In 2006, Destiny Image Publishers published a book by author Cheryl Chew called Make Me Your Choice. This powerful pro-life book tells moving stories of post-abortion women who suffered from guilt and grief and managed to find peace and healing. Chew also published the testimony of a woman named Judy. Judy worked for an OB/GYN who performed abortions (1).
Judy first described the way she was told to prepare women for their abortions:
During this time [I worked for the OB/GYN] my duties involved preparing the patients for the procedure. I was instructed to counsel with them if they had any questions. If they were having an abortion, I was to reassure them about their decision by telling them that it was all right and that “they were just getting rid of a blob of tissue.
Very few surgical abortions are done before the sixth week (2). By this time, the brain has divided into its hemispheres and is giving off measurable brain waves (3), and the embryo’s heart is beating. You can see an amazing video of a four-and-a-half-week-old embryo’s heart beating here. At this time, the heart beats 113 times a minute – faster than the average heartbeat of an adult.
Even at the earliest stages, these women were not “just getting rid of a blob of tissue.”
Exactly how extreme the “blob of tissue” lie was is revealed when Judy goes on to describe what she did when the abortion procedures were over:
My final duties were to clean up after the surgery. It would pain my heart and torment my soul when I would have to clean up after an abortion. There, at the end of the stirrup table, was a bin where the doctor would toss the small, crushed body parts of the fetus after he dislodged it from the mother’s womb. I could see the bloody, tiny crushed bodies with their small arms, tiny fingers, and legs that sometimes got torn away from their bodies.
The doctor also performed abortions in the second trimester. In the second trimester, forceps are used to tear apart the developing baby in a procedure called a D&E (dilation and evacuation) abortion:
I had to watch the doctor as he would insert the forceps into the cervix to puncture the uterus and then crush the fetus in his efforts to dislodge it from the womb.
See a diagram of a D&E abortion here.
The horrible things she was seeing at work took a toll on Judy, who found herself trying to repress her emotions:
Seeing this procedure done several times a day, one can become immune and numbed to the death of the fetus. In order to survive, I had to accept this aspect as just part of my job, not wanting to fully realize the consequences of what I was doing. I would go home at night and have nightmares, because I was the one who had to dispose of the little mangled and crushed bodies and place them in the incinerator.
She describes how the clinic burned the bodies of the aborted babies:
Since these procedures were done under the veil of secrecy, there was no other way to dispose of the body parts but to burn them at the end of the day. I felt so guilty when I had to collect the baby’s body parts and then burn them.
Judy said that the doctor she worked for was a heavy drinker, which makes one wonder if he was ever under the influence when he was performing abortions. He eventually died in an alcohol-related car accident.
(1) Cheryl Chew, Make Me Your Choice: Compelling Personal Stories of Struggle and Healing for Those Who Have Had or Dealt with Abortion (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image Publishers Inc., 2006) pp. 93 – 94.
(2) Randy Alcorn, Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000) p. 67.
(3) J. Goldenring, “Development of the Fetal Brain,” New England Jour. of Med., Aug. 26, 1982, p. 564.
