I work in Labor and Delivery…we don’t perform elective abortions on our unit, but we do terminate in cases of infection in the amniotic fluid and or risk to the mother, or if the water has broken and not replenished, and the baby is not viable. Yes it’s hard to watch these little ones live after they are born, sometimes they have heartbeats for several hours, but many times they are so small that their eyes and mouths are still fused together…unable to pass a tube through. The difference is that the babies I deal with are wanted….and are mourned by their parents and families. We provide comfort, warmth, and love to these little ones for the short time they are here. We make memory boxes for the families with footprints, molds, and pictures. I can’t imagine working anywhere where this is a “choice.” We also provide our mothers with a high standard of medical care…. from what I am reading these clinics are full of filth and unsafe conditions and treat the women poorly
“I object to the monopolization of the term pro-life by groups whose agenda is to make abortion illegal and deny women the right and responsibility to decide this very personal matter. I am certainly not “antilife,” nor am I proabortion. I am for choice. The issue is whether women should have that freedom.”
Buchanan, J. M. (2012, Mar 07). Life and health.The Christian Century, 129, 3-3.
Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and a leader in the women’s equality movement for more than 30 years, said religious groups and feminists have often been “on a collision course,” but they need to work together for reproductive choice.
“I feel we’re missing the boat in not taking back the moral high ground on this issue.”
Supporters of legal abortion talk strategy. (2001, Apr 11). The Christian Century, 118, 10-10.
Can pro-choicers really have the moral high ground?
“(Live births) are little known because organized medicine, from fear of public clamor and legal action, treats them more as an embarrassment to be hushed up than a problem to be solved. It’s like turning yourself in to the IRS for an audit.” Cates said. “What is there to gain? The tendency is not to report because there are only negative incentives.”~
Willard Cates, M.D., former head of the Centers for Disease Control of the U.S. Public Health Service as quoted in “Abortion: The Dreaded Complication” ; Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 2, 1981
Makeka, former patient of abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell:
So when I got pregnant again I went to the clinic and I asked them… “Is it OK that I get, you know, another abortion?” ”Fine, fine”. They even like had this woman sit down and she told me that women in Brazil have at least twenty-one abortions, and she’s like, “They’re still able to conceive…” And, that was it for me. That was where I basically said, you know what, this has to be OK. It was the norm for me after she had coached me into believing that that was the norm. I would say the next fourteen years… within that time I had eight abortions. Eight. And I look back at it and it’s like God, what was I thinking? It just seemed like it was OK, it was so OK to go in there and get it done as long as you had the money.
“I looked in the paper and saw a doctor’s office in need of a bilingual receptionist, someone who could schedule appointments for patients – it was perfect for me. I didn’t realize it was an abortion clinic.
…..
As happens with a lot of abortion clinic employees who are hired to do one thing but are recruited into another, my scheduling position evolved into doing work in the lab. “Lab” is where we sorted through the parts of the aborted child to make sure they were all accounted for and nothing was left inside the patient.
84 day old unborn baby
I also did counseling and somehow stomached the excuses women had to abort – for many it was because the baby was a girl and they wanted a boy while others it was because of a fetal defect and others because they didn’t want another child.
10 weeks
My conscience bothered me at times and I would secretly try to change the patient’s mind during counseling.
One woman came in who was pregnant with twins and already had another child. I just couldn’t counsel her to choose abortion and told her that there are other options. She chose to keep the twins and saw me a couple years later and told me how grateful she was for my advice and that her children were her joy.
As time went by I learned every position in the clinic and the doctor trusted me. However, he was always in a bad mood and rude to patients and employees. He referred to the larger women as cows or whales. I hated how he treated everyone and left but went back because I needed the money.
….
I tried to soothe my soul by comforting these women during their abortions or helping them with rides to the airport or bus and even had a few stay at my home because they had no extra money for hotels.
But I saw more things that made me question why I was working there. I saw the doctor increasing prices for no reason, making pregnancies look larger on the ultra sound to charge more. I saw him charge women for being overweight, on medication by a primary doctor, for having had previous C-sections, for having a tilted uterus, and many other reasons he just made up.
But even worse than lying to the women or dealing with a cranky boss was what I saw during the abortions. I was the doctor’s right hand person in the operating room and just like those employees of Dr. Gosnell, I saw the abortionist puncture the soft spot in the baby’s head or snip its neck if it was delivered alive.
22-24 weeks
She then goes on to describe how she got a flyer about ATTWN, Abby Johnson’s ministry to clinic workers, and responded to it. Read the rest of this testimony:
And Then There Were None is a pro-life group that reaches out to women and men who work in abortion clinics. They encourage them to leave, and when they do, they help them find new jobs and give them emotional support and sometimes material help.
Angie worked at a Planned Parenthood clinic that did not do abortions, but she was touched by abortion all the same. Here is excerpt from her testimony:
I was a Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner, a wife and mother of two kids in college. Heavily involved in ministry at church, I knew my husband had become distant. That led to a separation and ultimate end of our 23 year marriage. During my separation, I was led to a job at Planned Parenthood in Denton. I guess it was naive on my part, but I figured if I wasn’t working in the actual clinic that did the abortions, maybe it was an acceptable place to work.
It was there that my eyes were opened to the atrocities and the realities of abortion for the first time. It happened one day when a young women came in 20 weeks pregnant and bleeding. I examined her, listened with the monitor for the babies heartbeat, and realized it wasn’t beating. I sent her to the Emergency room where they found that the baby had died. A few days later, Planned Parenthood’s supervising Nurse Practitioner came to my office inquiring why I had used a fetal heart Doppler to allow my patient to hear her babies heartbeat. When I said it was part of the routine prenatal exam, she said “not at Planned Parenthood it isn’t!”We do not allow the patients to hear the heartbeats of their baby because it may sway their decision. When I commented that it was probably good in this instance, because the patient got to the Emergency Room where she needed to be, she questioned why I did not send her to Dallas for an abortion. I said, “You would have done a sonogram and told her that her baby was dead.” She said, “no we wouldn’t have, by the time we do the sonogram, she has already signed consent for the abortion. We don’t tell them if it is dead or alive, or twins, or triplets. It was at that point that I knew I could no longer be a party to this kind of travesty.
12 weeks sonogram
I was so shaken, I went across the street to a pregnancy resource center and told them who I was and what had happened. It was as if they already knew me. They said they thought there was a “plant” next door at Planned Parenthood, because of all the girls that had been referred there over the last few months. It was then as they prayed and cried with me, that I began to see how in spite of myself, God was using me for His purposes.
….
Several weeks later, I was in a state of despair. I had no job, no insurance, and I felt like God had abandoned me. What was my purpose? Just as I was at my lowest, I was awakened early in the morning. It was as if God were speaking audibly to me. All I could think was “Save the Babies.” I called a local pregnancy center that day and spoke to the director. It just so happened their nurse manager was ill, and not sure if she would return. I started volunteering the next week, was trained to do sonograms and hired as the nurse manager 3 months later. ….
. Now, every day I can’t wait to go to work and see who God will place in my path this day. As I watch the women and see the look on their faces as they witness the miracle of a little living, breathing, human being squirming on the sonogram, it makes me see a little bit more of His purpose for my life. They hear the little heartbeat, see the fingers, the toes, the humanness of their baby. They begin to bond and most decide to choose life. It makes me ever so grateful that God gave me a second chance. A second chance to “choose life.
From Lawrence B. Finer and Stanley K. Henshaw “Abortion Incidence and Services in the United States in 2000” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 35, number one (2003) 6-15
Ellen Hamilton, who had an abortion because she was raped, said she was more traumatized by the abortion.
According to Danielle Capelli with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on a NPR “All Things” Considered segment April 3, 1992, “Abortions without Anesthesia at Canadian Hospital.”
“She was sent over to Yellowknife, and she had–she was told that no anesthesia would be used because it wasn’t necessary; that general anesthesia was dangerous–that it would cause bleeding–and that local anesthesia wasn’t needed because it would only cause minor discomfort and the procedure would be over in a couple of minutes. In fact, she found it excruciatingly painful. She said she was strapped down to the table, held down by a number of nurses, including one male member of the staff at the hospital who had to come in and help hold her down. She said she was screaming and writhing in pain; she was begging the doctor to stop. The doctor was yelling at her, saying, ‘You’re only making it worse, stop moving,’ and refused to stop; he just kept going. “
