“In some ways it is very boring, these abortions — the same thing day after day. In fact the nurses are excited about complications because it’s something different.”
These are the words of a Director of Nursing at an abortion clinic, quoted by the late pro-choice writer Magda Denes. She did extensive interviews with clinic staff, witnessed abortions, and examined the remains of aborted children, for her book In Necessity and Sorrow. As a Holocaust survivor, Denes found her pro-choice views challenged by the disturbing things she saw, but she held onto her belief that abortion should be a legal option for all women. Abortion, in her opinion, was a tragic but necessary thing that women need to order their lives and to achieve equality. Perhaps the fact that she had had an abortion herself influenced her views.
I suppose it’s easy to understand why clinic nurses, like the ones described in the quote above, get bored. After all, how many severed body parts can one look at, over and over again, without it all becoming routine?
Even late-term abortions – done up to 24 weeks at the nurse’s clinic – became routine. But to Denes, new to the scene, they were anything but routine. In her book, she describes seeing the body of one late-term aborted baby. Curious to see what the remains of an abortion actually looked like, she went over to the buckets where the aborted babies were stored before being taken to the incinerator. She writes:
I remove with one hand the lid of a bucket… I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person there floating in a bloody liquid… the body is purple with bruises and the face has the agonized tautness of one forced to die too soon. Death overtakes me in a rush of madness.
These “agonized” faces of the babies they saw on a daily basis even became boring over time. If this weren’t disturbing enough, the complications experienced by women during their abortions were actually exciting to them. Remember, these are injuries to women.
These injuries cause physical pain and suffering. Many abortion complications can cause permanent damage to a woman’s body. A perforation of the uterus can cause massive bleeding. Fetal parts left behind can mean a traumatic repeat procedure. Other complications can lead to hysterectomies and a complete loss of fertility. These and other complications may rob a woman of any future chance to have a baby. This is what those clinic workers were “excited” about.
All of this shows an appalling lack of compassion towards the women these abortion clinics are supposed to be helping and serving – a lack of compassion that is, sadly, all too prevalent in abortion clinics.
Learn more about Denes’ book and read some excerpts from it in a Live Action article I wrote back in January of this year.
