In 1997, a friend, Nick Frankovitch, sent me this email:
“A woman from the Bronx used to come down to the upper West side on Saturdays to demonstrate in front of the abortion clinic near Lincoln Center. She drew a small following over time. They would carry the usual signs (e.g., Abortion Kills Children). They weren’t particularly Gandhi like, but they weren’t particularly vicious either. From all descriptions, the woman from the Bronx seemed to be an unpretentious, working-class Hispanic woman who had strong feelings about unborn children.
The landlord of the building in which the clinic was located began to receive complaints from neighbors – tenants and other merchants (it’s a very toney, high rent neighborhood) so he elected not to renew the clinic’s lease. The clinic sued for discrimination. They lost. Then the clinic went all over the Upper West Side looking for a space. No landlord would rent to them. Representatives of the clinic claimed that at meetings with prospective landlords and community leaders everyone would be sporting their pro-choice buttons and voicing their strong support for the work the clinic was doing. Then they would vote against renting space to the clinic on their block. I believe the clinic then ended up working out of space in a Planned Parenthood clinic further downtown (although as of last fall they began running ads in the Columbia student newspaper, I believe the new address is on the Upper West Side again.)
The significance of this story, as a local weekly newspaper pointed out issue after issue, was that it was happening in a neighborhood where virtually everyone and their dog was pro-choice. The newspaper articles emphasized complaints that these upper West sider’s were hypocritical and weak kneed, caving in to fears of lower property values, etc. I wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that the story also points to the ambivalence beneath all the official pro-choice rhetoric. Most people who think abortion should be legal agree with the woman from the Bronx that it’s a sad thing, and they would rather the abortion clinic be far enough away that they don’t always have to be thinking about what takes place there.
So one person, acting under conviction, was able to close the clinic (at least temporarily) almost single-handedly, just by standing in front of it and speaking plainly about abortion. And just as important, her action had the effect of bringing to light the demonstrations against abortion that even people who call themselves pro-choice carry on silently in the back of their mind.
In April of 2013, a group of TFP (Society for Tradition, Family, and Property) Student Activists staged a protest outside the courtroom where Doctor Kermit Gosnell was being tried for infanticide after killing babies born alive after abortions (he was later convicted)
One passerby tried to justify Gosnells actions:
Pro-abortion woman: “It’s not murder.”
Referring to pregnant mothers, she said: “There’s nothing there until there’s love.”
TFP volunteer: “If it’s not murder, then what is it?”
Pro-abortion woman: “It’s like you’re weeding your garden.”
TFP: “Really? Do you kill the weeds?”
Pro-abortion woman: “You have to love. There’s not life until there’s love.”
Eidelman worked for a short time in an abortion clinic that provided second trimester abortions. She said:
“They always wanted to know the sex, but we lied and said it was too early to tell. It was better for the women to think of the fetus as an “it.” They would scoop up the fetuses and put them in a bucket of formaldehyde, just like Kentucky fried chicken. I couldn’t take it any longer, and I quit.”
James Burtchaell, editor Rachel Weeping and Other Essays on Abortion ( Life Cycle Books 1982) 34
Victim of a saline abortion. These abortions are seldom done today because they caused so many live births, and because they were dangerous to the mother. This was probably mostly the type of abortions Eidelman assisted inShare on Facebook
“I love my work. I get enormous personal and professional satisfaction out of helping people, and that includes providing safe, comfortable, abortions.
I can take an anxious woman, who is in the biggest trouble she has ever experiences in her life, and by performing a five-minute operation, in comfort and dignity, I can give her back her life.”….
[Yes, the babies pictured on this page died with such comfort and dignity.]
I want to tell you one last story that I think epitomizes the satisfaction I get from my privileged work. Some years ago I spoke to a class of University of British Columbia medical students. As I left the classroom, a student followed me out. She said: “Dr. Romalis, you won’t remember me, but you did an abortion on me in 1992. I am a second-year medical student now, and if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be here now.”
[Because following YOUR goals and having YOUR life turn out exactly the way YOU want it to and getting where YOU want to go exactly when YOU want it to, is totally worth killing a baby for.]
Heath White, a champion marathon runner, wanted a perfect family. When his wife was expecting her second child, he discovered that the baby had down syndrome. In his own words, White did “everything I could to force her into having an abortion…my main concern was what people would think about me.”
He later said that he felt like he was getting a “broken baby.”
But when his daughter Paisley was born, he came to love her. Not right away. But he found himself playing with her, listening to her giggle and respond to him, and realized she was “like any other child.”
He would later run with Paisely, pushing her stroller, and say that he wanted to show the world he was proud of her.
He said;
“If I could keep one person, one family, one person, from having to live with the guilt of making the mistake that I almost made, it’s going to be worth the pain that Paisley will feel later in life knowing the way I felt.”
He would run a marathon with Paisley in Little Rock, wearing a T-shirt with her face on it.He continued to run with Paisley to show his pride in her – and got a tattoo. The tattoo reads “down syndrome.” He explains that he got it because
“The first thing that people see when they look at Paisley is down syndrome, I wanted it to be the first thing they see when they look at me.”
Heath White wrote a letter to his daughter, which he shared with ESPN:
“I want you to know how much you’ve taught me, how much I love you.”
This complete about-face by a father who once wanted to abort his child is a beautiful story – but how many parents will never have the opportunity to bond with their down syndrome children? 90% of down syndrome children are aborted and never see the light of day – what a terrible loss both to them and to their parents.
Watch the beautiful story in this 15 minute segment:
The book All God’s Mistakes: Genetic Counseling in a Pediatric Hospital told the story of Baby Boy Flannery, who had down syndrome and required a minor operation to allow him to digest food. The parents refused to grant their permission for the surgery, saying they wanted the baby to die. The baby was healthy aside from Down Syndrome except for the defect that could be corrected- he would live with the operation. The nurses refused to let the baby starve to death, and the hospital tried to transfer him to another hospital that would allow him to starve. Eventually, the parents gave permission for the child to be treated after being pressured. They were afraid of the publicity the case might garner, worrying about how the newspapers and media might run a story. They decided to explore adoption. Exactly what happened to the baby boy was not revealed in the book.
From one of the doctors who advocated not treating the baby
“When the parents first decided not to treat, prior to their attempts to relinquish custody, I had agreed with the parents’ decision not to support it. I went to the nurses to say that this is the situation. Here is the baby, we are not going to support it. I had a nursing revolt on my hands. My young nurses looking at this healthy baby couldn’t carry out this decision. They thought this was a place to maintain life. The same sentiment emerged among medical students, house officers, and fellows. The question I have is how to carry out a decision that involves such grief and pain to my staff.”
Charles L Bosk All God’s Mistakes: Genetic Counseling in a Pediatric Hospital (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) 100
This was from Dr. Palmer, the clinic coordinator. it was partly the nurses’ refusal to cooperate that saved the life of this little boy. Conscience laws, which are advocated by pro-lifers, allow health care providers to refuse to participate in abortion or euthanasia. Pro-choice groups consistently fight such laws.
Linda bird Francke, author of the book The Ambivalence of Abortion, in which she interviewed numerous women who have had abortions, was always pro-choice. Yet she felt grief and distress when she went in for her abortion. In the book she describes how she felt in the waiting room of the abortion clinic:
“Suddenly the rhetoric, the abortion marches I’d walked in, the telegrams sent to Albany to counteract the Friends of the Fetus, the Zero Population Growth buttons I’d worn, peeled away, and I was all alone with my microscopic baby…
Though I would march myself into blisters for a woman’s right to exercise the option of motherhood, I discovered there in the waiting room that I was not the modern woman I thought I was.”
She told the abortionist to stop after he dilated her, but he told her it was too late and completed the surgery
“What good sports we women are. And how obedient. Physically, the pain passed even before the hum of the machine signaled that the vacuuming of my uterus was completed, my baby sucked up like ashes after a cocktail party.”
Linda bird Francke The Ambivalence of Abortion (New York: Random House, 1978) 63
She came to realize that abortion killed a baby, and her explanation to the way she acquiesced to the male abortionist seems to hint about how women are exploited by abortion. She still maintains her pro-choice stand, but her story is not a positive one. Later in the book, she would describe her regret, and seeing, in her mind’s eye, a tiny baby “ghost” which she thought about at times.
“After 25 years in practice, I became an abortion provider. Like many others, I find the work enormously satisfying and feel pleasure that my professional activities now match my pro-choice words.”
Diana Koster, Abortionist in Albuquerque, NM
Here is a diagram of a first trimester abortion. Is this really work that someone should “love”?
And here is a diagram of a second trimester abortion
Here are the remains of the baby aborted in the first trimester (nine weeks)
In an article entitled “What Happens to Unborn Babies After Abortion? Pathologists Share the Horrors” in LifeNews, writer Jonathon Van Maren reveals a horrible conversations that took place on a forum board for pathologists. Pathologists deal with the remains of surgeries, and these ones have had to inspect during their careers. The quotes were taken from the message board here.
From one pathologist:
16 weeks – legal to abort all over the country
“Anyone get tripped on these? I’m talking especially the big ones, where you can actually make out facial expressions like they knew they were being hacked the hell up (im serious). I almost went bonkers once over one, that is some scary crap. Am I the only pathologist who freaks when a 0.5 cm eye ball comes rolling out of bag and stares right at you…I know we are thinking this, just no one in pathology is talking about it.”
He/she also said:
“One incident really freaked me, it was a boy fetus, at least 3+ pounds, around 24+ weeks. It sat decomposing because the rest of the staff was AFRAID of it, Im not joking. Then the chief of staff told me to deal with it because I was the FNG (f-kcin new guy) so I went to work. Pulled out 2 well formed arms and then the torso, headless. The head was at the bottom of the container, when I pulled it, he had this expression of such utter horror it flipped me wayyyy out, my PA saw it and ran, literally left work and went on disability (Im serious here). It was like a headless screaming baby, like it had been born at least for a split second to realize it was screwed and let out one agonal yelp. The story of this reverberated around the department, someone actually accused me of doing what should have been a ME case and threatened to call the medical board! Im not joking, I woke up once shortly after that in a cold sweat with piss running down my leg….not pretty.”
24 weeks
Another:
Baby at only eight weeks – no perfectly formed arms and legs, complete with fingers and toes
“Totally trippy man. We get a fair number of fragmented fetuses from abortion procedures and they come in a container with formalin. The fact that they’re all hacked up is disturbing to begin with. Of course, there is the whole eyeball issue which freaks me out as well.”
He/she also says:
Well, all you can say in a lot of these final diagnosis reports are that the fetus is fragmented, you don’t know what the sex is (unless you’ve found the gonads and histologically they’re confirmed as balls or babymakers), you’ve identified some organs, and you give the estimated gestational age based on foot length. I dunno what else really…I haven’t had too many of these cases but all of these reports with my name on it are pretty simple writeups.
Foot of a baby aborted at 16 weeks
A third pathologist said:
“Most of my abortion-path anecdotes come from my PSF. Here one of the residents grosses most of them in as part of some project he is doing, and we are more than happy to let him.
1) Anencephalic baby, otherwise intact. Those are disturbing to look at. Saw quite a few and they never really get comfortable to look at.
12 week hand
2) When doing one POC that was about 12-15 weeks, somewhere around there, I put through the entire hand into a histology block, so that I could see what a developing hand looked like. The histotech freaked out when she saw it and I wasn’t allowed to do that again. So I stuck later to doing things that weren’t recognizable, such as the full cross section of the 8 week fetus anencephalic head, and the full larynx, etc.
3) The strangest are when you get the macerated contents, and you are able to recognize a few parts here and there – usually a leg or an arm, sometimes the heart. But it’s odd when you can’t find a large portion of it.
Visible parts of aborted babies from 6 to 14 weeks
4) There was a stillborn birth at about 12 weeks or so and it was sent to the morgue for some reason, and never claimed. A couple of months later the family decided they wanted an autopsy. So I had to do an autopsy on a mummified 12 week fetus. They had bothered to put the little bonnet on its head, but otherwise it was shriveled and brown.
16 weeks
5) 16 week or so fetus, the POC is sent down as one specimen, and there is a second specimen labeled “heart.” They wanted us to identify if there were any clear cardiac anomalies. It was about the size of a marble. I took it to the dissecting scope and found the PFO but that was about all I could tell.
6) about a 12 week fetus, sent down POC and wanted to know if it was an imperforate anus.
Unborn baby at only seven weeks after conception
On a related note though, eyeballs are the specimen that freaks me out the most. Cutting into an eye makes me squeal. I remember doing it the first time in anatomy lab and I felt like I was sticking a knife into my own eye.”
….
“I usually like chow down on White Castle while my trusty lab assistant has to stack all the baby body parts, limb amputations and reduction mastectomies into the incinerator. It has almost a Nazi concentration camp feel it all sometimes, one of my assistants today tried to joke about this leg and aborted fetus we were transporting, I snapped “have some f-ing respect!!” then started laughing too, you cant help it. Its so unbelievably insane. Nothing med school prepares you for.
Leg of aborted baby at 12 weeks
….
Another pathologist:
I had a holoprosencephaly case too, with the proboscis. I handle the aborted fetuses okay; the only thing I really dislike is having to stick my finger in the mouth to check for cleft palate. That gives me the willies.
One pathologist (the fifth one quoted) had no sympathy for the aborted babies and was not horrified by what he saw:
In any case, no, abortions don’t freak me out whatsoever. Maybe if a twin IUFD case showed up and one was giving the other a Dirty Sanchez, well, perhaps then I would take pause. Until then, no amount of googly eyeballs or tiny jaws dislocated “mid-scream” does anything to humanize the little sacks of neverweres for me.
There are quite a few things that I find disturbing, but few of them spill directly out of the womb.
