THE WITNESS: I think that’s a concern. My approach has been to say that the cord usually comes down and severing of the cord means that the fetus sanguinates.
THE COURT: Do you think that a normal woman patient understands those words?
THE WITNESS: Well, bleed to death is the analogy on more lay terms.
Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, abortionist, in sworn testimony in National Abortion Federation, et. al. v. Ashcroft, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, April 5, 2004.
24 weeks. Dr. Westoff is describing aborting a baby around this ageShare on Facebook
When pro-choice people talk about abortion, they sometimes argue about whether life begins at conception. Pro-lifers believe that as soon as the sperm and egg unite, there is the beginning of a new human life. Science teaches that this is true, but many pro-choice people believe that while conception may be the beginning of a life, the zygote (which is the term for a newly fertilized egg) is not a fully independent life and should not be valued.
What people don’t realize is that the vast majority abortions take place long after the zygote stage. Abortions do not destroy a fertilized egg. Rather, they destroy a fetus, or, more rarely, an embryo.
Six-week-old unborn baby
Surgical abortions seldom take place before the sixth to seventh week of pregnancy. At this time, the developing embryo already has a heartbeat and brain waves. The majority of abortions take place in the eighth to tenth week. At this stage, the unborn baby is called a fetus. At this time, the unborn baby already has fingers and toes, a face, and all of her organs. The organs may be primitive – but they are all there. The fetus, at this stage, is obviously human – you can tell by looking at it that it is not a dog fetus or a cat fetus, but a human fetus. It is a human unborn baby in an early stage of development.
8 week old
Pictures of unborn and aborted babies abound on the Internet. It used to be the case that few people knew what abortion looks like. Now, a simple Google search for “aborted babies” turns up many sites.
But are these pictures real? Or are they done by Photoshop, or other deceptive means? In order to answer this question, one could look at the book “Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic” by Wendy Simonds. Wendy Simonds is a pro-choice author whose book is about an abortion clinic. She wrote it after spending time observing the daily workings of the clinic. She interviewed clinic workers. Her book is unabashedly pro-choice. It contains a chapter on how to repel “anti-choice” (pro-life) protesters. Repeatedly, throughout the book, she argues about how necessary abortion is. However, in one chapter, she discusses the difficulty that abortion clinic workers have in dealing with the bodies of aborted babies.
12 week sonogram
On page 88, she quotes one worker, identified simply as Nell, saying the following, in response to her question about why the aborted remains are hard to deal with:
“Because it looks like a baby. That’s what it looks like to me. You’ve never seen anything else that looks like that. The only other thing you’ve ever seen is a baby…You can see a face and hands and ears and eyes and, you know…feet and toes…It bothered me really bad the first time . . .”
Perhaps if more people could witness abortion procedures or see for themselves what a baby looks like after being torn apart in an abortion, they would agree that abortion is legalized infanticide.
“Every single transaction that we did was cash money. We wouldn’t take a check, or even a credit card. If you didn’t have the money, forget it. It wasn’t unusual for me to take $10,000 or $15,000 a day to the bank – in cash….
I believe the IRS would find it to be well worth their effort to get involved in that.”
David Kuperlian and Mark Masters “Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet” New Dimensions, 1990
“The whole Planned Parenthood family can take pride and satisfaction in the result [Roe versus Wade] we have one a splendid victory… We expect to do 1,666,000 abortions per annum, but it will take 2 to 3 years to gear up.”
Alan Guttmacher, then Pres. of Planned Parenthood
We see that Planned Parenthood was a proabortion organization from its very beginning,.Certainly, if given the opportunity, Planned Parenthood will gladly do over a million abortions every year. This is probably still true, as Planned Parenthood has quotas for abortions (according to former Planned Parenthood workers) and they pushed abortion at every opportunity, including encouraging vulnerable women to abort their babies. Thanks to the efforts of pro-lifers, however, Planned Parenthood has performed fewer abortions every year than Alan Guttmacher predicted
“We’ve seen a turnoff of physicians coming into this field.”
Ed Boaz, abortionist
ABC World News Tonight, January 16, 1998
Mark Crutcher “Access: the Key to Pro-Life Victory” Life Dynamics Incorporated,
Few doctors, it seems, want to be abortion providers. This may be partly because of pro-life activities, and also because abortion takes a toll on providers, dismembering babies for a living can be emotionally difficult. 15 years after this quote was made, the situation continues – the shortage of abortionists is even more pronounced today.
8 week old unborn baby – most abortions are done at this time or later
Because of the shortage of abortion providers, more babies like the one on the left will survive.
A 2014 U.S. News & World Report article describes how the United States is becoming more pro-life:
“Our nation’s laws need to realign with the changing views of Americans on abortion. In a recent national poll, 84 percent of Americans support significant abortion restrictions, including nearly 6 in 10 of those who identify as strongly pro-choice. For example, 79 percent of pro-choice respondents believed there should be a 24-hour waiting period before having an abortion and 80 percent support parental notifications.”
In contrast, the top proabortion organizations, Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice, and the National Organization for Women take the position that there should be no abortion restrictions whatsoever of any kind.
LifeNews ran an article on January 16, 2012, which revealed the salaries of Planned Parenthood clinic directors throughout the country. According to the article, Planned Parenthood performed approximately 350,000 abortions in 2011.
Here are the top 12 earners and the amount of money they make a year:
1. PP North Texas, Dallas, TX (salary of previous CEO) $324,3812. PP Mar Monte, San Jose, CA (Linda Williams) $315,950
3. PP Illinois, Chicago, IL (salary of previous CEO) $302,014
4. PP Hudson Peconic, Hawthorne, NY (Reina Schiffrin) $296,908
5. PP Northern New England, Williston,VT (Steve Trombley) $292,297
6. PP Orange & San Bernadino, Orange, CA (Joe Dunn) $278,871
7. PP Treasure Coast, West Palm Beach, FL (Lillian Tamayo) $275,238
From one woman who had an abortion, on the doctor who performed it:
“He delivered my daughter. I mean, how could he do both things, deliver Liza one year, and kill it [the aborted baby] the next? It was confusing. After that, I didn’t want him to be my doctor anymore. I actually changed to the nurse practitioners at the HMO.”
Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999) 238
Even though abortion was this woman’s choice, she developed negative feelings about the Doctor who performed the operation. She went so far as to switch to seeing nurse practitioners, who may even be seen as less qualified than a person with a medical degree. This shows the aversion that a lot of people have to abortionists; even those who make use of them often resent them. Perhaps this is one reason why so few people want to become abortionists, and there is such a serious shortage of abortion providers.
Other doctors have talked about on how when they become identified as abortionists, patients leave.
Pro-life women should find out if their OBGYNs perform abortions. Boycotting such doctors, and telling them why you’re boycotting them, might have an impact.
The Statement of Joyce Farley of Pennsylvania, Hearing on the Child Custody Protection Act before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, House Judiciary Committee, May 21, 1998:
I’m here today to tell you why I support the Child Custody Protection Act. My daughter was a victim of several horrible crimes between the ages of 12 and 13. My child was provided alcohol, raped, and then taken out of state by a stranger to have an abortion. This stranger turned out to be the mother of the adult male who provided the alcohol and then raped my 12-year-old daughter while she was unconscious. The rapist’s mother arranged and paid for an abortion to be performed on my child. This woman lied and falsified records at the abortion clinic to make sure this abortion would be completed without my knowledge. The abortion had been arranged to destroy evidence – evidence that my 12-year-old daughter had been raped…
Following the abortion, the mother of the rapist dropped off my physically and emotionally battered child in another town 30 miles away from our home. The plan was to keep the rape and abortion a secret. If I’d not contacted the state police… when I found my child missing, she might not be alive today. Severe pain and bleeding revealed complications from an incomplete abortion. This required further medical care and a second abortion to be performed…
The bill you are considering today may help prevent this from happening to my neighbor’s child, my future grandchildren, or any child in the United States. It has been 3 years since these crimes were committed, but my daughter still suffers physically and emotionally…
Despite Joyce Farley’s pleadings, pro-choice activists successfully killed the bill. It has never become law on a national level.
Recently, I wrote an article for Live Action according a former abortion doctor who admits that he was “terminating babies”:
“Nobody wants to perform abortions after 10 weeks because by then you see the features of the baby, hands, feet. It’s really barbaric.
Baby’s feet at ten weeks
Abortions are very draining, exhausting, and heartrending. There are a lot of tears. Some patients turn on you. They say, “Let’s get out of here,” after the abortion, as if you’re some dirty person. It’s vicious. Then you get these teenyboppers in the office who laugh their way through it. It doesn’t mean a thing to them. That bothers me. Then you’ve got the right to lifers calling you on the phone, coming in the office, preaching, threatening to picket your office.
15 weeks sonogram
I do them because I take the attitude that women are going to terminate babies and deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry babies. So I started doing abortions on an altruistic basis. I’ve done a couple thousand, and it turned into a significant financial boon, but I also feel I’ve provided an important service.
The only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman as my patient and block out the baby. I’ve delivered enough babies, seen enough divorces, and seen enough abused kids to do abortions with a clear conscience. This may be some kind of mental gymnastics on my part, but I really feel that parenthood is so tough that people shouldn’t back into it.
I don’t feel I’m violating my trust as a doctor by doing abortions, but I don’t want to do them anymore because you can do them to a certain point, and then you get overloaded. I’m at that point.
John Pekkanen M.D.: Doctors Talk about Themselves (New York, New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1988) 93 – 94
