A few days ago, Live Action posted an open letter to clinic workers written by Kristi Burton Brown. She gave a heartfelt plea for those working in abortion clinics to leave their jobs. Yesterday, a pro-choice site posted an article in response to her letter- “An Open Letter to Anti-abortion Protesters.”
The letter is full of insults and accusations. The author accuses pro-lifers of shaming women, imposing their religion on others, being hypocritical – you name it. But there is one particular statement in the letter that I would like to address.
“It’s not right when you use grotesque images that defy the reality of abortion. Aborted fetuses look remarkably different from all the manipulated grotesque images you use in your visual propaganda.”
The letter claims that the pictures shown by pro-life protesters are “manipulated” and not representative of actual abortion remains. They are saying that aborted babies do not look the way they appear in the photos. That the babies being aborted in their clinics do not look like human beings and that pro-lifers are lying when they claim that they do.
How to refute this statement? I could respond with Abby Johnson’s story of witnessing an unborn baby fighting for his life on ultrasound. I could respond with Jewels Green’s testimony. I could reply with former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levantino’s description of tearing the arms and legs off of second trimester children and crushing their skulls. Or maybe I could use Kathy Sparks’ description of how she and other clinic workers put the remains of aborted babies in jars after they were killed or Deborah Henry’s memory of pulling the perfectly formed foot of an aborted baby off the end of a suction cannula, an instrument used to perform first trimester abortions.
But the thing is, all of these people are now pro-life. Pro-choice activists can accuse them of lying, of having an agenda. So I won’t use any of these testimonies. Instead, I will use the words of practicing abortionists- men and women who are, to my knowledge, still doing abortions.
In this quote from Dr. Timothy Johnson comes from a court case before the Us District Court of New York(1)
THE COURT: “What did they utilize to crush the head?”
THE WITNESS: “An instrument, a large pair of forceps that have a round, serrated edge at the end of it, so that they were able to bring them together and crush the head between the ends of the instrument.”
You can imagine that the remains of the child’s crushed skull would resemble something like the pictures of abortions that pro-lifers use.
From a similar court case, Gonzales vs. Carhart:
“The friction causes the fetus to tear apart. For example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix.”
Again, this abortionist’s description of what happens in an abortion is in keeping with the photos of aborted babies that show torn off limbs.
Dr. Gerson Weiss, in sworn testimony on April 7, 2004, describes how he examines the remains of aborted babies to make sure no parts are left inside the mother(2)
“You can count there is a limb here, I can see feet and hands, I can see skull fragments, I can see trunk.”
These left over body parts are what is shown in the photographs of aborted babies carried by pro-lifers.
An abortionist working for Planned Parenthood was quoted saying the following in a book by Nancy Day. Day’s book is not written from a pro-life perspective; she examines both sides of the debate and allows the reader to come to their own conclusions.(3)
“When you do an ultrasound, particularly if you have children, and you see a fetus there, kicking, moving, living, doing things that your own child does, bringing it’s thumb to its mouth, and things like that- it’s difficult. Then, after the procedure, sometimes we have to actually look at the specimen, and you see arms and legs and things like that torn off…It does take an emotional toll.”
Dr. Warren Hern, who is still providing abortions at his clinic in Boulder, said the following in his book, Abortion Practice: (4)
“A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus, since it may be impossible to apply forceps or to do so while avoiding the thinned out cervix.”
Decapitate and dismember- exactly what the pictures show.
Abortionist Dr. Don Sloan, who has performed, so far, over 20,000 abortions, said the following in his book Choice: A Doctor’s Experience with the Abortion Dilemma:(5)
“With the D&E, as with any suction procedure, the materials passing through the suction tip are easy to see, and at that stage, the clear polyethylene tubing and the translucent plastic cannula are of a large enough bore to allow you to identify what you are seeing. In fact, it’s medically required that you do so, to confirm that the abortion is total and the uterus empty. Out pass the limbs, the intestines and the various internal organs. Most important, it is imperative for the operator to be convinced that the skull tissue has passed, this being the largest part of the fetus formed at that stage of pregnancy.”
These testimonies by practicing abortion providers reveal what pro-choicers do not want the public to know- that the children being ripped apart in abortion clinics are babies, and that the pictures shown by pro-lifers are accurate.
- Testimony of abortionist Dr Timothy Johnson, National Abortion Federation, et. al. v. Ashcroft, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, March
- Dr. Gerson Weiss, abortionist, in sworn testimony in National Abortion Federation, et. al. v. Ashcroft, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, April 7, 2004
- Nancy Day. Abortion: Debating the Issue (Enslow Publishing: New York) 1995
- Warren Hern Abortion Practice (Philadelphia: J Lippincott, 1990) PP 153 154
- Don Sloan, M.D., with Paula Hartz. Choice: A Doctor’s Experience with the Abortion Dilemma (New York: New York International Publishers) 1992 p 187
