Even pro-abortion sources sometimes acknowledge that abortion is hard for women. In the famous book Our Bodies, Ourselves, the authors say the following about abortion:
“Even the most positive feelings afterward tend to be mixed with negative ones.”
The Boston Women’s Health Collective, Inc. Our Bodies, Ourselves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 234
“The picture is accurate. My job is to put the little pieces together to make sure we have not left any parts inside the mother because she would die if that happened. I work with the jars full of tiny arms and legs swirling around and around in the blood and it is just like in the picture. (She indicated this with her finger going around and around in a circular motion). You can even see every rib, spine, finger and toe – all of it perfectly formed at about five weeks.”
Dr. Warren Hern does 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions at his clinic in Boulder. This is from an interview:
16 weeks. Hern aborts babies at this age every day
Q. Does it bother you that a second trimester fetus so closely resembles a baby?
A: I really don’t think about it. I don’t have a problem with believing the fetus is a fertilized egg. Sure it becomes more physically developed but it lacks emotional development. It doesn’t have the mental capacity for self-awareness. It’s never been an ethical dilemma for me. For people for whom that is an ethical dilemma, this certainly wouldn’t be a field they’d want to go into. Many of our patients have ethical dilemmas about abortion. I don’t feel it’s my role as a physician to tell her she should not have an abortion because of her ethical feelings. …Facing the situation of abortion is a part of that passage through life for some women–how they resolve that is their decision. …it. My role is to provide a service and, to a limited degree, help women understand themselves when they make their decision. I’m not to tell them what’s right or wrong.
Discharging the Committee on the Judiciary from Further Consideration Of the President’s Veto of HR 1833, Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1995
24 weeks
September 9, 1996 Capital Words, A Project of the Sunlight Foundation volume 142 , number 130
In her article in Harpers magazine, Tisdale talks about her work in an abortion clinic:
“A twenty-one-year-old woman, unemployed, uneducated, without family, in the fifth month of her fifth pregnancy. A forty-two-year-old mother of teenagers, shocked by her condition, refusing to tell her husband. A twenty-three-year-old mother of two having her seventh abortion, and many women in their thirties having their first. . . .Oh, the ignorance . . . .Some swear they have not had sex, many do not know what a uterus is, how sperm and egg meet, how sex makes babies. . . .They come so young, snapping gum, sockless and sneakered, and their shakily applied eyeliner smears when they cry. . . .I cannot imagine them as mothers.”
She talks about lying to women about their unborn babies:
12 weeks
“I am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about ‘the tissue’ and ‘the contents’ when the woman suddenly catches my eye and asks, ‘How big is the baby now?’. . . .1 gauge, and sometimes lie a little, weaseling around its infantile features until its clinging power slackens.
But she knows the reality of abortion:
But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside. . . .I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. . . .”
Quoted in Jason Deparle, “Beyond the Legal Right; Why Liberals and Feminists Don’t like to Talk about the Morality of Abortion,” Washington Monthly Apr. 1989,
Dug up this old quote from Planned Parenthood about sex selection abortions.
“… once the state of the fetal diagnostic art moves from second to first trimester, so abortion falls within the menstrual extraction.. Planned Parenthood will increasingly connote planning the sex as well as the spacing of offspring.”
Planned Parenthood spokesman, quoted in Lisa Andrusko “a Fact of Life: What Are Sex Selection Abortions?” March 14, 1985
“About 80 percent of late-term abortions are done by D and E. A couple of days ahead, small, absorbent rods are put in the pregnant woman’s cervical opening to expand it gradually. Then, for the actual procedure, she–and the fetus–are given heavy sedation or general anesthesia. The doctor breaks her bag of water and drains out the fluid. The opening won’t let the fetus out whole. So the doctor inserts metal tongs, physically crushes the head, and dismembers the fetus. The pieces are pulled out and counted to confirm that nothing was missed.
Partial-birth abortion is, if anything, less grotesque. The fetus is delivered feet first. To get the large head out, the doctor cuts open a hole at the base of the fetus’s skull and inserts tubing to suck out the brain, which collapses the skull. Often, but not always, the fetus is injected lethally beforehand. The procedure is used for a very small percentage of late abortions, and nothing makes it especially necessary over D and E. “
Here is a chart of a D & E operation:
D & E abortions are usually done in the second trimester, when one out of ten abortions take place. This adds up to many thousands a year.
Here is a picture of a 16 week old unborn baby, a candidate for this kind of abortion.
Dr. Grant Clark performed abortions for a while shortly after Roe versus Wade. He then left practice. He contacted Oregon right to life to tell his story.
From the interview:
Doctor: Well, most of the abortions I did were in the first trimester, the first three months, and it was done with a suction machine, a high powered suction machine, vacuum cleaner, dilate the cervix and put in the tip of the suction machine, and suction out the baby, which comes out in shreds. And after the procedure is over, you must make sure that you got all of the pieces of the baby. Otherwise, if you leave pieces in, it’s likely to cause an infection. Although, I’ve had several patients say afterward, a week after the abortion, they were still passing little baby parts. So it is-
Interviewer: The women would actually see-
Doctor: Oh yeah.
Interviewer: Recognizable body parts?
Doctor: Oh yeah. And not very much fun for them or for anyone else. Um..that was probably the most difficult part of the abortion procedure with the suction abortions, you had to go through what you suctioned out of the uterus and identify perfectly formed little arms and legs and little hands, skulls were usually crushed. Eyes and cute little noses- you just killed a baby. And I don’t care what you do, you can’t bring them back.”
When the interviewer asked what made Dr. Grant Clark call Oregon Right to Life, he said:
“I saw a billboard and it said “the score of abortion: one dead, one wounded.” And I thought, no, one dead, and a whole bunch of people wounded, including the doctor, the nurses involved, the anesthesiologist, the grandparents, you know, the father of the baby… all of these people have been wounded.… Knowing that I’ve been wounded, and knowing that I’ve wounded others, talking about it and bringing it out is something that is not good at all, is useful. It’s time to make a decision, and say, “this has to change.” Our society can’t go on this way, of pretending it’s hunky-dory. It’s not. It’s murder….
Legs at 11 weeks
There were 2 cases that were significant in my life, and one of them was the beginning of acceptance of 2nd trimester abortions, which were accomplished by putting a needle into the uterus, draining off some fluid, to make sure that you were in the uterus, not the bladder or somewhere else with your needle, and injecting into the uterus a very strong salt solution, which would cause a: the baby to die, and b: contractions to begin, very shortly after the salt solution was in there, and the mother would then abort the baby.
Interviewer: She’d deliver a dead baby
Doctor Clark: Deliver a dead baby. But in one case, she did not deliver a dead baby. It was a live baby that she delivered.
Interviewer: Do they not have their skin burned?
Doctor Clark: The skin was burned, it was hard to look at, and hard to realize that I killed a near-term baby. The dates that the mother had given me were wrong, and we had no real way of checking it at that time. Ultrasound and stuff has come in since then, so we can date a baby’s age fairly well, but not, not back then. And the baby was born alive and lived for an hour.
Interviewer: was it a girl or a boy?
Doctor Clark: I don’t remember, and I didn’t want to remember.… But at that point I said, “No more 3rd or 2nd trimester abortions…”
Interviewer: was the mother aware the baby was born alive?
Doctor Clark: yes, she was, and it was just a bad scene all the way around. I mean what was I supposed to do, smother it? Strangle it?… It was just, what do I do, so I took the coward’s way out and did nothing, and the baby died. As it probably would have anyway.
….
The other one was a little bit later and came on the heels of that one and that was a young lady who came in, unmarried lady, came into the office, wanted an abortion, would not settle for anything else, and, um, went through the procedure of the suction abortion and all I got out were some chewed up tissue, and I recognized no body parts at all, and so we sent the material, it’s called “the products of conception” (that’s the high sounding words that we used) to the laboratory as we did all the cases, you have to send it all in. And they gave me the report back saying, “this is products of a dead conception”, the baby had already died.
And all I did was essentially a D&C, scrape out the insides of the uterus. Well, several months later, she gave birth to a full-term normal child. And then came the lawsuits. She sued me for not completing my work, not aborting the baby, and she also sued me for 18 to 20 years of child rearing costs, and then she sued me for all the pain and anguish she went through for having to go through labor, and I talked to my lawyer about it. And I said, wait a minute, what pain did she go through that she would not normally have gone through had there been no attempted abortion.
…
Interviewer: so she had a baby that died, and she didn’t know that she had another one living in her the same time.
….
Interviewer: so she was upset because somehow she still had a live baby?
Doctor: yes.
Interviewer: this is why this woman was all upset, because she gave birth to a healthy, live child?
Doctor: I talked that over with the lawyer, saying, “what happened here is the absolute normal way a pregnancy is supposed to end. In what way is it malpractice for it to end up totally normally?” Then the other thing is, she adopted out the baby – and still sued me for child rearing charges between age 1, or zero, and 21 years of age.
Interviewer, so you’re saying, this experience put you up close and personal with a mother so intent on the death of her child?
Doctor: and also, so intent of making money out of it.
Interviewer: making money out of it, if it didn’t die… These people are really out there… It sounds absolutely unbelievable –
Doctor: The lawyer offered her $2000 if she would drop the case and get out of town. She did. That’s how it ended.… Except it didn’t end that way for me. I went through the cases, and more and more I was seeing, why are you there for the abortion, and there all selfish reasons. “It doesn’t fit in with my lifestyle. It doesn’t fit in with what I had planned and I dare not let anyone know I have been pregnant, because that might indicate that I had sex and oh my, that can’t get out.” Well, foolishness, and greed and… I said, enough.
“Although human life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed. … The combination of 23 chromosomes present in each pronucleus results in 46 chromosomes in the zygote. Thus the diploid number is restored and the embryonic genome is formed. The embryo now exists as a genetic unity.”
(O’Rahilly, Ronan and Müller, Fabiola. Human Embryology and Teratology, 2nd edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996, pp. 8, 29).
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, whose has spoken to many former clinic workers, said:
“Former workers in the abortion industry have told us stories about playing games of toss with aborted babies in the hallway. Your mind has to invert what is going on: to make it a game, a joke, something positive. It’s the only way to keep from going crazy — and some of them do.”
“The one thing that sticks out in my mind the most, that really upset me the most, was that he had done an abortion, he had a fetus wrapped inside of a blue paper. He stuck it inside of a surgical glove and put another glove over it. He was standing in the hall, speaking with myself and two of his assistants. He was tossing the fetus up in the air and catching it. Like it was a rubber ball. I just looked at him and it’s like doctor, please. And he laughed. He says, “Nobody knows what this is.”
Rachel M. Macnair, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002)
