For those of us who are active in the pro-life movement, and who know what an unborn baby looks like even at the earliest stages, it is hard to believe that so many people do not know that abortions often leave behind recognizable body parts. People really are uninformed about fetal development, especially in the first trimester. For example, this past May, pro-lifers responded with incredulity when comedian Sarah Silverman called unborn babies “goo.”
The next time one of your proabortion friends or family members makes a statement like Silverman’s, direct them to these quotes by three abortion clinic workers and two abortionists.
Fingers and toes
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“I wonder how many fingers and toes we put down the disposal today?”(1)
Former clinic worker Carol Everett recalled another clinic worker saying this to her around the time she first got involved in the abortion industry. Although aware of the reality of abortion, Everett went on to own two abortion clinics and direct four. Eventually, her clinics came under fire for performing “abortions” on women who were not pregnant in order to make more money. She ended up becoming a born-again Christian, leaving the abortion industry, and launching a pro-life ministry called The Heidi Group.
Detached heads
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“When you’re doing a dismemberment D&E, usually the last part to be removed is the skull itself and it’s floating free inside the uterine cavity…So it’s rather like a ping-pong ball floating around and the surgeon is using his forcep to reach up to try to grasp something that’s freely floating around and is quite large relative to the forcep we’re using.”(2)
This quote is from sworn testimony given by late-term abortionist Dr. Martin Haskell. He is describing the most commonly used surgical abortion procedure in the second trimester. In this procedure, a D&E, the unborn baby is pulled apart by forceps and extracted piece by piece until only the head is left inside the mother. Haskell compares this floating head to a “ping-pong ball” which he must search for with his trusty forcep.
“Harpooning” a baby
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“On a number of occasions with the needle, I have harpooned the fetus. I can feel the fetus move at the end of the needle just like you have fish hooked on a line. This gives me an unpleasant, unhappy feeling because I know that the fetus is alive and responding to the needle stab… No one has ever mentioned this, but I’ve noticed it a number of times, you know, that there is something alive in there that you’re killing…”(3)
This quote comes from an abortionist interviewed by Dr. Magda Denes, a pro-choice psychologist whom I quoted in a previous article. This abortionist is describing a procedure commonly used in the 1970s – 1990s where the doctor injected a caustic poison made of saline solution into the amniotic sac to poison the baby. Nowadays, the poison of choice is digoxin.
Body parts
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“When you see the larger body parts it’s a little bit sickening.”
This quote, from an abortion clinic worker identified only as Marva, was cited by Life Dynamics. An unborn baby has “body parts” i.e. arms, legs, etc. that are formed by 7 to 8 weeks after conception.
A hand left behind
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“I am walking out the back door, and I see a plastic jar of tissue and blood waiting to be sent to the path lab, and in the plastic jar a tiny perfect white hand. . . “
This quote is from clinic worker Anne Finger, describing a baby that was aborted at the clinic where she worked. Finger wrote a memoir called Past Due in which she detailed her experiences as a disabled woman giving birth to a child who had a traumatic birth and severe disabilities. She also wrote about her time working in the clinic. In this passage, she tried to downplay the aborted baby’s resemblance to a full term child by saying that only the hands looked human. You can see pictures of unborn babies here and make up your own mind.
These five quotes, all from clinic workers or abortionists who were practicing at the time they were quoted, cast light on the gruesome nature of abortion and show that pro-choicers who describe unborn babies as “goo” and abortion as only “terminating a pregnancy” are divorced from reality.
Citations
1. Carol Everett Blood Money: Getting Rich off a Woman’s Right to Choose (Sisters, Oregon: Questar Publishers Inc., 1991) 84
2. Sworn testimony given in US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin (Madison, WI, May 27, 1999, Case No. 98-C-0305-S), by Dr. Martin Haskell, abortionist
3. Magda Denes, PhD. In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital (New York: Basic Books inc ,1976)141
4. “Abortion in America: Focus on the City: Sanger Center’s Moments of Pain, Conflict, Relief” Newsday (New York) March 5, 1989
5. Anne Finger Past Due (Seal Press, 1990) 86
