I have previously written about the emotional impact abortion can have on abortionists and clinic workers. In one article, I quoted a medical professor describing how doctors who abort “kids” suffer emotional problems. In 2006, an anonymous abortion provider talked about something similar in Boston magazine. The abortionist in the Boston article says:
Doing them [abortions] over and over and over again can be really taxing. All of us who provide abortions believe in what we’re doing and think it’s a good thing and a right that needs to be available. But when you’re in the clinic and in that group of people doing it, it can be tough, and you can get really tired. I don’t think it’ll ever make me stop doing terminations, but it can move people to tears. And it’s not just me — it extends to the nurses and the people who help us in the operating room. It’s not unusual that you’ll have only a couple of nurses who will help you out with it. There are nurses that will say, “No, I won’t help you take care of this patient.” I even know people who feel they can’t tell their families what they do; their families think they work on labor and delivery.(1)
During a congressional debate in 2009, California’s pro-choice Representative Lynn Woolsey complained:
Abortion is a legal medical practice. Why are we even having to talk about it? We’re not talking about whether you can or can’t have your tonsils out… (2)
Well, Rep Woolsey, and any pro-choicers reading this, tonsil operations don’t “move people to tears.” While doing any operation can be stressful, you don’t see a lot of nurses refusing to help with removing tonsils because they find it so emotionally draining and upsetting. And you don’t get many doctors and nurses who are too ashamed to tell their families that they remove tonsils. No, abortion is something quite different from a tonsil operation.
Why? Because it ends a life. And the abortionist goes on to admit that very thing:
I have the utmost respect for life; I appreciate that life starts early in the womb, but also believe that I’m ending it for good reasons. (1)
He lists some of these reasons as saving a woman from a bad situation, making life better for other children in the family who would have difficulty adjusting to a new sibling, preventing a woman from going on public assistance, and saving an unwanted child from having a hard life. These, in his opinion, are valid reasons to kill a baby.
Of course, we know that siblings are often adversely affected by abortion. We know that many women suffer emotional trauma after their abortions. We know that no child has to remain unwanted; there are 2 million couples waiting to adopt. We know that many families that receive government assistance recover financially and become self-supporting again (statistics show that 80% of families with children who receive government aid are off within 5 years, and well over a third receive aid for less than one year). We know that if a person has a difficult childhood, he can still be grateful for his life and grow up to be a happy adult.
Killing a healthy mother’s baby is never necessary.
The abortionist says:
I have no problem with a woman walking out. I always find those are good days — when a woman walks out and says, “No, I’m keeping it.”
This article is 9 years old. I wish I knew whether the abortionist who said these things is still performing abortions. Has he continued to harden his heart, or has his conscience finally led him out of the abortion business? There is obviously a part of him that is still affected by the work he does, a part of him that is happier when the baby lives.
Not all abortionists are beyond redemption; not all of them have lost their humanity completely. Pro-lifers need to remember that even the ones doing the abortions are human beings. Many of them are still reachable.
1. Cheryl Alkon (as told to) “Confessions of an Abortion Doctor” Boston December 2004
2. Defending Life 2010: Proven Strategies for a Pro-Life America (Washington D.C.: Americans United for Life, 2010) 15
