From
Worldometers[dot]info: “According to WHO [World Health Organization],
every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions.
This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day.”
“In
the USA, where nearly half of pregnancies are unintended and four in 10
of these are terminated by abortion, there are over 3,000 abortions per
day. Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies in the USA (excluding
miscarriages) end in abortion.”
In researching my current series of articles on abortion---in which infants are removed, alive, from the womb, and their organs cut out, killing them---for medical research---I’ve come across information about what I would call the culture of abortion.
In this article, I’m just going to quote others and make no comments.
Investigate
Magazine, Ian Wishart, 3/7/12: “[Abortion clinic technician Dean]
Alberty told of seeing babies wounded but alive after abortion
procedures, and in one case a set of twins ‘still moving on the table’
when clinicians from AGF began dissecting the children to harvest their
organs. The children, he said, were ‘cuddling each other’ and ‘gasping
for breath’ when medics moved in for the kill.”
The following quotes are collected at clinicquotes[dot]com., an astonishing resource:
A
Year in the Life of an Abortion Clinic, Peter Korn, 1996: “Although the
operation is over, the fetus is still a matter of concern…Rhonda, a
medical assistant who also works for a biological supply company, takes
the surgical tray in another room where she uses a plastic colander to
strain out the blood, leaving only the separated parts of the fetus.
These she places in a glass dish, taking a moment to measure one of the
feet against a transparent plastic ruler to establish exact gestational
age. Earlier in the day she received her regular fax detailing what body
parts are needed by which researchers around the country. The
researchers specify preferences for age and, in some cases, sex. Liver,
spleen, pancreas, and brain are the organs most often requested.”
Is
Abortion Good for Women, Rachel MacNair, Angela Kennedy; Swimming
Against the Tide: Feminist Dissent on the Issue of Abortion, 1997; from
abortion worker Judith Fetrow, who worked for Planned Parenthood:
“When
I started at Planned Parenthood, I saw two types of women working at
the clinic. One group were women who had found some way to deal with the
emotional and spiritual toll of working with abortion. The second group
were women who had closed themselves off emotionally. They were the
walking wounded. You could look in their eyes, and see that they were
emotionally dead. Unavailable for themselves, or for anyone else.”
Abortion
at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic, Wendy Simonds,
1996; quoting an abortion clinic employee: “It’s just---I mean it looks
like a baby. It looks like a baby. And especially if you get one that
comes out, that’s not piecemeal. And you know, I saw this one, and it
had its fingers in its mouth…it makes me really sad that that had to
happen, you know, but it doesn’t change my mind. It’s just hard. And it
makes me just sort of stop and feel sad about it, the whole necessity of
it. And also….it’s very warm when it comes into the sterile room
because it’s been in the mother’s stomach. It feels like flesh, you
know…”
Interview
of Joy Davis done by Life Dynamics in 1993; Joy Davis, a former
abortion worker, wrote about her fellow clinic workers: “We don’t have
conversations. Sometimes the employees faint. Sometimes they throw up.
Sometimes they have to leave the room. It’s just problems that we deal
with, but it’s not talked about…If you really dwell on it, and talk
about it all the time, then it gets more personal. It gets more real to
you. You just don’t talk about it, try not to think about it…If [the
abortionist] ever caught you discussing something like that, he’d fire
you.”
Sadja
Goldsmith “Second Trimester Abortion by Dilation and Extraction
(Evacuation) [D&E]: Surgical Techniques and Psychological
Reactions”; Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of
Planned Parenthood Physicians in Atlanta, Georgia Oct 13-14 1977; In a
paper on the D&E abortion method, which at the time was new, an
abortionist wrote: “The fetus was extracted in small pieces to minimize
cervical trauma. The fetal head was often the most difficult object to
crush and remove, because of its size and contour. The operator kept
track of each portion of the fetal skeleton….”
“Selective
Abortion, AKA Pregnancy Reduction.” New England Journal of Medicine,
April 21, 1988; Two abortionists describing selective abortions done on
multiple pregnancies: “Using ultra-sound to locate each fetus, the
doctors would insert a needle into the chest cavity of the most
accessible fetus and place the needle tip directly into the heart of the
baby. Potassium chloride was then injected into the heart and the heart
was viewed on the ultrasound screen until it stopped beating. Even at 9
weeks, 3 of the 12 fetuses selected for elimination presented problems.
The heart continued to beat and the procedure had to be repeated.”
Kenneth
Paul Fye, PhD, Obvious Murder: The March From Abortion to Infanticide
(May 30, 2016) 253; Jewish former abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson [who
had performed thousands of abortions] said to an audience in Canada,
where he was speaking: “I’m going to set it against my Jewish heritage
and the Holocaust in Europe. The abortion holocaust is beyond the
ordinary discourse of morality and rational condemnation. It is not
enough to pronounce it absolutely evil… The abortion industry is a new
event, severed from connections with traditional presuppositions of
history, psychology, politics, and morality…This is an evil torn free of
its moorings in reason and causality, and ordinary secular corruption
raised to unimaginable powers of magnification and limitless extremity.”
Written Testimony of Kathi A. Aultman, MD Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing March 15th 2016:
Chairman
Grassley, I would like to thank you for inviting me to participate in
this hearing today. I have spent my entire career as a women’s advocate
and have a keen interest in issues that impact women’s health. I come to
you as someone who has done 1st and 2nd trimester abortions and who has
treated women with the medical and psychological complications of
abortions. I have cared for women and their babies throughout normal
pregnancies, medically complicated ones, and those with fetal anomalies.
I have taken care of women who decided to keep their unplanned
pregnancies and those who aborted them. I have given birth vaginally
twice and I have had an abortion. I also have a cousin who survived an
abortion. I have testified on issues related to abortion in state courts
and legislatures, and before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the
Constitution.
At
the time I entered medical school I believed that the availability of
abortion on demand was an issue of women’s rights. I felt that a woman
should have control over her body and not be forced to bear a child she
didn’t want. My commitment to women’s issues was strengthened as I was
exposed to the discrimination inherent in medical school and residency
at that time, and to the plight of the indigent women we served in our
program. I also believed it was wrong to bring unwanted children into an
overpopulated world where they were likely to be neglected or abused.
During
my residency I was trained in 1st trimester abortions using the D&C
with suction technique. I then sought and received special training in
2nd trimester D&E procedures during which the fetus is crushed and
removed in pieces. After each procedure I had to examine the tissue
carefully to account for all the body parts to make sure nothing was
left to cause infection or bleeding. I was fascinated by the tiny but
perfectly formed intestines, kidneys, and other organs and I enjoyed
looking at their amazing cellular detail under the microscope. I realize
it is hard to imagine someone being able to do that and be so detached
but because of my training and conditioning a human fetus seemed no
different than the chick embryos I dissected in college. I could view
them with strictly scientific interest devoid of any of the emotions
with which I would normally view a baby. I wasn’t heartless I just had
been trained to compartmentalize these things.
If
I had a woman come in with a miscarriage or a still birth and she had
wanted the baby I was distraught with her and felt her pain. The
difference in my mind was whether the baby was wanted or unwanted.
After
my first year of training I got my medical license and was able to get a
job moonlighting at a women’s clinic in Gainesville, Florida doing
abortions. I reasoned that although the need for abortion was
unfortunate, it was the lesser of two evils, and I was doing something
for the wellbeing of women. I also could make a lot more money doing
abortions than I could make working in an emergency room. I enjoyed the
technical challenges of the procedure and prided myself on being really
good at what I did. The only time I experienced any qualms about what I
was doing was when I had my neonatal care rotation and I realized that I
was trying to save babies in the NICU that were the same age as babies I
was aborting, but I rationalized it, and was able to push the feelings
to the back of my mind. My last year in residency I became pregnant but
continued to do abortions without any reservations.
The
first time I returned to the clinic after my delivery, however, I was
confronted with 3 cases that broke my heart and changed my opinion about
abortion. In the first case I discovered that I had personally done 3
abortions on a girl scheduled that morning. When I protested about doing
the abortion, I was told by the clinic staff that it was her right to
choose to use abortion as her method of birth control and that I had no
right to pass judgment on her or to refuse to do the procedure. I told
them it was fine for them to say but that I was the one who had to do
the killing. Of course she got her abortion and despite my urging she
told me she had no desire to use birth control. The next situation
involved a woman who when asked by her friend if she wanted to see the
tissue she replied “No! I just want to kill it!” I was taken aback by
her hostility and lack of compassion towards the fetus.
The
last case brought me to tears. This was a mother of four who didn’t
feel she and her husband could support another child. How I hurt for
that mother. What a terrible decision to have to make. She cried
throughout her time at the clinic and that was the end of my abortion
career. I had finally had made the obvious connection between fetus and
baby.
I
found out later that few doctors are able to do abortions for very
long. Physicians are taught to heal, not harm. OB/GYNs especially, often
experience a conflict of conscience because they are normally are
concerned about the welfare of both their patients but in an abortion
they are killing one of them.
Although
many people view an abortion as just removing a blob of tissue, the
abortionist knows exactly what he or she is doing because they must
count the body parts after each procedure. Eventually the truth sinks in
and if they have a conscience they can no longer do them.
My
views also changed as I saw young women in my practice who did
amazingly well after deciding to keep their unplanned pregnancies and
those who were struggling with the emotional aftermath of abortion. It
was not what I expected to see.
I
will never forget one woman who had gone to the Orlando area for a late
term abortion. She had not recovered from the horror of delivering her
live 20+ week baby boy into the toilet. Her agony was compounded by the
fact that her baby brother had died by drowning.
Another
woman told me that she was seeing a psychiatrist because although she
strongly believed in a woman’s right to choose abortion she couldn’t
cope with the realization that she had killed her child. Some of my
patients didn’t express any remorse until they realized they would never
get pregnant either because of medical problems, advancing age, or
personal issues. I personally didn’t have any concern or remorse about
having had an abortion until after I had my first child. It was then
that I mourned the child that would have been.
As
a society we have shifted our priorities from basic human rights to
women’s rights and have taught our young women that nothing should
interfere with their right to do whatever they want with their bodies,
especially when it comes to pregnancy. We have also done a good job of
sanitizing our language to make abortion more palatable. We don’t speak
about the “baby”, rather we talk about the “fetus”. The abortionist
“terminates the pregnancy” rather than “killing the baby”. As medical
doctors and as a society we have moved away from the idea that life is
precious and closer to the utilitarian attitudes which wreaked so much
havoc during the last century. In most ethical dilemmas we must weigh
the rights of one person against the rights of another.
Even
for the most staunch abortion supporter there is a line somewhere that
they feel shouldn’t be crossed. I would agree that we need to give a
women as much choice as possible in determining her future and what she
does with her body but we must also recognize the truth that there are
at least 2 people involved in a pregnancy and that at some point the
rights of the weaker one deserve some consideration. Some people believe
life begins at conception when the egg and sperm meet and should be
safe guarded at that point. Others feel it isn’t until it is safely
implanted it its mother’s uterus that it deserves protection. Many feel
it should have some rights once it is viable or old enough to live
outside the womb. Yet there are some who feel that the baby has no
rights even in process of being born. Should a baby that can live
outside the womb be given no consideration, no protection, and no
rights, just because it is unwanted? Should we not at least have
compassion on babies at 20 weeks gestation when their nervous systems
are developed enough for them to experience pain and protect them from
the excruciating pain of being dismembered or killed in other ways?
Hopefully
we all agree that a mother should not be able to kill her 3 year old
child; but what about an infant? There are some who advocate that a
mother should have the right to euthanize her infant up until 3 months
of age because there may be a defect that didn’t express itself at
birth. I think most Americans would say that once a baby is born there
is no question it should be protected and yet there are those who say
that if it is unwanted but managed to survive an abortion it does not
qualify for the same care that any other baby would get at the same
gestation and it is OK to kill it. Is it the child’s fault that it is
unwanted? Should it lose its rights simply for that reason? Doesn’t the
government have a responsibility to protect that child even if its
parents won’t? What if a baby is defective when it is born? We have laws
to protect people with disabilities. Are we going to exclude babies,
our most vulnerable citizens, from that protection? The problem is where
does it stop? Where does a civilized society draw the line?
As
legislators you have the burdensome task of writing the laws that
govern our society and that the majority of people will accept. At the
same time you must protect the most vulnerable among us. You are
ultimately the ones who will determine where that line is drawn. It’s a
difficult job. We are a people of many religions and traditions with
different needs and wants.
In
making your decision you should not forget that abortion generates a
lot of money. Much of the power and influence behind the drive to
prevent any restriction on abortion comes from those who make a profit
on it and I am sad to say they have used a distorted view of women’s
rights as a cover.
I
have always thought of myself as a good person but at one point I was
horrified by the realization that I had killed more people than most
mass murderers. Today when I meet young men and women that I delivered,
the joy of meeting them and knowing that I played a part in bringing
them into the world safely, is clouded by the thought of all the ones I
will never meet because I terminated their lives. I would not want to be
in your shoes and have the burden of knowing that I could have
prevented the deaths of thousands even millions and did nothing. I would
encourage you to vote for both of these bills.
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Gab at @jonrappoport)
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