Mary Kominsky had an abortion after the father of her baby abandoned her. It was before Roe vs. Wade, but abortion was legal in New York.
She says:
“Fear had led me to the belief in the lies surrounding abortion. No one would ever find out. After all, the doctor at Planned Parenthood told me it was just a clump of cells and tissue even though I was 11 weeks pregnant.
She promised I would be able to go on with my life as if nothing had happened. But just the opposite came true.”
She describes what happened afterward:
“Following the procedure, I was deeply traumatized as fear turned into guilt and shame. It was not a simple surgical procedure as I had been promised…
I had to detach my mind, my heart, and my emotions. In shutting these off, my heart hardened and turned cold. Initially, there is a relief of not having to face uncertainty, but that often turns to great sadness. I became angry and resentful to all those around me. I had a deep shame and a profound sense of loss.”
Mary Kominsky “Foreword” in Janet Morana Everything You Need to Know about Abortion – For Teens (Gastonia, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2021) xii, xiii
To see how Planned Parenthood lied, below is a picture of a baby at just over 10 weeks in the womb. Mary’s baby was even older than this:
A woman who was considering abortion after a pregnancy resulting from rape agreed to a free ultrasound at a pregnancy center. She describes her baby:
“She was blinking. She was just hanging out, looking around, sucking on her thumb. … It was so realistic, so lifelike. It looks like you can just reach right in there and pick up the baby.
I know they have a heartbeat at 4 to 6 weeks, but it still doesn’t feel as real to you until you see a human. It amazed me.”
She chose life.
She doesn’t regret it and says:
“I never thought I could love or bond with a child [who] was conceived under such horrible circumstances, but that’s where we don’t give God enough credit. I look at her, and I don’t even see him. She’s beautiful and perfect.”
Karla Dial “Bringing Good Things to Life” Citizen June 2003
Pro-life activist Janet Porter told the following story:
“I remember attending a pro-life concert in Cleveland. One of the musicians asked the audience how many believe in abortion for a 12-year-old girl who is raped by her father. Hands went up all over the room.
She then looked to all those who believed in abortion for that hard case and said, “You just killed me. And not only me, but all of my children, and all of their children.”
Abortion takes the lives of the most innocent and robs us of generations.”
“The campaign for abortion rights was systematically mismanaged by feminist leaders, partly because of their refusal to acknowledge the violence inherent in any termination of life.
The same people who opposed capital punishment ironically fought for abortion on demand, showing a peculiar discrimination about whom to execute.
Squeamishly sensitive about their humanitarian self-image, feminists have used convoluted casuistry to define the aborted fetus in purely material terms as inert tissue, efficiently flushed.”
Camille Paglia “Sex War: Abortion, Battering, Sexual Harassment” Vamps & Tramps (New York: Vintage, 1994) 49
“I often hear the argument [keeping] late-term abortion legal is necessary to save women’s lives in cases of life-threatening conditions that can and do arise in pregnancy.
Albany Medical Center where I worked for over seven years is a tertiary referral center that accepts patients with life-threatening conditions related to or caused by pregnancy. I personally treated hundreds of women with such conditions in my tenure there.
There are several serious conditions that can arise or worsen typically during the late second or third trimester of pregnancy that require immediate care. In many of those cases, ending or “terminating” the pregnancy, if you prefer, can be lifesaving. But is abortion a viable treatment option in this setting? I maintain that it usually, if not always, is not.
Before a suction D&E procedure can be performed, the cervix must first be sufficiently dilated. In my practice, this was accomplished with serial placement of laminaria. Laminaria is a type of sterilized seaweed that absorbs water over several hours and swells to several times its original diameter.
Multiple placements of several laminaria at a time are absolutely required prior to attempting a suction D&E. In the mid-second trimester, this requires approximately 36 hours or more to accomplish. When performing later abortion procedures, cervical preparation can take up to three days or more.
In cases where a mother’s life is seriously threatened by her pregnancy, a doctor more often than not doesn’t have 36 hours, much less 72 hours, to resolve the problem.
Let me illustrate with a real-life case that I managed while at the Albany Medical Center. The patient arrived one night at 28 weeks gestation with severe preeclampsia or toxemia. Her blood pressure at admission was 220/160.
As you are probably aware, a normal blood pressure is approximately 120/80. This patient’s pregnancy was a threat to her life and the life of her unborn child. She could very well be minutes or hours away from a major stroke.
This case was managed successfully by rapidly stabilizing the patient’s blood pressure and “terminating” her pregnancy by cesarean section. She and her baby did well. This is a typical case in the world of high-risk obstetrics.
In most such cases, any attempt to perform an abortion “to save the mother’s life” would entail undue and dangerous delay in providing appropriate, truly lifesaving care.
During my time at Albany Medical Center I managed hundreds of such cases by “terminating” pregnancies to save mother’s lives. In all those hundreds of cases, the number of unborn children that I had to deliberately kill was zero.”
Quoted in Adam Peters with Robert Alexander Pro-Choice Lies: How to Expose the Pro-Abortion Deception (Irvine, California: Renaissance Publishers, 2021) 36 – 37
In one of their publications, the pro-abortion group NARAL states:
“Eggs and sperm are alive; so are bacteria and all plants and animals. Of course, embryos and fetuses are alive. That doesn’t mean, though, that abortion should be illegal or that it constitutes murder. The Supreme Court has said…that legal personhood begins with birth.”
NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin “Anti-Choice Statements – Pro-Choice Responses,” quoted in Carla Mooney Should Abortion Be Legal? (San Diego, California: Reference Point Press, 2014) 29
A preborn baby, like the one below, is more than merely “alive” in the same sense as bacteria and plants. She is a living human being.
Nancy Kreuzer from Illinois talks about her abortion and its aftermath:
“My baby was 22 weeks, I was five and a half months pregnant, when I was told that she had water on the brain (hydrocephalus) and was advised by my doctor to “terminate the pregnancy.”
It was explained that the abortion would be a simple procedure. My husband and I were told we could leave this behind us, get on with our lives and try for another baby…
It was not, as the doctor described, “simple.” At the abortion clinic no one asked how I was or explained what was happening to me. I felt alone, afraid and devastated. While I sat, waiting for the doctor to arrive, many nurses and workers in the abortion clinic casually walked by me. I sat there for hours. Tears streamed down my face but no one talked to me, no one acknowledged my pain.”
After the abortion, she says:
“The day after my abortion, I felt numb. I left the abortion clinic with no baby to bury, no doll-size casket, no funeral service, no grave to adorn with flowers. I vomited in the parking lot and rode home in silence.
No one brought meals, no one sent cards, no one called, because I had been too ashamed to tell anyone what I had agreed to do. In the weeks that followed, I tried to bury the memory of the abortion and not look back.
In the months and years afterward, there were clear signs that the scars of my abortion existed, but I didn’t recognize them at the time. Interestingly, I assumed I was doing just fine. But below the surface, I was unusually fearful.
As time went on, I often had the sense that I wanted to run and I had repeated nightmares of running from something horrible. I would awaken panicked, unable to sleep the rest of the night. There was an internal sadness, not visible to the world.”
Quoted in Janet Morana Everything You Need to Know about Abortion – For Teens (Gastonia, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2021) 82 – 83
Judy Mathe Foley, the former managing editor of the national magazine of the Episcopal Church, says:
“Suppose Jesus were to meet a 20th-century woman who works every available overtime she can in a hospital emergency room at night and goes to nursing school during the day the whole time her teenage daughter and son are in high school. She often feels guilty about not spending more time with them, but they are cooperative and loving.
Now, just as they are about to become the first in her family ever to go to college, she finds herself pregnant. Knowing she will not be able to meet tuition payments if she must care for another child, and unable to bear the thought of telling them that what they’ve all worked for so long just can’t be, she has an abortion.
Would the Jesus of the parables automatically condemn her? Would he quote a law prohibiting “abortions of convenience”?
When a man too sick to get the healing waters approached Jesus on the Sabbath, a day on which Jewish law prohibited doing any work, did the Son of God say, “Sorry, today’s my day off. Take two aspirins and call my office on Monday”?
That image of Jesus jars… it’s so far from the way he would act…”
Judy Mathe Foley “A Faith-Filled Talk of Life and Death” in Phyllis Tickle, ed. Confessing Conscience: Churched Women on Abortion (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1990) 74
As much as we can sympathize with the mother trying to do the best she can for her born children, it’s hard to picture Jesus approving of doing this to a baby.
The pro-life group Live Action just released a video where former abortionist Kathi Aultman describes a second-trimester D&E abortion.
She says:
I’m a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist with almost 33 years of experience, and I’ve completed over 500 abortions.
Today I’m going to describe a second-trimester surgical abortion called dilation and evacuation or D&E. A D&E is generally performed between 14 and 22 weeks of pregnancy.
Before a D&E abortion can be done, the cervix must be dilated slowly over one to two days with laminaria or a similar product. laminaria is a type of seaweed that absorbs water and swells to several times its original diameter.
When the woman undergoes the evacuation portion of the procedure. She lies on a table with her legs in stirrups. She may be given injections of local anesthetic in the cervix, IV conscious sedation, or general anesthesia.
The abortionist uses a speculum to open the vagina and uses an instrument to stabilize the cervix. Metal dilators may be used to further open the cervix if needed.
Once the cervix has been stretched open a cannula attached to suction tubing is placed inside the uterus. The suction machine is then turned on and the amniotic fluid surrounding the fetus is suctioned out. The fetus is too large to fit through the cannula, so he or she must be removed in pieces with a clamp such as this sopher clamp.
A sopher clamp is made of stainless steel and is about 13 inches long. At the tip there are rows of teeth for grasping.
The abortionist reaches into the uterus with the clamp and tries to grasp an arm or leg. Once the abortionist has a firm grip, she pulls forcefully in order to remove the limb. Piece by piece, the abortionist removes the arms and legs followed by the head or the body, including the torso and pelvis. Along with the intestines, the heart and the lungs.
The placenta is also removed. If the cervix has been over-dilated, the body or even the entire fetus may be pulled out intact.
Usually, the most difficult part of the procedure is extracting the fetus’s head, which at 20 weeks is about the size of a large plum. The abortionist must open the clamp widely to grasp the head and then crush it so that it will fit through the cervix.
The abortionist knows she has crushed the skull when a white substance, the fetus’s brains, leaks out through the cervix. The abortionist then removes the compressed head.
Any remaining limbs, organs, bone fragments, or pieces of placenta not removed with the forceps are removed by scraping the uterine lining with a large curette or by reinserting the suction cannula.
The abortionist then reassembles the fetal parts to make sure that there is nothing left inside the uterus which could cause infection or bleeding. Once all the parts have been accounted for, the bleeding has been controlled, and all the instruments have been removed from the vagina, the abortion is considered complete.
For the woman, this procedure carries the risk of major complications, including perforation or laceration of the uterus or cervix, with possible damage to the bowel, bladder, or other maternal organs. Infection and hemorrhage can also occur which can lead to death. Future pregnancies are also at an increased risk for loss or premature delivery due to abortion-related physical trauma and injury to the cervix.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I used to perform abortions. At the time I truly believed I was helping women. After the birth of my daughter, however, I realized that abortion doesn’t just undo a pregnancy, it kills an innocent human being.
Such terms as zygote, embryo, or fetus are simply terms that refer to age, like infant, toddler, and adult, and do nothing to diminish the humanity of the child.
As I cared for women in my OB-GYN practice, I also learned how abortion harms women. I stopped doing abortions because I could no longer kill babies just because they were unwanted. I am now a pro-life advocate.
I am proof that anyone can change no matter who they are, or what they’ve done. I invite you to join me and make a decision to protect the preborn.
A doctor who did illegal abortions in the 1930s wrote in his 1939 book:
“… I have performed operations later regretted by the women when they wanted children and for some reason could not have them. That has made me more careful.”
Martin Avery Confessions of an Abortionist: Intimate Sidelights on the Secret Humor, Sorrow, Drama and Tragedy in the Experience of a Doctor Whose Profession It Is to Perform Illegal Operations (AJ Cornell Publications, 1939) 29 – 30
