ABORTIONISTS SPEAK!

"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

'Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet" by David Kuperlain and Mark Masters in Oct "New Dimensions" magazine


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


"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


"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


"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


"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


"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


"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


Why is there so much fuss about abortion? Isn't what is removed only a mass of tissue?
"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"

"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 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 t hen 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"

"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


--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 pg 21

"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."
"If I see a case...after twenty weeks, where it frankly is a child to me, I really agonize over it because 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 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


"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.


"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

"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." - p 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
"Television interviews in particular should focus on the public issue involved (right to confidential and professional medical care, freedom of choice and so forth) and not on the specific details of the procedure." p 323

--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



"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
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



"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?"



"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 wanted to be the world's best abortionist, for the good of my patients. If I was going to do this, 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



"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



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."
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


"I went up to the lab one day and on the pathologist'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




Quotes from clinic employees:
"It's just- I mean it looks like a baby. It looks like a baby. 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... 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...."
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."