They said it.
Actress Shelley Winters on the Donahue show, on her two abortions:
“I am a very lonely woman. I would give everything – my money, my Academy Awards, my career – if only I could have those children now.”
cited in David C Reardon Aborted Women: Silent No More (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway books, 1987) 69
Share on FacebookFrom a letter to the editor by a woman who regrets her abortion:
“I am 34, married seven years. I had an abortion not quite four years ago. The pain of the knowledge of what I did is permanent, deep, and fresh again when I least expect it. A word about a child, Mother’s Day, a song – can literally rip me apart. There is never any warning. In the middle of the happiest moments, something will trigger sadness for my action.
I can’t make you feel how I feel or how I felt. I would be writing for hours. Even if I talk to you, you could not know the pain I’ve set myself up for. It’s not just babies that abortion kills. It’s mothers too.”
Reprinted in “Mother Is the Other Victim of Abortion” The National Right to Life News, December 22, 1983, 10
Share on FacebookFrom a clinic worker:
“Our surgeons have a technique, even though I shouldn’t really say this, where they don’t really scrub between cases. They’ll scrub once and they’ll do a case and they’ll go next door to the next room and put on a new gown and gloves. Without scrubbing between. The surgery is only 3 to 5 minutes long… A person who is eight weeks in term only needs two minutes worth of surgery from a good doctor…”
Magda Denes, PhD. In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital (New York: Basic Books inc 1976)236
This is an old quote, but it shows how little regard abortionists had for their patients after legalization.
Share on Facebook
In one of the partial birth abortion ban trials, Judge Arnold, who opposed any kind of ban on abortion, explained how a common D & E procedure was similar to a D &X (or partial birth) procedure.
“In a D&E procedure, the physician inserts forceps into the uterus, grasps a part of the fetus, commonly an arm or a leg, and draws that part out of the uterus into the vagina. Using the traction created between the mouth of the cervix and the pull of the forceps, the physician dismembers the fetal part which has been brought into the vagina, and removes it from the woman’s body. The rest of the fetus remains in the uterus while dismemberment occurs, and is often still living…”
Richard Smith “Candor and the Court: The Supreme Court will confront as never before the violent nature of mid-and late-term abortion” America April 1, 2000
Read more about the D & E procedure, from a former abortionist.
See pictures of a D & E procedure.
See remains of a babies aborted by D & E at 21 weeks
Share on Facebook
Sometimes even abortion lobbyists show a degree of uneasiness about what it is they are lobbying for. At the end of 1993 Kate Michelman, the head of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, was interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer about NARAL’s new emphasis on the prevention of teen pregnancies. The reporter quoted Michelman as saying, “We think abortion is a bad thing.” Michelman complained that she had been misquoted, whereupon she was reminded that the interview had been taped. Nevertheless, NARAL issued a statement a few days later declaring that Michelman “has never said–and would never say–that ‘abortion is a bad thing.'” Michelman, who had reason to know better, sought only to “clarify” her remark in a letter to the Inquirer. “It is not abortion itself that is a bad thing,” she wrote. “Rather, our nation’s high rate of abortion represents a failure” of our system of sex education, contraception, and health care. But a month later Michelman herself, testifying before a House subcommittee on energy and commerce, insisted that “the reporter absolutely quoted me incorrectly,” and she later told a Washington Post reporter, “I would never, never, never, never, never mean to say such a thing.” Not until the Post reporter showed her the transcript did Michelman finally acknowledge–somewhat evasively –that she had said it: “I’m obviously guilty of saying something that led her to put that comment in there.”
George Mckenna, “On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position,” The Atlantic Monthly Sept. 1995
From an abortion provider who is also a family doctor:
“As a family doctor, I have processed abortion guilt with so many women.”
Carole Joffe Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: the Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2009) 122
Although this abortion provider no doubt tells her patients not to feel guilty, her comment reveals that many of them do have those feelings after having abortions, and that abortion is a hard thing for women to deal with.
Share on FacebookFrom one abortion provider:
“She [the patient who just had an abortion] asked me if she could have the pregnancy… I gave it to her in a jar… She wanted to put it in the – River, at a place she knew that felt special to her. I told her I thought a goodbye ritual like that would help her move on. We had a long, long hug before she left.”
Carole Joffe Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: the Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2009) 121
Remains of an abortion at eight weeks
From a woman who helped out with abortions in a hospital:
My duties were not only to care for those that were in for abortions, I also cared for the older folks having hysterectomies and so forth. I didn’t have a personal opinion on abortion until I saw how many were done and for the multitude of ridiculous reasons. Not to mention the actual procedure itself and the “aftermath”. It wasn’t until a few years afterwards that I started to feel this wasn’t right. That is when I transferred to a different department and hospital completely. . . Plus you must understand, I worked for a hospital smack dab in the middle of NYC, I got to know some of the girls getting these abortions on a first name basis, since they had them so often. That really got under my skin, seeing these girls using it as a birth control measure. And why shouldn’t they? The state paid for it anyway! Just not right!
From a woman who had a down syndrome pregnancy:
“Unless the child was institutionalized, I would have to give up my teaching to be a full-time nurse, putting the entire financial burden on [my husband] Bud. We would have to begin saving immediately for that day, in our old age, when we could no longer care for the child at home. While we may have somehow coped had we never had the tests, Bud couldn’t fathom knowingly bringing these burdens upon us… I decided I must go through with the abortion to preserve my family.”
Maria Vida Hunt, McCall’s, July 1985
quoted in Bonnie Szumski , Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (St. Paul, Minnesota: Greenhaven Press, 1986)
Tests for Down Syndrome are not accurate until 16 weeks, when the baby is fully formed. (see below)
Abortions at this stage are done by dismemberment- a doctor tears apart the baby with forceps, taking it out piece by piece.
Was the suffering of the baby justified by the family’s right not to be inconvenienced? There is a waiting list to adopt even down syndrome babies.
Share on FacebookAid to Women is a crisis pregnancy center in Canada which is located next to an abortion clinic. The government has been trying to shut them down, and police have repeatedly arrested the workers who sometimes try to talk to the women going into the clinic. At one point in the legal battle, the center gathered affidavits of women they helped. Here are the stories of two of them.
“In December 1992 I was four months pregnant. At the time I had a boyfriend Chris who was not the child’s father.
We decided I would have an abortion. An appointment was made [at] The Cabbagetown Women’s Clinic on Gerrard Street [for an ultrasound] The people at the clinic did not tell me how big my baby was.
On the way out of the clinic [the abortion was scheduled for the following day] Chris and I met two men and a woman carrying signs. When we walked by them one of them asked if they could talk to us. We said it was OK….Chris and I accepted the invitation to go to Aid to Women next to the abortion clinic…After a while I decided not to have an abortion. Chris then went back to the clinic to get the money back. Since that day we got some more help from Aid to Women. They supplied us with baby clothes and a crib. Chris and I got married on Feb 13, 1993. My daughter Elizabeth was born on May 26, 1993…Aid to Women helped me find a doctor who delivered my baby for nothing.”
Another woman wrote:
“When I arrived, there was a long line of other women waiting for abortions. I could not see the doctor until I waited a long time. Eventually he saw me. He did an ultrasound examination of my abdomen to see the baby. When I asked to see it he refused. I asked him how big the baby was. He would not tell me. He said the abortion was going to be easy…However, by that time of the day I did not have time to wait for the abortion…I explained I had to leave. An appointment for the abortion was arranged for the next day, Nov 2, 1992. By that time in pregnancy, I could already feel the baby move inside me. I cried a lot on Nov 3 before I went to the clinic…Upon arrival at the clinic, I saw ladies outside carrying picture of unborn babies. I looked at the pictures and thought about my own baby. As I was going towards the door a lady asked “Can we help you?” I started crying …They asked if I knew how the baby looks like and they showed me a book about how the baby looks like as it grows inside the mother.
They also asked me about why I wanted an abortion. I told them about my financial probems…[They] helped me by paying my rent and helping to pay for the groceries [and] with maternity clothes and things for the baby. My daughter Emily wsw born on April 8, 1993.”
Leonard Stern “Abortion Wars” The Ottawa Citizen May 2000
Share on Facebook