Posted on 11/28/2001 2:48:37 PM PST by Caleb1411
At 6:15 a.m. in an industrial park in central Los Angeles, a plain-looking warehouse is unlocked. Beyond the iron gates and surveillance camera, another iron gate leads to a truck yard, which leads to the giant doors. Inside, the trucks are warmed up. A few more people show up. Some are staff, some are volunteers and two of them are off-duty police officers who will escort the trucks.
The reason for all the security is apparent when you look at the trucks. Photographs of aborted fetuses, blown up to billboard size, decorate each side of the bed of every truck. The word "Choice" in quotation marks and a web address loom over the photos. Some of the babies are juxtaposed against a dime as big as their entire body. Every working day, five days a week, since June, these trucks have been on the freeways of Los Angeles turning heads for three hours as they drive through morning traffic.
The trucks are the latest weapon of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a non-profit pro-life group dedicated to getting the public to face the issue they love to avoid. Its founder and director, Greg Cunningham, briefs the crew before leaving on today's run. Using a large map, he reveals his plan. Today they will follow a loop that begins on the 605 North to 60 East to 57 North, to 210 West to 134 West, to 405 South to the 10 East to 5 South and back to 605 South. "We will drive this loop ad nauseam -- that is, until every driver that has seen us is nauseated!" Cunningham jokes. The session ends with a brief prayer. At 6:40 a.m., everyone boards the trucks.
Riders wears body armor -- a 50 pound, bullet-proof SWAT vest with steel panels on all four sides of the torso. Each vest has pepper spray in its pocket. Helmets are located under the seats, just in case. "The California Highway Patrol turned down our application to armor-plate the cabs," explained Cunningham. "The windows are not bulletproof, but they are coated with mylar film, which can stop a brick. We don't put our people in harm's way for the purpose of getting beaten up."
A security car, outfitted like a police car, follows the convoy of trucks, keeping lanes clear behind them and making sure no one can stalk the convoy upon return to the warehouse. The security car and the trucks are equipped with video cameras that document all surrounding activity on each trip. Each member of the convoy communicates by radio. "Violence against pro-lifers is under-reported because a lot of pro-life activists just don't think the police will do anything about it," explained Cunningham, "and frequently they won't do anything about it. It's harder to get district attorneys to prosecute it and it's harder to get judges to find people guilty for it or penalize them significantly. [Yet] a bogus allegation of an assault against a pro-abort is likely to land a pro-lifer in jail."
During the early part of the trip, the trucks are going against the commute. Stalled traffic on the other side of Highway 60 cannot miss the message on each truck. The trucks move at 45 mph, the minimum legal speed on California's highways. As he drives, Cunningham explains their mission. "The truck campaign is an outgrowth of the [pro-life] Genocide Awareness Project, which involves the outdoor display of large photo murals on university campuses. We've now been on 33 public campuses all over the country. Probably three quarters of a million students have seen these pictures now.
"The campus project resulted from a fairly sophisticated analysis we had done on the unchanging principles of social reform, going back 150 years or more. We've examined every movement from the abolition of child labor, the abolition of slavery, to the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Successful social reformers invariably used horrifying pictures to dramatize injustice and to confront the culture and prick the collective conscience. But since the reformers were social liberals, they found sympathetic allies in the press, who would broadcast these photos. Clearly, the press, if not hostile, is certainly not sympathetic to our [pro-life] point of view. So we had to come up with a new mass medium, a way of putting these pictures into the heads of people who are never going to see them in the media. The freeway system is built for transportation, but it could be appropriated for educational purposes. Commutes are getting longer and freeways are getting more crowded each year and you basically have a captive audience of people who can't change the channel and can't turn the page when they see us."
Cunningham's voice is earnest, steady and gentle. "When I am asked a question on talk-radio, two or three words into my answers, everyone starts shouting me down. When I was on the Leslie Marshall show, she got so angry with me that she hung up on me. I was supposed to come on at six in the evening on the Brian Whittaker show; but he kept me on hold until six-thirty, just beating the heck out of us, criticizing, misstating facts, and taking hostile calls, not letting me off hold into the conversation; so I finally hung up. Without realizing it, these talk show hosts who are so vehemently opposed to the truck project are making our point, which is, you can't hang up on the trucks. You can't put them on hold and you can't shout them down.
"The trucks are in your face," said Cunningham. "That's critical, because another aspect of social reform that we identified was massive societal denial among people complicit in injustice or complacent in response to the injustice. They felt guilty about it, and, as a consequence, didn't want to know more about the injustice than they already knew. So if you want to teach people who don't want to learn, you've got to develop methodologies that don't rely on the consent of the person you are trying to educate. Once you look at the pictures, they are in your head and you're never going to get them out. Every time you hear the word 'abortion' thereafter, instead of an abstraction, you are going to see a dead baby, tortured to death, bloody, sickening. Over time, if you have a functioning conscience, these images will begin to change the way you feel, think and ultimately, behave."
"Those who shout me down are foils for me," mused Cunningham, "because they are demonstrating their fear of my answer. These trucks have created pandemonium on the other side, because there is nothing they can do to stop this. If they respond violently, they draw more attention to us and discredit themselves. If they take us to court, they create a forum for the project. It's like the dilemma of an animal caught in a leg-hold trap; the harder it pulls, the deeper the teeth sink into its leg. The pro-aborts don't know whether to ignore this or resist it, so the only semi-coherent criticism we hear, besides 'You're upsetting children,' is that the pictures aren't real. The liberals know that if the pictures are real, they're dead. There's no moral defense for their position that's in any way convincing, so they resort to the same tactics that neo-Nazi skinheads employ when confronted with evidence of the Holocaust. They just say the pictures are fake and it never happened."
Cunningham recognizes that some people will never be convinced. "This project only works with those who have a functioning conscience. This is an educational, not a spiritual, project. A person who understands the magnitude of the evil that abortion represents and endorses it nonetheless is not ignorant but is morally bankrupt. I'm not aiming this at the 20 percent of the population that is irremediably evil, but at the, maybe, 60 percent that's just confused about all of this or believes abortion is the lesser of two evils because they don't know how evil it actually is. Evil that remains invisible quickly becomes tolerable. It's imperative that you make it real to people."
The unwanted nature of the message is what Cunningham believes gives it power. "That creates a great deal of anger, but Martin Luther King created a great deal of anger, the anti-Vietnam war movement created a great deal of anger. Earth First creates a great deal of anger. Social reformers don't care what people think of them, but what people think of injustice. I'm willing to get people angry at me to get them angry at abortion."
Though a conservative, Cunningham does not spare conservatives in his prescription to end abortion. The principal reason the pro-life movement has made so little progress over the last 30 years is because social reform is new to conservatives," he said. "Conservatives, to their discredit, are frequently defenders of an unjust status quo and it's political liberals who usually try to effect reform. Conservatives mistakenly imagine that in order to be effective, you have to be liked. At some level, they just can't deal with disapproval the way liberals can." Conservatives are "beaten down by liberals who are very clever at identity politics. 'If you're against abortion, you're against women.' That's an intellectually dishonest way of changing the subject; to discredit your opponent because you don't want to deal with his argument. None of those tactics work in the face of a dead baby picture in your windshield on the way to work. Is this a baby or isn't it? Is this an act of violence or isn't it? Should this be lawful or not?
"The pro-life movement doesn't have a clue as to how to change peoples' understandings of the facts of abortion. They just want to shout conclusions and opinions at people. What's really bizarre is that mainstream pro-life organizations and the Church are working harder than Planned Parenthood to suppress the best evidence we have -- photo evidence -- that abortion is an act of violence and it does kill a baby."
Cunningham is very disappointed with the efforts -- or lack thereof -- of Catholic bishops to fight abortion. "The U.S. bishops just bought an ad campaign whose operating principle is subtlety. During the Vietnam War, the working press had historically low approval ratings because people were angry that night after night the television showed the police chief of Saigon blowing out the brains of a Vietcong suspect, or naked children whose clothing was burned off by napalm running toward the camera. Those photos lodged in the public mind and gradually eroded public support for U.S. involvement in the war. The press was willing to take the hit. The protesters were willing to accept persecution. They had their eyes focused on a public policy objective and you can't win that on the cheap.
"But the bishops want to win this on the cheap," continued Cunningham. "They are laboring under the misconception that to be effective you have to be liked. They need to go back and read the prophets of the Old Testament and note the consistency with which they were persecuted and even martyred. Jesus said, 'If they persecute me, they will persecute you.' Well, they're not persecuting the bishops because the bishops have been very careful to avoid any behavior that invites persecution.
"The National Council of Catholic Bishops is releasing these insipid, 'subtle' ad campaigns that are designed to be just pro-life enough to mollify the 20 percent of the Church that is comprised of traditional orthodox Catholics, but not pro-life enough to antagonize the 20 percent of parishioners who are hard-core pro-aborts and are constantly trying to throttle and thwart pro-life activism in the Church. So the 60 percent who are in the middle on all of this are just abandoned to twist in the wind. It's the attempt to create the impression that NCCB is serious about abortion, when they're really only doing half-measured, conscience-salving stuff that is so dishonest.
Cunningham is equally disappointed with Evangelicals in the fight for life. He believes both Catholics and Protestants are losing an opportunity and uses the term "the Church" as a reference to all denominations. "The bishops are wrong about this," he said. "It may be that when you offend people they will close their ears, but I'm not speaking to them. I care what they do with their eyes and they can't close their eyes on the freeway without having a wreck. We are a visual culture. So many people in the pro-life movement learned in an age when people read and listened. That's over. Kids learn today by looking, and people my age, middle-aged people, don't get that. The bishops and Respect Life coordinators don't get that, and that's one of the reasons we're losing this thing. Gut decision makers tend to be voyeuristic; so if that's where the culture is, that's where we've got to engage them. The bishops are just bureaucrats. If the bishops were where the pope is in the fight against abortion, this fight would be over.
"This slaughter is occurring with our permission. The Church is permitting an atrocity to happen that God has given us the resources to stop. That's why the Church has blood on its hands in a very real sense. When Jesus commanded us show our love for God by obeying His commandments, he wasn't just talking about prohibitions against doing evil, He was talking as well about our affirmative duty to intervene on behalf of those who are being victimized by injustice. That's what the parable of the Good Samaritan is about and it's that affirmative duty that the Church is failing to discharge. Even while the Church mumbles platitudes about abortion being law, you show me your checkbook and I'll show you what you're serious about. From that perspective, the Church is hardly serious about abortion. All 'peace and justice' issues are irrelevant to dead babies. Illiteracy, homelessness, poverty, disease, hunger are absolutely irrelevant to a dead baby. Abortion is a threshold sin. It's a foundational evil."
As we turn on the 210 and enter the San Gabriel Valley, traffic gets heavier. As we get closer to Pasadena, the cars start getting more expensive. Although no one is making obscene gestures at us today - otherwise a frequent occurrence -- many people are glaring or staring at the trucks. Passengers in cars point and seem to be having animated discussions. "When we are in Orange County and the Inland Empire, we get looks of stunned disbelief," said Cunningham. "Some people will attempt to cut us off or break into the convoy. They'll do that when they haven't seen the police car behind us. We'll see more aggressive driving the closer we get to West L.A. That's where the cultural elites are.
"Sometimes we'll go into Malibu and Topanga Canyon and that's where the studio bigwigs are. You'll start really seeing the obscene gestures and scowls and frowns. They're scandalized because they regard these areas as their domain and we're violating the sanctity of their liberal environs by bringing the truth of abortion to Malibu."
To prevent legal harassment, the project keeps two public interest law firms on retainer: the Life Legal Defense Foundation and the Thomas More Center. "We involve counsel in the planning of everything we do, from the conceptual level all the way through implementation," said Cunningham. "We structure our activities to give us maximum litigation advantage and our adversaries the minimum of openings to harass us in court. In the eleven years the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform has been doing its work, we have not been sued once. We are easily the most aggressive pro-life organization in the country. We've only sued someone else once; we brought a federal lawsuit against Indiana University last year and forced a settlement on them that allows us to display our Genocide Awareness Project at a very prominent location on their campus."
In spite of the "in your face" approach of this project, Cunningham denounces all pro-life violence. Still, Cunningham thinks the pro-life movement has not been all that violent. "Look at the history of social reform," said Cunningham, "and note the thousands of bombings and riots and injuries and arrests and murders (especially during the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war movement). Compare that to the pro-life movement, where only seven lives have been lost in 30 years, with only a tiny fraction of bombings and arsons and virtually no riots. To suggest that the pro-life movement has been violent is preposterous. There were more people killed during a few days of rioting in the Rodney King matter in Los Angeles than have been killed in the entire history of the pro-life movement -- not only in this country, but worldwide.
The Genocide Awareness Project is funded by donations. "Ironically, much of our work is being funded by people in the southeastern United States. There are some enlightened donors there who believe the best way to fight abortion in Kentucky is by funding pro-life activism in Southern California because California is such a trend-setting state. If you're able to make a dent in public opinion here, the theory is that the influence that the activism creates will spread to other parts of the country. Almost all of the funding has come from private individuals and almost none of it is institutional money." What is Cunningham's goal should the funding continue to increase? "Expansion to more cities," he said.
A former state legislator, justice department official, and assistant U.S. attorney, Cunningham, 54, says something deeper keeps him doing pro-life work. "I sat in the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles," said Cunningham, "and every week watched 25 or 30 resumés come across my desk from people at very good law firms and from very good law schools; day by day it became clearer to me that any one of these people could do my job at least as well as I, and some of them better. But none of them would be willing to fight the greatest moral evil the world has ever seen. I thought to myself, 'I'm going to have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and explain what I was doing while the sewers of our cities were running red with the blood of our children.'"
"I don't understand Christians who agonize about being in the will of God and then dedicate their lives to doing the work that the pagans are perfectly willing to do! Christians want to live a 'normal life' and the 'American Dream,' but that notion would have been absolutely anathema to firstcentury Christians. I admit, I'm a materialistic person. I used to have a private plane. I had a Rolex and drove a Porsche, and I miss them. But I can't have those things and sit here on the freeway, scandalizing Southern California with the horror of abortion. We've got to make a choice. If I'm going to be serious about giving more of my time to this work, then I've got to be willing to live more modestly than I was willing to live. I'm not some super-spiritual person; this was not easy. My contemporaries with whom I went to law school are at the apex of their careers, doing things I would rather be doing and living in places where I would rather live.
"A guy named Leith Anderson wrote a book called Dying For Change about the Church," continued Cunningham. "He noticed that the Church and para-church organizations tend to move away from geographical centers of cultural influence while liberal organizations tend to move into centers of cultural influence. We see this again and again, that conservatives would rather live where they want to live and be left alone, where liberals want to change the world. So liberals go where they can have the greatest possible impact -- the news centers, media, entertainment and education - to the points of influence that have the greatest impact on the culture. Conservatives, again, are dumb as a post about all this. The irony of it is most traditional Christians, Catholic, Evangelical, what have you, are conservatives, and they're under a biblical mandate from our Lord to change the world. It is we who are supposed to be changing that world and we have abdicated that responsibility to pagan liberals -- some of them masquerading as Catholic clerics."
As we enter a bumper-to-bumper 405 South at the Sepulveda Pass, we are in what Cunningham describes as one of the areas where the offense taken at the photos is greatest. He is able to generalize reactions according to car models. "Porsches aren't that bad and Mercedeses aren't that bad, but there's something about a BMW that attracts serious pro-aborts. I saw a lady who almost had a wreck on the 405 North; she got off at one of the Hollywood exits and she was leaning out of her window, wobbling and swerving, trying to shout backward at us, while she tried to exit. I was afraid she would get cut in half. If abortion is O.K., then why do these pictures upset them so?"
As we move south of Westwood, we turn east on 10 and traffic thins out. Gawkers continue to slow down and stare as they pass us, but the ride back to the warehouse is uneventful. As we pull into the lot, a pickup following us takes down the building's address, then flees before the police stop him. They don't bother chasing him. Another successful mission is accomplished. An estimated 400 thousand drivers have seen the message.
Cunningham's strategy is best summarized by analogy to a chess game. "This is like a chess game where we don't even let our opponent sit down at the table until we've pre-positioned the pieces to place him at checkmate," said Cunningham. "Then we invite him to sit down and tell him, 'It's your move.' Although we're not going to do anything unlawful or immoral, we're not going to play this game pursuant to rules written by pro-aborts and weak bishops."
According to the Gallop Poll, you are only 17% of we the poeple. The other 83% of the we the people do tolerate it.
End of story.
Yes many are. Many have been lied to for years that the aborted baby is nothing but a blob of tissue, just some piece growing on the mother, or that it is like some kind of parasite. The truth is important, to me the lies are far more hideous than this display, it's at least about honesty regarding abortion and what is being done to babies.
"Because it's the mirror of their souls..." The truth. The perfect response.
BTW, I just finished the first volume of Ian Kershaw's masterful biography of Adolf Hitler. As the final chapter came to a close, Hitler had just militarized the Rhineland and called for new elections. The people voted for him and his party at a rate of 98.6%. I guess they were right, too.
"It is when I am holding a plastic uterus in one hand, a suction tube in the other, moving them together in imitation of the scrubbing to come, that woman ask the most secret question. I am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about 'the tissue' and 'the contents' when the woman suddenly catches my eye and says 'How big is the baby now?' These words suggest a quiet need for definition of the boundaries being drawn. It isn't so odd, after all, that she feels relief when I describe the growing buds bulbous shape, its miniature nature. Again, I gauge, and sometimes lie a little, weaseling around its infantile features until its clinging power slackens."
--abortion worker Sallie Tisdale "We Do Abortions Here" Oct 1987 Harpers Magazine p 68
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"In my facilities, I always gave option counseling. Of course you make the abortion the most appealing. I told them about adoption and about foster care and about [when there was welfare] assistance. The typical way it would go is, "Well, you know you can place your baby out for adoption." But then, in the second breath you would say, "That's an option available to you, but you also have to realize that there's going to be a baby of yours out here somewhere in the world you will never see again. At least with abortion you know what's happening. You can go on with your life...The longer I was in it, the less I cared, so I really didn't really care what my conscience said. My conscience was totally numb anyway. But what it did do was public relations-wise. You were able, when a reporter or TV crew came, to pull out a packet of information for the patients to read and they received it. So what can anybody say? Publicly it looked good -- in reality it was another tool that was used to force a woman into abortion. It's typical -- I would give them an option and then shoot it down. The only option you didn't shoot down, obviously, was abortion."
Former clinic owner Eric Harrah quoted by Dr. Jack Willke and Brad Mattes
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"Counselors are just to give the appearance of help. . . [They] think of themselves as company for the women." --abortion counselor
"I have never yet counseled anybody to have the baby. I'm also doing women's counseling on campus at Albany State, and there I am expected to present alternatives. Whereas at the abortion clinic you aren't really expected to."
--abortion counselor Rachel Weeping and Other Essays About Abortion. James Tunstead Burtchaell, editor. New York: Universal Press, 1982
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"Vital signs should be observed regularly, and a Doppler [for listening to the fetal heartbeat] inaudible to the patient should be used at intervals to determine the presence or absence of fetal heart tones.. This [informed consent] is a controversial area, but most professionals in the field feel that it is not advisable for patients to view the products of conception, to be told the sex of the fetus, or to be informed of a multiple pregnancy" --Abortionist Warren Hern in "Abortion Practice" J.B. Lippincott Company, 1984 pgs 145 and 304
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"Sonography in connection with induced abortion may have psychological hazards. Seeing a blown-up, moving image of the embryo she is carrying can be distressing to a woman who is about to undergo an abortion, Dr. Sally Faith Dorfman noted. She stressed that the screen should be turned away from the patient."
--"Obstetrics and Gynecology News" editorial February 15-28, 1986
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"I was trained by a professional marketing director in how to sell abortions over the telephone. He took every one of our receptionists, nurses, and anyone else who would deal with people over the phone through an extensive training period. The object was, when the girl called, to hook the sale so that she wouldn't get an abortion somewhere else, or adopt out her baby, or change her mind. We were doing it for the money."
--Nina Whitten, chief secretary at a Dallas abortion clinic under Dr. Curtis Boyd
"They [the women] are never allowed to look at the ultrasound because we knew that if they so much as heard the heart beat, they wouldn't want to have an abortion." -Dr. Randall 'Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet" by David Kuperlain and Mark Masters in Oct "New Dimensions" magazine
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"Every woman has these same two questions: First, "Is it a baby?" "No" the counselor assures her. "It is a product of conception (or a blood clot, or a piece of tissue). . .How many women would have an abortion, if they told them the truth?"
--Carol Everett, former owner of two clinics and director of four "A Walk Through an Abortion Clinic" by Carol Everett ALL About Issues magazine Aug-Sept 1991, p 117
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"If a woman we were counseling expressed doubts about having an abortion, we would say whatever was necessary to persuade her to abort immediately."
--Judy W., former office manager of the second largest abortion clinic in El Paso, Texas
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"We tried to avoid the women seeing them [the fetuses] They always wanted to know the sex, but we lied and said it was too early to tell. It's better for the women to think of the fetus as an 'it.'
--Abortion clinic worker Norma Eidelman quoted in Rachel Weeping p 34
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"The counselor at our clinic would cry with the girls at the drop of a hat. She would find theirweakness and work on it. The women were never given any alternatives. They were told how much trouble it is to have a baby."
--former abortion worker Debra Harry, quoted in the film "Meet the Abortion Providers" 1989
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"When discussing the sonogram, you are supposed to tell the client that it is a measurement as far as the pregnancy is concerned, but not a measure of the fetal head or anything like that."
--Rosemary Petruso, on her training to be an abortion counselor. Her story appeared in the St. Louis Review and was also quoted in "Women Exploited: The Other Victims of Abortion" Paula Ervin, editor. Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 1985
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"Sometimes we lied. A girl might ask what her baby was like at a certain point in the pregnancy: Was it a baby yet? Even as early as 12 weeks a baby is totally formed, he has fingerprints, turns his head, fans his toes, feels pain. But we would say 'It's not a baby yet. It's just tissue, like a clot.'"
--Kathy Sparks told in "The Conversion of Kathy Sparks" by Gloria Williamson, Christian Herald Jan 1986 p 28
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"When I first started working there [at the clinic], I had to sit and listen to women answering the phone for at least a month before they would allow me to answer the phone. We had to know exactly what we were doing when we were talking to these women. We had to find out very quickly what their problem was, play on that and get them in the clinic for an abortion. We were very good salespeople."
-Joy Davis
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"In fact many women will come to me considering abortion, and I have been personally told that I am to turn the monitor away from her view so that seeing her baby jump around on the screen does not influence her choice."
--Shari Richards, quoted from the John Ankerburg Show on 3/7/90
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"When a girl called to make her appointment, we'd work her in as soon as possible. If she called on Tuesday, we'd have her in no later than Friday. We wanted to avoid a long waiting period where she'd have time to think about it. First she would fill out her forms, and then talk with a counselor. . . The counselors were trained in what areas to cover and which to avoid. They'd say, "I know this is a terrible situation you're in. What can we do to help make this better for you? Yeah, it doesn't sound like you're ready for a pregnancy right now." Their task was to keep the machinery moving - to get the woman into the procedure room as quickly as possible."
---clinic worker, name withheld
"There was a public health center in a town not far from Denver and they sent a lot of girls to us. They told us they did all the counseling. We weren't allowed to counsel them or even ask them about birth control. We couldn't even tell them what could happen during the abortion. Nothing. If we tried to discuss alternatives, we would get in trouble with the doctor because then the health center would threaten to send their business elsewhere. All we did was find out how far along they were, tell them when they were going to be finished, get their money, do the abortion, and send them home."
--Registered nurse Sam Griggs
From "Abortion Clinics: An Inside Look" published by Last Days Ministries.
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"I have seen hundreds of patients in my office who have had abortions and were just lied to by the abortion counselor. Namely 'This is less painful than having a tooth removed. It is not a baby.' Afterwards, the woman sees Life magazine and breaks down and goes into a major depression." --Psychologist Vincent Rue quoted in "Abortion Inc" David Kupelian and Jo Ann Gasper, New Dimensions, October 1991 p 16
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"The Pennsylavania Abortion Control Act went into effect on March 20, 1994. For the past six years, health centers that provide abortion services and the lawyers representing them have been fighting the provisions of the law. What does the law provide? Women seeking an abortion must be told by a physician at least 24 hours prior to the procedure the nature of the procedure and the probable gestational age of the fetus. Women must also be told that the Commonwealth's materials are available describing fetal development and listing for agencies that offer alternatives to abortion. . . What we must do now is make sure that our Representatives know how strongly we feel about the law. Call them, write to them! Let them know how burdensome these regulations are. Vote for pro-choice candidates...."
--Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center for Women newsletter April 1994
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More evidence of abortion clinic lies.
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Part Two: What is abortion really like? Why all this fuss about abortion? Isn't it just the removal of a ball of cells?
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"But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside."
--Sallie Tisdale "We Do Abortions Here"
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"I can remember...the resident doctor sitting down, putting the tube in, and removing the contents. I saw the bloody material coming down the plastic tube, and it went into a big jar. My job afterwards was to go and undo the jar, and to see what was inside.
I didn't have any views on abortion; I was in a training program, and this was a brand new experience. I was going to get to see a new procedure and learn. I opened the jar and took the little piece of stockingnette stocking and opened the little bag. The resident doctor said "Now put it on the blue towel and check it out. We want to see if we got it all.' I thought, "that'll be exciting-hands on experience looking at tissue.' I opened the sock up and put it on the towel, and there were parts of a person in there. I had taken anatomy, I was a medical student. I knew what I was looking at. There was a little scapula and an arm, I saw some ribs and a chest, and a little tiny head. I saw a piece of a a leg, and a tiny hand and an arm, and you know, it was like somebody put a hot poker into me. I had a conscience, and it hurt. Well, I checked it out and there were two arms and two legs and one head and so forth, and I turned and said "I guess you got it all.' That was a very hard experience to go through emotionally.
--Former abortionist
"Saline abortions have to be done in the hospital because of the complications that can arise. Not that they can't arise during other times, but more so now. The saline, a salt solution, is injected into the woman's sac, and the baby starts dying a slow, violent death. The mother feels everything, and many times it is at this point when she realizes that she really has a live baby inside her, because the baby starts fighting violently, for his or her life. He's just fighting inside because he's burning."
--Debra Harry "One night a lady delivered and I was called to come and see her because she was 'uncontrollable.' I went into the room, and she was going to pieces; she was having a nervous breakdown, screaming and thrashing. The other patients were upset because this lady was screaming. I walked in, and here was this little saline abortion baby kicking. It had been born alive, and was kicking and moving for a little while before it finally died of those terrible burns, because the salt solution gets into the lungs and burns the lungs too. I'll tell you one thing about D& E . You never have to worry about a baby's being born alive. I won't describe D & E , other than to say that, as a doctor, you are sitting there tearing, and I mean tearing- you need a lot of strength to do it- arms and legs off of babies and putting them in a stack on top of the table." --Dr. David Brewer of Glen Ellyn Illinois
"I remember an experience as a resident on a hysterotomy. I remember seeing the baby move underneath the sack of membranes, as the cesarean incision was made, before the doctor broke the water. The thought came to me, "My God, that's a person" Then he broke the water. And when he broke the water, it was like I had a pain in my heart, just like when I saw that first suction abortion. And then he delivered the baby,. and I couldn't touch it.. I wasn't much of an assistant. I just stood there, and the reality of what was doing on finally began to seep into my calloused brain and heart. They took that little baby that was making little sounds and moving and kicking, and set it on that table in a cold, stainless steel bowl. Every time I would look over while we were repairing the incision in uterus and finishing the Caesarean, I would see that little person moving in that bowl. And it kicked and moved less and less, of course, as time went on. I can remember going over and looking at the baby when we were done with the surgery and the baby was still alive. You could see the chest was moving and the heart was beating, and the baby would try to take a little breath, and it really hurt inside, and it began to educate me as to what abortion really was." quoted in "Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet"
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"Following [the doctor's] directions, I took the collection bottle and poured its contents into a shallow pan. Then I used water to rinse off the blood and smaller particles which clouded the bottom of the pan. 'Now look closely,' the doctor said. 'It is important that we have got all the stuff out.' I looked in the pan to find that the stuff consisted of the remains of what had been, a few minutes before, a thirteen week old fetus. I could make out the remains of arms and legs and a trunk and a skull. I tried to piece them back together in my mind, to see if there were any missing parts. Most of the pieces were so battered and bloody they were not recognizably human. Then my eyes locked upon a perfect little hand, less than half a centimeter long. I stared at four tiny fingers and a tiny opposed thumb, complete with tiny translucent fingers. And I knew what I had done."
--former abortionist "Chi An" quoted in Stephen Mosher's "A Mother's Ordeal: One Woman's Fight Against China's One Child Policy" pgs 60-61
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"I got to where I couldn't stand to look at the little bodies anymore"
--Dr. Beverly McMillan, when asked why she stopped performing abortions.
"I have been there, and I have seen these totally formed babies as early as ten weeks... with the leg missing, or with their head off. I have seen the little rib cages..." --Debra Harry
"We all wish it were formless, but its not...and its painful. There is a lot of emotional pain." --abortion clinic worker Quoted in "The Ex Abortionists: They Have Confronted Reality" Washington Post April 1, 1988 p a 21
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"You have to become a bit schizophrenic. In one room, you encourage the patient that the slight irregularity in the fetal heart is not important, that she is going to have a fine, healthy baby. Then, in the next room you assure another woman, on whom you just did a saline abortion, that it is a good thing that the heartbeat is already irregular....she has nothing to worry about, she will NOT have a live baby...All of a sudden one noticed that at the time of the saline infusion there was a lot of activity in the uterus. That's not fluid currents. That's obviously the fetus being distressed by swallowing the concentrated salt solution and kicking violently and that's to all intents and purposes, the death trauma. ..somebody has to do it, and unfortunately we are the executioners in this instance..." --abortionist Dr.Szenes
"And then to see, to be with somebody while they're having the injection when they're twenty or twenty-four weeks, and you see the baby moving around, kicking around, as this needle goes into the stomach, you know." --Susan Lindstrom, M.S.W.
"I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person in there, floating in a bloody liquid- plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But hen perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises and the face has the agonized tauntness of one forced to die too soon. I have seen this face before, on a Russian soldier lying on a frozen snow-covered hill, stiff with death, and cold." --Pro-choice doctor and author Magda Denes "Performing Abortions" by Magda Denes, M.D. "Commentary" Oct. 26 1976 p 35-37
Also quoted Magda Denes, "[the doctor] pulls out something, which he slaps on the instrument table. "there," he says, "A leg." . . . I turn to Mr. Smith. . . He points to the instrument table, where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about three inches long. . . "There, I've got the head out now." ...There lies a head. It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a person."
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"If I see a case...after twenty weeks, where it frankly is a child to me, I really agonize over itbecause the potential is so imminently there...On the other hand, I have another position, which I think is superior in the hierarchy of questions, and that is "who owns this child?" It's got to be the mother."
--Dr. James MacMahon, who performs D & X abortions, in Nat Hentoff "It's Just Too Late: Third Trimester abortions are an Outrage and an Insult to the Human Race" July 27, 1993 Pittsburg Post-Gazette
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Describing an abortion that apparently did not prevent the child from being born alive, Dr. Haskell said this, "It came out very quickly after I put the scissors up in the cervical canal and pierced the skull and spread the scissors apart...in the previous two, I had used the suction to collapse the skull." --Dayton Daily News Sun Dec 10 1989
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"The first time, I felt like a murderer, but I did it again and again and again, and now, 20 years later, I am facing what happened to me as a doctor and as a human being. Sure, I got hard. Sure, the money was important. And oh, it was an easy thing, once I had taken the step, to see the women as animals and the babies as just tissue." --abortionist quoted from a radio talk show by John Rice in "Abortion" Litt D. Murfreesboro, TN.
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"I have never known a woman who, after her baby was born, was not overjoyed that I had not killed it." --Abortionist Aleck Bourne "A Doctor Speaks" London Express, Jan 25
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"We know that its killing, but the state permits killing under certain circumstances" --Dr. Neville Sender, abortionist
"Even now I feel a little peculiar about it, because as a physician I was trained to conserve life, and here I am destroying it." --abortionist
"There was not one [doctor] who at some point in the questioning did not say "This is murder."' --Magda Denes on her two years of research done for her book In Necessity and Sorrow; Life and Death Inside an Abortion Clinic.
Also
"I do think abortion is murder- of a very special and necessary sort. And no physician ever involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that." "You know there is something in there alive that you are killing." --another abortionist interviewed by Denes
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"Clinic workers may say they support a woman's right to choose, but they will also say that they do not want to see tiny hands and tiny feet....there is a great difference between the intellectual support of a woman's right to choose and the actual participation in the carnage of abortion. Because seeing body parts bothers the workers." --Judith Fetrow, former clinic worker from San Francisco quoted in "Meet the Abortion Providers III" from a taped conference in Chicago 4/3/93
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..the emotional turmoil that the procedure inevitably wreaks on the physicians and staff...There is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator...the sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current." --Abortionist quoted in "Meeting of American Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians" OBGYN News P 196
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Quoted in Melody Green and Sharon Bennett "The Crime of Being Alive: Abortion, Euthanasia, Infanticide" p 3
"Remember, there is a human being at the other end of the table taking that kid apart. We've had a couple of guys drinking too much, taking drugs, even a suicide or two." --Dr. Julius Butler, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School
"Arms, legs, and chests come out of the forceps. It's not a sight for everybody" --Dr. William Benbow Thompson at the University of California at Irvine
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"Abortion Practice" by Warren Hern, M.D., Boulder Colorado Abortionist published in 1984 by the J.B. Lippenott Company. Hern performs abortions up until the 4th month of pregnancy.
"The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks because fetal tissues become much more cohesive and difficult to dismember" p 154
"A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus." - 154
"The aggregate fetal tissue is weighted, then the following fetal parts are measured, foot length, knee to heel length, and biparietal diameter" p 164
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"Nobody wants to perform abortions after ten weeks, because by then you see the features of the baby, hands, feet. It's really barbaric." --abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves by John Pekkanen p 93
"I was for abortion, I thought it was a woman's right to terminate pregnancy she did not want. Now I'm not so sure. I am a student nurse nearing the end of my OB-GYN rotation at a major metropolitan hospital and teaching center. It wasn't until I saw what abortion really involves that I changed my mind. After the first week in the abortion clinic several people in my clinical group were shaky about their previously positive feelings about abortion. This new attitude resulted from our actually seeing a Prostaglandin abortion, one similar in nature to the widely used saline abortion. . . this method is being used for terminations of pregnancies of sixteen weeks and over. I used to find rationales. the fetus isn't real. Abdomens aren't really very swollen. It isn't 'alive.' No more excuses...I am a member of the health profession and members of my class are now ambivalent about abortion. I now know a great deal more about what is involved in the issue. Women should perceive fully what abortion is; how destructive an act it is both for themselves and their unborn child. Whatever psychological coping mechanisms are employed during the process, the sight of a fetus in a hospital bedpan remains the final statement."
Quoted in "The Zero People: Essays on Life" by Jeff Lane Hensley, editor. Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1983
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"I found much distress in the clinic, but it involved not only the women. I saw the pain of the babies who were born burned from the saline solution used for late-term abortions. I saw the bits of feet, bits of hands, the mangled heads and bodies of the little people. I saw pain and felt pain."
--One time clinic worker Paula Sutcliffe in "Precious in My Sight" "Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices" Gail Garnier-Sweet, editor
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>From "Rachel Weeping"
"The doctors would remove the fetus while performing hysterotomies and then lay it on the table., where it would squirm until it died. ..They all had perfect forms and shapes. I couldn't take it. No nurse could." --Joyce Craig, director of a Brooklyn clinic of Planned Parenthood. who assisted in abortion for two months, then quit. p 34
Edward Eichner, director of medicine at a Cleveland abortion facility said "No doctor, for ethical, moral or honest reasons wants to do nothing but abortions...women don't like to do abortions over and over for moral reasons. Sometimes our women doctors become pregnant themselves, which upsets the patients. At the same time, if a woman is carrying a baby, she doesn't like to abort someone else's. We have much more trouble keeping women doctors on the staff than men." --p 49
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"After an abortion, the doctor must inspect these remains to make sure that all the fetal parts and placenta have been removed. Any tissue left inside the uterus can start an infection. Dr. Bours squeezed the contents of the sock into a shallow dish and poked around with his finger. "You can see a teeny tiny hand' he said. --abortion clinic worker quoted in "Is the Fetus Human?" and in Dudley Clendinen, "The Abortion Conflict: What it Does to One Doctor" New York Times Magazine Aug 11 1985 p 26 ------------------------------------------------------------------
"From May to November 1988, I worked for an abortionist. He specializes in third trimester killings. I witnessed evidence of the brutal, cold blooded murder of over 600 viable, healthy babies at seven, eight and nine months gestation. A very, very few of these babies, less than 2%, were handicapped...I thought I was pro-choice and I was glad to be working in an abortion clinic. I thought I was helping provide a noble service to women in crisis....I was instructed to falsify the age of the babies in medical records. I was required to lie to the mothers over the phone, as they scheduled their appointments, and to tell them that they were not 'too far along' Then I had to note, in the records that Dr. Tiller's needle had successfully pierced the walls of the baby's heart, injecting the poison what brought death...one day, Dr. Tiller came up the stairs from the basement, where the mothers were in labor. He was carrying a large cardboard box, and ducked into the employees only area of the office so that he wouldn't have to walk through the waiting room. He passed behind my desk as I sat working on the computer, and he turned the corner to go around a short hall. He called out for me to come and help him. the box was so big and heavy in his arms that he couldn't get the key into the lock. So I unlocked the door for him, and , pushing the door open, I saw very clearly the gleaming metal of the crematorium- a full sized crematorium, just like the one's used in funeral homes. I went back to my computer. I could hear Dr. Tiller firing up the gas oven. A few minutes later I could smell burning human flesh. Mine was the agony of a participant, however reluctant, in the act of prenatal infanticide." --Luhra Tivis on her experience in the abortion business Quoted in Celebrate Life Sept/Oct 1994 "Where is the Real Violence?"
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>From the film "Meet the Abortion Providers"
"My heart got callous against the fact that I was a murderer, but that baby lying in a cold bowl educated me as to what abortion really was." --former abortionist Dr. David Brewer
"I want the general public to know what the doctors know- that this is a person, this is a baby. That this is not some kind of blob of tissue." --Dr. Anthony Levantino
"I have taken the lives of innocent babies, and I have ripped them from their mother's wombs with a powerful suction machine" --McArthur Hill, M.D.
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"I am deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I have in fact presided over 60,000 deaths. There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists from the very onset of pregnancy"
--Dr. Bernard Nathanson, "Deeper Into Abortion" New England Journal of Medicine Nov 1974 p 1189
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"I dare say that any thinking, caring individual can't not realize that he is ending life, or potential life." --abortionist
"[Powell] said "Is this a fair way of expressing what you have just said, Doctor? You tell the mother "because your baby is defective, you have the right to kill it or not to kill it. If you choose to kill it, I will do the killing." "Of course," he [the abortionist] said. "There is no other way to say it and be honest."
both from The Zero People pg 9
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"I wanted to be the world's best abortionist, for the good of my patients. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. So, after I met each patient, reviewed the medical information gathered by my nurse, examined the patient and performed the abortion, I would then carefully sift through the remains to be sure all the parts were accounted for. I had to find four extremities (two arms and two legs) a spine, a skull, and the placenta, or my patient would suffer later from an incomplete abortion...My attention was so focused on my perceived patient that I managed to deny that there were, in fact, two patients involved- the expectant mother and a very small child...I had to wonder, how can having a child be so wrong for some people that they will pay me to end its life?"
--former abortionist Dr. McMillan "How One Doctor Changed Her Mind About Abortion" Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs
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"Abortions are very draining, exhausting, heart-rending. There are a lot of tears. Some patients turn on you...I do them because I take the attitude that women who are going to terminate babies deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry babies...I've done a couple thousand, and its been a significant financial boon...the only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman as my patient and block out the baby."
--abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves
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>From the article "Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts" which appeared in the July 12 1993 issue of AAA News, a publication of the American Medical Association:
"I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria, for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure that destroys a fetus, kills a baby."
"When I put my hands on somebody to feel how big they are and I get kicked, I am barely able to talk at that moment."
an abortionist stated that 'somebody had asked her what they could say to the staff to make them look less shocked when they look at a 20 week fetus.."It's hard to be in a profession where you have a hard time answering the questions that other people ask you about what you do."
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>From World magazine August 1995
"You would just look in the buckets and see arms and legs. I have horrible dreams about that now. It was something you would see in a scary movie." --Former clinic worker Kirsten Breedlove
"The babies were frozen in a freezer. Now I wished I had not looked." --Norma McCorvey
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"Even if you are pro-choice, no one likes to see a dead fetus."
-Vilma Valdez, Education Director Planned Parenthood of Greater Miami, The Miami Herald, Oct 24 1992
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"I went up to the lab one day and on the pathologiest's table I saw what I thought was little rubber doll until I realized it was a fetus. . .I got really shook up and upset and I couldn't believe it. It had all its fingers and toes, you know, hands and feet. . . I never thought it would look so -real. I didn't like it."
--Planned Parenthood employee quoted in Magda Denes book "In Necessity and Sorrow" New York:Basic Books 1979
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In an interview by Mark Crutcher, former abortion clinic director Joy Davis said "Each person who worked there had a different way of dealing with it. [One] would look at the ultrasound the entire time she was in the room, but she would never look down in the pan. She would never look at the tissue being removed. She never wanted to see that. She would never take her eyes off the screen. And I had one who would never look at the screen....she would never look at the tissue and never look at the screen, she just didn't want to see anything."
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Also from the 1993 Chicago conference
"Planned Parenthood is set up so clinic workers never have to see the babies. It's set up that way because having to look at the babies bothers the workers. ...Generally there is one clinic worker in charge of the babies...I was that clinic worker. I had to look at the babies. I had to store them, I had to send them to pathology. And I was the person who had to dispose of them.....in order to maintain my sanity, I established a personal mourning ritual. I said Shiva for the babies. I said prayers for the dead. I also named the babies as I put them in a waste container."
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"It [the fetus] is a form of life...This has to be killing...The question then becomes "is this kind of killing justifiable? In my own mind, it is justifiable, but only with the informed consent of the mother"
--abortionist quoted in "Democrat and Chronicle" 7/5/92
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>From the Dallas Observer 3/18/95 Former clinic administrator Charlotte Taft, "We were hiding from the women some of the pieces of truth about abortion that were threatening....It is a kind of killing." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >From "Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic" by Wendy Simonds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996
Quotes from clinic employees:
"You're going from dealing with people to dealing with what most people here at the Center consider a real hurdle, to do sterile room, because you have to deal with the actual abortion tissue. And for some people, that's really hard. They can be abstractly in favor of abortion rights, but they sure don't want to see what an eighteen-week abortion looks like."
"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..."
"It's going to be weird now because you're going to see the sono. You're going to see the heart beating- little hearts, you know- and then, all of a sudden, you're going to put his cardiac medicine in it to make it stop- to kill it. So you're going to see the exact moment when you kill the fetus. I won't kill it, the doctor will kill it...and, I mean, it might be more humane...[if] the fetuses do feel something, why not kill it, you know, fast, [rather] than rip its leg off?"
"I feel some sadness [about abortions] and I think part of the problem is that we don't talk about that...we don't talk about it as much as we think about it...somehow your pro-choice stance is compromised by saying the word "baby."...We don't allow ourselves to say or think that word...."
"At nine weeks...you start seeing fetal parts. And by the second trimester it's, you know, it's a baby, and by eighteen weeks it's definitely a baby. And by like, you know, twenty-two weeks, you go in and you watch someone do a sonogram, and you're like, "Oh my." There it is just moving, moving around. And it's really hard because I always thought of abortion in terms of just the woman, just her body."
"You're looking between the woman's legs; you're seeing, you know, what the doctor's doing. And it's what a lot of people would call kind of, I guess, gruesome- that's not really the word because- it's identifiable. I mean, when he...takes the forceps and pulls out a foot, you can see the foot, and my reaction- because I feel so strongly that women who want to have a twenty week abortion should be able to have that- but I mean when I look and was just like, you know, my first reaction was, you know, I was pretty horrified."
"So by it looking like a baby, you're associating it with yourself because...you used to be a baby, you used to be a fetus."
"...when you're, you know, putting a fetus's feet in over its head in a baggie, there's just this brief moment of "This could have been me," which I fundamentally believe is okay. She should have the right to choose..."
"...it looks like a baby, That's what it looks like to me. You've never seen anything else that looks like that. The only other thing you've ever seen is a baby...You can see a face and hands, and ears and eyes and, you know...feet and toes...It bothered me real bad the first time..."
"The destruction I can't deny....I wish we lived in a world where abortion didn't have to exist."
"You know, we still say "products of conception." Well, why don't we say it looks like- you know, a twenty-week fetus looks like a baby. Why can't we say that in public? Because that's what the antis say, you know."
"I think the tough part was seeing actual pieces of fetus being removed..And in the beginning, yes, I remember looking, standing behind this woman's shoulder [as she performed an early second- trimester-abortion] and thinking, "I can't do this...There's something emotionally upsetting about this..Features are discernible; you can count five fingers on a hand and five toes on a foot. You know, all the organ systems are formed. You know, you can see ears as structures, and the nose and eyes as structures...I have gotten to the point now that because I've been doing this work five months, four months, I look at it a little differently. I don't see the same things that I did. And, honestly, when I sit down to do one of these now, I am watching to be sure that I'm getting everything that I need to get. It's 'Do I have two lower extremities? Do I have two upper extremities? Is t here a spine? ...and the skull?...It does become a bit routine after a while. I don't fear it."
"I hate it when people put it together to look like a baby. I hate that...I don't want to look like it when its like that because it's like a broken doll, and that grosses me out."
From the author: "Many health workers told me they 'never look at the face' when processing tissue."
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"Another thing that bothered me as I went about my work at the clinic was the fact that I had seen an ultrasound abortion. We did first trimester abortions. This was a late first trimester, probably second trimester. I handled the ultrasound while the doctor performed the procedure and I directed him while I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. I had seen the Silent Scream a number of times, but it didnt effect me. To me it was just more pro-life propaganda. But I couldnt deny what I saw on the screen." --Joan Appleton, former clinic worker
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"So when I went back to doing abortions and saw the fetus on the ultrasound, I recalled the early days of my pregnancies, when I found out I was pregnant and saw the baby on the ultrasound, and it really felt like this is a baby, a very real and potential being. Now, I do feel that this is a potential person and it does not have a life of its own outside of the mother, but I also am really aware that when you're ready to embrace a pregnancy, you can embrace it from the very moment you conceive or are aware that you are pregnant. Faye Wattleton said recently, "I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus, but it is the women's body, and therefore ultimately her choice." I believe that very firmly. You look at the ultrasounds and there's a fetus with a heartbeat and then after the procedure, there's the fetus, usually in pieces, in a dish. It was alive one moment and it's not the next. I don't believe it's a painful experience for the fetus because its nervous system is not "wired" so that it can feel pain at that point. I don't believe, as some anti-abortion people would have you believe, that there's a "silent scream." But it's very clear to me that it's killing a potential life. And I found that hard at first. "
----anonymous, quoted by Camille Peri at http://www.salonmagazine.com/june97/mothers/abortion970623.html in Salon Magazine
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"I hated putting babies in strainers and rinsing them off and putting them in zip-lock bags."
--former abortion clinic owner Eric Harrah
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By Dr. Arnold Halpern, former director of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic
"There is no difference between a first trimester, a second trimester, a third trimester abortion or infanticide. It's all the same human being in different stages of development. I finally got to the point I couldn't look at those little bodies anymore."
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An abortion doctor describes his job:
"... As you get into the second trimester, if we remove the pregnancy using forceps, and if a heartbeat is the measure of being alive, that happens all the time."
Dr. Dennis Christensen, Madison Abortion Clinic, Wisconsin. From The New York Times; May 15, 1998; page A14.
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"I worked as an assistant nurse at Dr. Haskell's clinic for three days--September 28, 29, and 30, 1993. . . . On the third day, Dr. Haskell asked me to observe as he performed several of the procedures that are the subject of this hearing [D&X abortion, also called partial birth abortion]. Although I was in that clinic on assignment of the agency, Dr. Haskell was interested in hiring me full time, and I was being given orientation in the entire range of procedures provided at that facility. I was present for three of these partial-birth procedures. It is the first one that I will describe to you in detail. The mother was six months pregnant (26 1/2 weeks). A doctor told her that the baby had Down's Syndrome and she decided to have an abortion. She came in the first two days to have the laminaria inserted and changed, and she cried the whole time. On the third day she came in to receive the partial-birth procedure. Dr. Haskell brought the ultrasound in and hooked it up so that he could see the baby. On the ultrasound screen, I could see the heart beating. As Dr. Haskell watched the baby on the ultrasound screen, the baby's heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen. Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby's legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby's body and the arms--everything but the head. The doctor kept the baby's head just inside the uterus. The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby was completely limp. I was completely unprepared for what I was seeing. I almost threw up as I watched the doctor do these things. Brenda Pratt Shafer, RN
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My official title at the mill was "health worker." I did various duties-lab work, leading groups (deceiving women about their abortions), "advocating" (deceiving women during their abortions), and assisting the abortionist, which included helping during the abortion and checking to make sure all the parts of the baby were there in the collection jar afterwards. I will never forget, in the second-trimester abortions, holding those little feet up to a chart on the wall to make sure of the age of the baby. --- Dina Madsen
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My 23rd abortion changed my mind about doing abortions forever. This patient was a little overweight and ultimately proved to be a little farther along than anticipated. This was not an uncommon mistake before ultrasound was readily available to confirm the gestational age. Initially, the abortion proceeded normally. The water broke, but then nothing more would come out. When I withdrew the curette, I saw that it was plugged up with the leg of the baby which had been torn off. I then changed techniques and used ring forceps to dismember the 13 or 14 week size baby. Inside the remains of the rib cage I found a tiny, beating heart. I was finally able to remove the head and looked squarely into the face of a human being -- a human being that I had just killed. -Dr. Paul Jarrett
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From Norma McCorvey's book Won By Love:
At least 80 percent of the women would try to look down at the end of the table, wondering if they cold see anything which is why our doctor always went in with the scalpel first. Once the baby was already cut up, there was nothing but blood and torn up tissue for the woman to see. When a later abortion was performed, workers had to piece the baby back together, and every major part--head, torso, two legs, and two arms --had to be accounted for. One of our little jokes at the clinic was, "If you ever want to humble a doctor, hide a leg so he thinks he has to go back in." Please understand, these were not abnormal, uncaring women working with me at the clinic. We were just involved in a bloody, dehumanizing business, all of us for our own reasons. Whether we were justifying our past advocacy(as I was), justifying a previous abortion (as many were) or whatever, we were just trying to cope--and if we couldn’t laugh at what was going on, I think our minds would have snapped. It's not an easy trying to confuse a conscience that will not stay dead.
pcl, PLEASE, my friend, read Skooz's whole thread. I beg of you.....
Somewhat like "those who are not with us are with the terrorists."
All the info is there. They are also on my donation list.
Does it make you uncomfortable?
Apparently you think it alright to kill someone who has never even remotely threatened you with physical violence of any kind.
Try this. Take a long hard look in the mirror. Do it for at least five minutes.
I bet you can't do it for that long.
L
His VERY project would not be possible were it not for the Catholic Church. Fr. Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life is on the board of directors for his organization. He is the MAIN contributor to buying the trucks. Also, the Thomas More Legal Defense fund, AND Priests for LIfe, are funded by Catholic Millionaires(Monaghan comes to mind), so if it wernt for Catholics, he wouldnt even be able to speak the way he does...
Another point, he speaks worst about conservatives than he does about liberals. What irony...When it was REPUBLICANS(if my memory serves me correctly, Abe Lincoln) and Christians who were the MAIN champions of real social reform(slavery comes to mind), if it wasnt for Christians, slavery would probably still be in existence today.
Its cool to push the Church to be more outspoken, but some of his statements were way out of line(The Church having blood on her hands comes to mind)...
Here's the answer to your question: If someone walking down the street threatens to do to me what my babies did to me in childbirth, he's a dead man. Only an idiot thinks pregnancy is a benign condition-- having a baby in your tummy isn't a threat of violence, it's a guarantee. Ripped from here to there, and plenty of stuff never works right again (trust me, you don't want me to get more graphic with this.)
I wanted my babies, planned them, had them, and they're the joy of my life, but don't babble to me your hypothetical arguments about things you don't understand.
Something happened around 1998. Before that time there were more Pro-Lifeers than there were Pro-Choicers. After that point, the Pro-Choicers began to outnumber the Pro_Lifers. The Pro-Choicers continue to out number the Pro-Lifers with a growing margin.
It would seem that something happened that caused this shift. Would you like to know what is was?
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