As the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill remains in question and the number of OB/Gyns willing to commit abortions remains low, the abortion industry looks to continue advocating for primary care doctors to commit abortionists in their offices.
But it might also allow them to commit illegal abortions under the radar.
Manual aspiration abortion training
According to The Guardian, abortionist Joan Fleischman has been committing abortions for decades through manual uterine aspiration. Using this method, a first-trimester abortion is carried out with the use of a small, hand-held device that uses pressure to pull the preborn baby and pregnancy tissue out of the uterus.
Fleischman is also a co-founder of the MYA Network — the group that in 2022 spread inaccurate photos of first-trimester preborn children with the help of The Guardian. The MYA Network of primary care clinics spreads across 16 states — and Fleischman thinks that the manual uterine aspiration abortion tool could be the solution to the possible removal of the abortion pill from the market and the enactment of more pro-life laws.
Currently, only about 10% of primary care physicians commit abortions, but The Guardian claims more would be willing to. The MYA Network is planning to unveil an online curriculum as well as in-person trainings to teach primary care doctors how to use the manual uterine aspiration tool to kill preborn babies.
“The number of clinicians who could be trained would be limitless,” says Michele Gomez, a co-founder of the MYA Network of clinicians. “There are so many clinicians out there who want to do something to help but just don’t know how, and this information and support could be a gamechanger.”
Fleischman, who had her own abortion as a college student because she wrongly believed she was incapable of being both a medical student and a mother, was a family care doctor in her 30s when she decided to learn how to do abortions. She knew that so many women go to Planned Parenthood for abortion as she had — it’s the leading abortion business in the nation — but she also saw the lack of ‘intimacy’ with women at Planned Parenthood. This inspired her to begin committing abortions on her own patients — to make it more personal.
She explained about Planned Parenthood, “Women went station to station. They got their blood drawn, and then they sat in a little waiting room with other people. They got their ultrasound; they sat in another little waiting room, always with paper gowns on. They had been fasting for the whole night before. They saw a counsellor. Then they were in a bigger waiting room. And then they got called by name, to come in for their procedure. The surgeon went from room to room to room, doing 50 to 60 abortions a day.”
Skirting the law
Manual uterine aspiration also has the potential to allow abortionists to skirt pro-life laws, which are expanding throughout much of the nation.
As explained by The Guardian, following the 1971 civil war in Bangladesh, pregnancy from rape increased dramatically. Though abortion was not legal, abortionists began carrying out “menstrual regulation” procedures — the same manual aspiration abortion procedure that Fleischman uses to kill preborn children, marketed under a more digestible (and even more euphemistic) term. It was a legal loophole. The Guardian states (emphasis added):
Now, one might walk through a busy street in Bangladesh and find a sign advertising menstrual regulation in a country where, at least officially, abortion is only allowed in life-threatening situations. A woman simply comes in and explains she has missed her period. She doesn’t take a pregnancy test before the procedure, and nobody asks her to. As long as she sees the clinician before 12 weeks, they will “restore her period” for her.
Bill Powell, the senior medical scientist at the pro-abortion IPAS, an international abortion advocacy organization focused on expanding abortion, explained, “It’s just a clever policy, a wink and a nod — everybody knows what’s going on.” (emphasis added)
Under the guise of “menstrual regulation,” abortionists can kill preborn children without ever confirming that the woman is pregnant. This could be dangerous for a woman if she is farther along than she thinks and fails to give the doctor accurate information — making aspiration abortion the wrong procedure for her stage of pregnancy and increasing her risks of a failed abortion.
Fleischman said she is only advocating for the legal use of manual uterine aspiration abortion — but that means nothing, especially since other abortion advocates argue that women can carry out their own manual uterine aspiration abortions.
An ulterior motive
Fleischman believes the abortion method is easy and safe, and she has patients traveling to her for an abortion from around the world because of this. However, the safety of women is not a top-of-mind concern for abortion industry leaders, who actually appear to have an ulterior motive for increasing the use of manual aspiration abortion.
As revealed during the Center for Medical Progress’ undercover investigation into Planned Parenthood’s participation in the trafficking of fetal body parts, Dr. Mary Gatter, former president of the Planned Parenthood Medical Directors’ Council, explained that manual aspiration abortion is better for acquiring ‘intact’ dead babies for research use compared to machine vacuum aspiration abortion. Gatter referred to manual aspiration abortion as “less crunchy” than machine vacuum aspiration abortion because the baby doesn’t come out in pieces.
The problem, as far as Gatter sees it, is that when a woman comes in for a first-trimester abortion, she is often told she will have a machine vacuum aspiration abortion — but if she signs the paperwork for donating her baby’s body to research, the abortionist might switch to a manual aspiration abortion procedure, which would be against the law to carry out without the woman’s permission.
42 U.S. Code § 289g–1 states: “No alteration of the timing, method, or procedures used to terminate the pregnancy was made solely for the purposes of obtaining the tissue.”
Gatter doesn’t see much of a difference between the procedures, saying that by switching to the manual technique, “you’re slightly increasing the length of the procedure, you’re increasing the pain of the procedure; is it local anesthesia or conscious sedation — so they’re technical arguments having to do with one technique versus another.”
The issue, however, isn’t the technique — it’s the lack of informed consent for the woman undergoing the procedure simply because the abortionist wants to get and sell her “intact” baby’s remains. The woman will not have consented and will experience more pain and a longer procedure than she was expecting. (Of course, in reality, the preborn child that is killed cannot consent to his or her own death.)
The abortion industry is consistently inventing ways to kill preborn children regardless of the law — but not out of concern for women. Its ‘solution’ to pro-life laws — whether to alter the routine abortion pill method or increase manual aspiration procedures — is never to provide life-affirming care and often makes abortion more dangerous for women while continuing to end human lives.
