid that I resented and wasn’t mature or economically steady enough to support in a positive and wholesome environment.
I’m really lucky. No one shamed me. No monsters stood outside the clinic and screamed names at me. No judge forced me to develop a fertilized egg that I didn’t want in my body. No one wrote nasty letters or emails to me. No one denounced me. No one made me feel bad about myself for taking what I knew was the most responsible and ethical decision for me at the time….
The next time I got pregnant I meant to. … I did not enjoy being pregnant. I felt invaded by an alien life form. I had been invaded by an alien life form, albeit one who shared some of my genes. But I choose to bring it to term, and I was very lucky that he turned out to be healthy and beautiful and himself.”
