Florida clinic director Michelle Fortier laments the fact that many young people are pro-life or are otherwise not committed to the pro-choice cause:
“The problem that I have is with people who are younger than me, the things that would come out of their mouths were completely ridiculous… I think a lot of people who are younger than me tend to be more conservative, which is really bizarre.”
Sarah Erdreich Generation Roe: inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013) 160
This video is from the 1990s, but abortions are still being performed today by the thousands at the same gestational ages as the ones in these videos. With the advent of the abortion pill, it is no longer true that abortions cannot be done before the sixth week. The majority of abortions, however, are done later. Hundreds of abortions a day are done after the 8th week, when the baby is fully formed with arms, legs, fingers, and toes. I apologize for the poor quality of the audio. The pictures of the abortion protesters you see in the video our from “rescues”, which took place in the 1990s, when groups of antiabortion protesters blocked clinics, engaged in sit ins and tried to prevent women from having abortions. Sometimes they succeeded in closing clinics are turning women away, but more often than not, the women simply reschedule their appointments. Abortion protester seldom block clinics now, partly because of new laws that give extremely lengthy sentences to antiabortion protesters who try to block the door of the clinic.
I apologize that the quality of the video is not great. The images you see of abortion protesters being manhandled by police come from the “Rescues” that anti-abortion protesters used to participate in in the early 1990s, where the protesters would conduct sit ins in front of clinics in an effort to prevent women from getting their abortions.
What do you think? Were the police justified in treating abortion protesters that way? Should these abortions be allowed? How did the video make you feel? Leave a comment.
Abortionist Lisa Harris speaks about performing an abortion while she was pregnant, and feeling her own baby Just as she was pulling the leg off of the baby she was aborting.Sadly, this did not make her stop doing abortions.
18 week old unborn baby
When I was a little over 18 weeks pregnant with my now pre-school child, I did a second trimester abortion for a patient who was also a little over 18 weeks pregnant. As I reviewed her chart I realized that I was more interested than usual in seeing the fetal parts when I was done, since they would so closely resemble those of my own fetus. I went about doing the procedure as usual, removed the laminaria I had placed earlier and confirmed I had adequate dilation. I used electrical suction to remove the amniotic fluid, picked up my forceps and began to remove the fetus in parts, as I always did. I felt lucky that this one was already in the breech position – it would make grasping small parts (legs and arms) a little easier. With my first pass of the forceps, I grasped an extremity and began to pull it down. I could see a small foot hanging from the teeth of my forceps. With a quick tug, I separated the leg. Precisely at that moment, I felt a kick – a fluttery “thump, thump” in my own uterus. It was one of the first times I felt fetal movement. There was a leg and foot in my forceps, and a “thump, thump” in my abdomen. Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes – without me – meaning my conscious brain – even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling – a brutally visceral response – heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life. Doing second trimester abortions did not get easier after my pregnancy; in fact, dealing with little infant parts of my born baby only made dealing with dismembered fetal parts sadder.
A pro-choice author describes how couples often disagree about what to do with an unplanned pregnancy:
“Leslie Rotenberg, the director of social services in the Margaret Sanger clinic of Planned Parenthood of New York City, reported that, when a couple comes in together, in half the cases the woman wants a child and the man doesn’t and in the other half it is the opposite. When it is the woman who wants to have the child, the most common response from the man is: “it isn’t fair. I should have a say if I’m going to be a father.” Rotenberg explained as tactfully as possible that he had a choice before he had sex.”
Alexander Sanger Beyond Choice: Reproductive Freedom in the 21st Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) 154 – 155
Alexander Sanger is the grandson of Margaret Sanger, the birth control crusader who was also a eugenicist and racist.
The excuse James Scott Pendergraft IV gave in court, defending his practice of having abortion patients deliver their dead or dying babies into the toilet at his abortion facility. The court case was about a baby that survived the abortion. It came out in the trial that other babies had also survived the initial abortion procedure and been born alive but died at the clinic.
The jury found that Pendergraft was liable for the child’s medical care. Pendergraft has been in legal trouble numerous times, and has had his license suspended at least 4 times. He is still performing abortions.
“It has been 10 years now, almost to this day, and I can still remember, clearly, those fatal few minutes that I will regret to my dying day. The abortionist did not speak or look at me except to growl, “Be quiet and keep still,” when I began to shake and cry against my own will as I felt his cold, sharp instruments cutting out the life that had been growing inside me for the past three months. The sound of the fetus dropping into the plastic bucket held between my legs is a sound I cannot erase from my memory, and to this day my throat feels choked and my stomach tenses, as I fight back tears for the baby I allowed to be killed.”
Melinda Tankard Reist Giving Sorrow Words: Women’s Stories of Grief after Abortion (Springfield, IL: Acorn Books, 2007) 37
Missy Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president, Women’s Rights without Frontiers, said in a 2001 hearing before a congressional subcommittee that UN officials the delegates were not interested in her speech about forced abortion abuses in China. She says:
“I participated in the UN CSW week of – the conference that they give every year. But the issue of forced abortion in China was nowhere on the agenda, and my presentation was not even a side event. It was like a side side event. And yet it is something that affects one out of every 5 women in the world, and it is the biggest just numerically perpetrator of violence against women in the world is this one thing.”
“China’s One Child Policy: the Government’s Massive Crime against Women and Unborn Babies” Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights, Committee of Foreign Affairs House Of Representatives 112th Congress, September 22, 2001
