Pro-Choice activist Malcolm Potts, who campaigned to make abortion legal all over the world:
“Those who want the [abortion] law to be liberalized will stress the hazards of illegal abortion and claim that hundreds, or thousands, of women die unnecessarily each year when the actual number is far lower.”
Malcolm Potts, Peter Diggory and John Peel. Abortion. Cambridge University Press, 1970
In China, party officials coerce women to abort if they do not have a permit for a baby. In most cases, women are only allowed one child. The Chinese abortionist quoted below wishes she did not have to do abortions, but she has no choice, as an OBGYN, but to perform them. She describes one scene of infanticide:
“Some women come to the clinic for an abortion with a pregnancy of eight or nine months. If she does not come with the family planning official, we usually do not perform a delivered [live birth] abortion. If she comes with the family planning official, we have no way out but performing the operation. In most situations of late abortion, the aborted babies are alive. We have to employ medical measures. We just wait for the appearance of the baby’s head [at the opening of the womb], then inject the medicine into the skull. We really cannot bear to see these children, but we have to do what is required. Otherwise we will break the rule and be punished.. From the humane perspective, we are unwilling to do what we have to do. But we are not allowed to have a live baby after an abortion [another doctor who was in the interview room interrupted at this moment and said, “By all means, it cannot be alive.”] But sometimes the baby is alive despite all the injected medicine. It seems that the child of elite abortion has great vitality. It was not unusual for child after regular delivery to not survive despite medical rescue measures. But the life force of these children [undergoing delivered abortion] is very strong. I have a true story.…
It was an abortion of late stage. The child was alive after the abortion. The child burst out crying, making the sound “wa wa.” The lying in woman raised her head: “Doctor, the child is alive?” I could not tell her the truth and just asked her to lie down on the bed without moving. I told her this had nothing to do with her. But the lying in woman sat up desperately and begged me. “Doctor the child is alive. Please leave it alone.” I replied to her, “You lie down.” Then I told the nurse on duty to fetch Dr. Guang, the supervisor of the department. I knew how to kill the child, but I just could not put my hand on it.
Soon the nurse came in with Dr. Guang. Dr. Guang was a senior doctor. As soon as I saw Dr. Guang, I said to her, “I will leave this to you.” She replied, “You cannot do it this way. The child was delivered by you. You cannot deliver it at this moment and then be out of charge of the mess. I will get a bucket and fill it with water. We drown the child to death by putting her head down into the water first.” She got a bucket of water and put the child into it.
After about half an hour, Dr. Guang drew the child out of the bucket and wanted to send it to the burning oven of the hospital. But the child got back its breath again and burst into crying. The life force of the child was too indomitable. Even being submerged in the water for half an hour could not kill her. I really felt that there was something very strange here. I said to Dr. Guang that I had to leave. But she did not allow me. She said to me, “I still need to do something.” She then fill the washing basin in the room, which was bigger than the bucket, and put the child into the water again for another half an hour.
After all this, I did not use the washing basin for a long time. For a long time, I felt terrible.”
Nie Jing-Bao Beyond the Silence: Chinese Voices on Abortion (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005) 182-183
Dr. John Fletcher from the National Institutes of Health, reacts to the tendency of couples to ask for an ultrasound to determine whether or not the baby is a boy or girl, with the purpose of aborting if it’s the wrong gender. He disagrees with this reason for abortion but realizes he must support it or else be a hypocrite. He says that ultrasounds must be done in these cases.
“The existence of some trivial reasons should not deter us from the larger goal of protecting the right of women to make such decisions in the first place… It is inconsistent to support an abortion law that protects the absolute right of women to decide and, at the same time, to block access to information about the fetus because one thinks that an abortion may be foolishly sought on the basis of the information.”
John C Fletcher “Ethics of Amniocentesis for Fetal Sex Identification” Sounding Board, New England Journal of Medicine 301, no. 10 (September 6, 1979) 551 from James Tunstead Burtechaell, C.S.C. Rachel Weeping: the Case against Abortion (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982)
Pro-Abortion organizations accuse pro-life crisis pregnancy centers of not caring about women and using propaganda and lies to convince them to have their babies. Often, however, these centers provide real help for women. Some centers have parenting classes, job training, and daycare, and others provide maternity clothes, diapers, referrals to affordable medical care, counseling, baby items, and more, all for free. An abortion clinic will take a woman’s money, do the abortion, and sent her home to cope. In this quote, Roderick P Murphy, founder of a large crisis pregnancy center, speaks:
eight weeks
“We’ve saved babies by making overdue car payments and more than once we have paid for a wedding with reception, so that the baby would live. We have bought airline tickets to Africa and South America so that an abortion pressured client could go home to her family instead of aborting her baby. No life should end in because of money.”
Roderick P Murphy. Stopping Abortions at Death’s Door (Southbridge, Massachusetts: Taig Publishing 2009) 22
Pro-Choice activists like to blame pro-lifers for delaying the approval of RU-486 in the United States, and it’s true that many pro-life organizations what it as hard as they could. But another reason that it took so long for pharmaceutical companies to start producing it had nothing to do with antiabortion pressure. Some pharmaceutical companies didn’t want to touch it because they were concerned about its effectiveness and safety.
One pharmaceutical company said that they would not produce RU-486 –
“as soon as our attorneys learn that it’s only 95% effective, they began to scream. The other 5% could involve defective children and that, in terms of liability suits, could blow us out of the water.””
Pharmaceutical company executive in the “Political History of RU-486”
Quoted in Mary E Williams. Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego, California: Greenhaven Press, 2002)
In the United States, Medical World News reports a study in which 99 mothers were informed of the sex of their children. 53% of these pre-borns were boys and 46% were girls. Of this number, only one mother elected to kill her boy, while 29 elected to kill their girls.
Medical World News, with December 1, 1975, 45
Randy Alcorn “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments” (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000)
19 weeks – it’s around this time that the sex is discernible
This is an old reference, but it shows the sex selection abortions have been taking place for a long time.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson described how patient care was compromised in the abortion clinic he ran because physicians were seeking more money. Doctors were being paid based on the number of abortions they performed and:
“The pay system inspired incredible situations. Walden [one of the abortionists] told me that when he first started, the practice was that a “senior” doctor with more experience at the clinic would have to confirm the newcomer’s estimate on how far along the pregnancy was. One day he estimated the woman at 16 weeks, and called in a “senior” with a solid reputation outside the clinic who told him, “She’s only 10 weeks. You can do her.” Walden started to work and soon was in the middle of a treacherous, 16 week abortion that took him an hour and a half, with blood, bone and fetal parts all over the room. Meanwhile the “senior” doctor was running through three women and earning three times the pay while he was tied up. Walden told me that the old hands pulled this on a lot of the new boys, to tangle them in impossible cases and reduce the competition for fees. On the side, of course, there was the trifling matter that they were putting the women patients in unnecessary danger.”
Bernard N Nathanson, M.D. with Richard N Ostling. Aborting America (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1979) P112 – 113
Jill Stanek tells her story about babies born alive after abortions:
I had been working for a year at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, as a registered nurse in the Labor and Delivery Department, when I heard in report that we were aborting a second-trimester baby with Down’s syndrome. I was completely shocked. In fact, I had specifically chosen to work at Christ Hospital because it was a Christian hospital and not involved, so I thought, in abortion. It hurt so much that the very place these abortions were being committed was at a hospital named after my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I was further grieved to learn that the hospital’s religious affiliates, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and the United Church of Christ, were pro-abortion. I had no idea that any Christian denomination could be pro-abortion!
But what was most distressing was to learn of the method Christ Hospital uses to abort, called induced labor abortion, now also known as “live birth abortion.” In this particular abortion procedure doctors do not attempt to kill the baby in the uterus. The goal is simply to prematurely deliver a baby who dies during the birth process or soon afterward.
To commit induced labor abortion, a doctor or resident inserts a medication into the mother’s birth canal close to the cervix. The cervix is the opening at the bottom of the uterus that normally stays closed until a mother is about 40 weeks pregnant and ready to deliver. This medication irritates the cervix and stimulates it to open early. When this occurs, the small second or third trimester pre-term, fully formed baby falls out of the uterus, sometimes alive. By law, if an aborted baby is born alive, both birth and death certificates must be issued. Ironically, at Christ Hospital the cause of death often listed for live aborted babies is “extreme prematurity,” an acknowledgement by doctors that they have caused this death.
It is not uncommon for a live aborted baby to linger for an hour or two or even longer. At Christ Hospital one of these babies lived for almost an entire eight-hour shift. Some of the babies aborted are healthy, because Christ Hospital will also abort for life or “health” of the mother, and also for rape or incest.
In the event that an aborted baby is born alive, she or he receives “comfort care,” defined as keeping the baby warm in a blanket until s/he dies. Parents may hold the baby if they wish. If the parents do not want to hold their dying aborted baby, a staff member cares for the baby until s/he dies. If staff did does not have the time or desire to hold the baby, s/he is taken to Christ Hospital’s new Comfort Room, which is complete with a First Foto Machine if parents want professional pictures of their aborted baby, baptismal supplies, gowns, and certificates, foot printing equipment and baby bracelets for mementos, and a rocking chair. Before the Comfort Room was established, babies were taken to the Soiled Utility Room to die.
One night, a nursing co-worker was taking a Down’s syndrome baby who was aborted alive to our Soiled Utility Room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a Soiled Utility Room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was between 21 and 22 weeks old, weighed about 1/2 pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet that I could not tell if he was still alive. I held him up to the light to see through his chest wall whether his heart was still beating. After he was pronounced dead, we folded his little arms across his chest, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried him to the hospital morgue where all of our dead patients are taken.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson discusses the reality of babies born alive during saline abortions. A saline abortion consisted of injecting a poisonous saline solution into a woman’s uterus which killed the baby (or was supposed to.) then the woman went through labor to expel the baby. It caused so many live births that saline abortions were discontinued in the 1980s.
“When we had live births in the early saline period (1965 – 1970), the nurses, to their everlasting credit, reacted in the instinctively proper manner when they saw that the tiny newborn was gasping or moving. They invariably instituted rigorous resuscitative measures, carried the baby to the premature nursery, and demanded the customary standards of care for it. The doctors were caught in the dilemma of being the adversary of alpha [Nathanson’s term for the fetus/aborted baby] in performing the abortion and, in an instant, becoming obstetricians committed to the newborn’s safety. Neatly trapped by definitions, taught from medical school that an “abortus” is only a pathology specimen, we stood gawking at the wiggling, gasping baby, paralyzed by the paradox.”
Bernard N Nathanson, M.D. with Richard N Ostling. Aborting America (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1979) page 273
24 weeks, saline abortions were often done at this time. Abortions at this stage are still legal in the US
Abortion Complications Higher in 1977 Than In 1969- Roe was 73
“The total number of abortion complications treated in American hospitals has, in fact, been reported to increase since abortion was legalized nationally. In 1969, 9000 cases were reported. In 1977, 17,000 were reported
Hospital Record Study, a joint publication of the Commission on Professional Hospital Activities in Ann Arbor, Michigan and IMS America, LTD. In Ambler, Pennsylvania (1969 – 1977)
James Tunstead Burtechaell, C.S.C. Rachel Weeping: the Case against Abortion (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982)
