ClinicQuotes

Eliminating “Defective” Babies

Rayna Rapp, who herself aborted it down syndrome baby, discusses abortions of disabled fetuses:

“New developments in reproductive technologies assist in the quest for the perfect baby not only by genetically creating “better” children but also by detecting and eliminating fetuses deemed abnormal and defective. In a world where babies are bred for desired characteristics, having a healthy, normal baby becomes nothing less than a duty. While it may appear that medicine simply offers procedure such as diagnostic ultrasound, fetal electrocardiography, and amniocentesis as options for those who desire them, the fear of producing a child that falls outside the boundary of “normal” compels many women to seek premonitory information regarding the status of the fetus. As one of [Rayna Rapp’s] interviewees explained regarding her tests, “if he was gonna be slow, if he wasn’t gonna have a shot at being President, that’s not the baby we wanted.”

unbornbaby16w-02 — 16 week-old unborn baby

Rayna Rapp “Moral Pioneers: Women, Men, and Fetuses on a Frontier Of Reproductive Technology,” and Hoffman et al., Embryos, Ethics and Women’s Rights, 110, from Kathy Rudy. Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: Moral Diversity in the Abortion Debate (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1996) 11

Incidentally, abortions for fetal anomaly are almost always late-term abortions – the tests that detect problems such as down syndrome can only be performed in the second trimester.

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Few Ivy League College Women Carry Unplanned Pregnancies to Term

A large percentage of abortions are performed on college-age women. These women often feel forced to choose between their education and their baby. Groups like Feminists for Life have college outreach programs where they try to encourage colleges and universities to provide services to pregnant and parenting students. This pro-life group believes that no woman should be forced to sacrifice her baby in order to have an education.

The problem is real. Frederica Mathews-Green writes:

“A student at an Ivy League college told the author that the campus health center refers about 50 women a year for abortions; yet in the previous five years the number of students who continued their pregnancies totaled zero.”

Frederica Mathews-Green. Real Choices: Offering Practical, Life-Affirming Alternatives to Abortion (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Books, 1994) 162

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Author Discusses Problem Of “Public Relations” in the New York Times Magazine

Pro-choice activist Nora Johnson:

“Perhaps the major problem of pro-choice public relations is that the image of this procedure we so believe in – of someone scraping or vacuuming out a woman’s insides, digging between her legs into her tender sexual passage, blood, gooey tissue, injured fetus all falling out – is aesthetically a disaster. Are we really pro- that ?

Nora Johnson, “Whose Life Is It?”, “Hers” column, the New York Times Magazine, January 23, 1994 quoted in Frederica Mathews-Green. Real Choices: Offering Practical, Life-Affirming Alternatives to Abortion (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Books, 1994)

To see which is talking about, view these pictures of an actual abortion in progress.

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77% of San Francisco Abortion Providers Have Doubts, Study Says

Abortion clinic workers often struggle emotionally with the difficult task of performing abortions. Ripping apart a fully formed unborn baby whether via suction or via forceps, can be very visually disturbing. In one study, 77% of abortion clinic workers in San Francisco saw abortion as “a destructive act against a living thing.”

According to the study

“Particularly striking was the fact that discomfort with abortion clients or procedures was reported by practitioners who strongly supported abortion rights and expressed strong commitment to their work. This preliminary finding suggested that even those who support a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy may be struggling with an important tension between their formal beliefs and the situated experience of their abortion work.”

…

seen as murder:

“This theme was unexpected among pro-choice practitioners yet 18% of the respondents talked about involvement with abortion this way at some point in the interview. This theme tended to emerge slowly in the interviews and was always presented with obvious discomfort.”

Kathleen M. Roe “Private Troubles and Public Issues” Social Science and Medicine, Vol 29, No 10

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The Washington Times, Feminism and Late-Term Abortions

Richard Cohen started his article saying

“I am pro-choice.”

But he goes on to say:

“Later term abortions may be necessary, but you cannot read about them without feeling diminished as a human being. Something awful has happened, and simply as a matter of principle, we ought to be opposed.”

He said of pro-choice feminists:

“[they] talked as if late-term abortions affect only the woman, no mention of the fetus-child with the collapsed skull.”

Quoted in Suzanne Fields “Feminists Support an Evil Practice” The Washington Times, July 10, 2000

Baby Born at 23 Weeks after Botched Abortion At Queens Park Hospital

A lawsuit was aimed at the Queen’s Park Hospital in England, after an abortion led to a live birth:

From the “My Beautiful Abortion Baby” Lancashire Evening Telegraph, first published Wednesday 1st Nov 1995.

Office manager Julie Robb, 38, was admitted to Queen’s Park Hospital for a “therapeutic termination” after a scan revealed that her 23-week-old foetus could have serious abnormalities, [(cerebral palsy, water on the brain, or downs’ syndrome)]…. A team of medics induced Mrs Robb who gave birth to Elizabeth, weighing 696 grams (1lb 8oz), at 2.25am on December 7 last year

According to the testimony of medical experts, the baby “gasped” after it was born and showed signs of life.Also had heartbeat. The team (2 midwives and 2 specialists) decided not to revive the baby. Death certificate showed baby was alive for 90 minutes, Medical personnel testified it was less than 35 minutes.

Verdict was in favor of hospital

There have actually been many similar cases of babies born alive after abortions.

For example, there was Baby Hope.

And other stories.

The Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which became law in 2001, forbids hospitals and clinics from aborting babies alive and leaving them to die. It was opposed by a number of pro-choice groups. It was also voted against by Barack Obama, then a senator.

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Partial-Birth Abortion More “Respectful” That Vacuum Aspiration?

When commenting about the uproar surrounding the partial-birth abortion ban, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists put out a statement that said `

“it could be considered more respectful to the foetus than established methods of abortion such as vacuum aspiration . . . in which the foetus is removed in fragments’

“Abortion: New and Disturbing Questions.” The Daily Mail. July 17, 1996. 11.

Here is a diagram of a vacuum aspiration, or suction abortion.

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Abortionist “Frustrated” and “Angry” About Her Job

Carole Meyers OB GYN who has performed “hundreds of abortions” and worked as medical director of Planned Parenthood of Maryland:

Addressing crowd of students who had gathered to hear her speak at John Hopkins University:

“”If you are going to perform abortions, how is your family going to think about it? How will you tell your kids? What are you going to do if your church doesn’t want you to come anymore? How are you going to feel about a patient who admits she has picketed the clinic in the past? What about the woman who comes in for her third abortion and doesn’t want to hear about birth control? How are you going to feel about that? I’ll tell you how I feel. I get mad, frustrated, angry.”

7wkbaby — unborn baby at seven weeks – most abortions are done at this point or later in pregnancy

((Patricia Meisol “A Hard Choice: A young medical student tries to decide if she has what it takes to join the diminishing ranks of abortion providers” Washington Post, Nov 23 2008))

Few doctors want to be abortionists. In this section, you can read about stigma and how it affects doctors.

It’s also interesting to note that this abortionist, like many others who work in clinics, gets frustrated and angry at women who have multiple abortions. If abortion is such a benign procedure, merely the removal of some products of conception and ending a pregnancy, why does it matter for woman has more than one? Why does it matter she relies on abortion instead of birth control? The truth is, the abortionist sees the little babies that were torn apart in every abortion and she or he knows the cost that these little people pay.

Many other doctors are disturbed by the act of abortion itself – pulling pieces of arms and legs off of babies or tearing them apart with the suction machine is not a very easy thing to do emotionally.

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Pro-Choice and Post-Abortive

Sometimes people who are vehemently pro-choice have had abortions themselves, and are trying to justify their choice by championing other people’s abortions. Two former pro-choice activists said the following:

From a woman identified as Kelly:

“The first two years after my abortion, I was probably the strongest pro-choice supporter you could find. It was my way of making sure that what I had done was right. I often wonder about some of the louder pro-choice voices out there, because I remember feeling like that. You have to keep telling everybody that you did the right thing.”

From a woman identified as Elizabeth:

“I was a big contributor to Planned Parenthood and NARAL. It was like: this must be the right position because I have to be okay; if not… I’d have to look at what I’ve done.”

Frederica Mathews-Green. Real Choices: Offering Practical, Life-Affirming Alternatives to Abortion (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Books, 1994) 117

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When Life Begins is a “Established Scientific Fact”

Dr. Hymie Gordon, professor of medical genetics and physician at the Mayo Clinic:

“I think we can now also say that the question of the beginning of life – when life begins – is no longer a question for theological or philosophical dispute. It is an established scientific fact. Theologians and philosophers may go on to debate the meaning of life or purpose of life, but it is an established fact that life, including human life, begins at the moment of conception…

I have never ever seen in my own scientific reading, long before I became concerned with issues of life of this nature, that anyone has ever argued that life did not begin at the moment of conception and that it was a human conception if it resulted from the fertilization of the human egg by a human sperm. As far as I know, these have never been argued against.”

The Human Life Bill – S. 158, Report Together with Additional and Minority Views To the Committee of the Judiciary, United States Senate, Made by Its Subcommittee on Separation of Powers, 97th Congress, 1st Session : 9

Found by the subcommittee:

report also said:

“No witness [who testified before the subcommittee] raised any evidence to refute the biological fact that from the moment of conception there exists a distinct individual being who is alive and is of the human species. No witness challenged the scientific consensus that unborn children are “human beings” in so far as the term is used to mean living beings of the human species….Those witnesses who testified that science cannot say whether unborn children are human beings were speaking in every instance to the value question rather than the scientific question… These witnesses invoked their value preferences to redefine the term “human being”… [The witnesses] took the view that each person may define as “human” only those beings whose lives that a person wants to value. Because they did not wish to accord intrinsic worth to the lives of unborn children, they refused to call them “human beings” regardless of the scientific evidence.”

Quoted in Francis J Beckwith. Defending Life: a Moral and Legal Case against Abortion Choice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 68

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