Outspoken abortionist Jessica Chen is both celebrating and lamenting her decision to abort her preborn child after 23 weeks of pregnancy. She makes reference to the “luxury” and “excruciating components of our choice” to end her child’s life, which she admits resulted in “grief, heartbreak, and even guilt.”
In an op-ed published by JAMA Network, interestingly titled “The Burden of Choice,” Chen, a Family Planning fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, admitted that despite her dedication to even late-term abortion, she wrestled with the question of whether her baby would “feel pain,” or “hear my voice,” and even questioned whether choosing to kill her preborn baby made her a “bad person.”
Chen noted that she has “proudly spoken at abortion rallies, written passionate op-eds, and filmed documentaries and news segments about my work” aborting preborn children, had “studied the myriad reasons why someone might seek abortion care throughout the entirety of their pregnancy,” and “walked patients step-by-step through the physical and emotional pain that often comes with these decisions.” Chen had even received “medical training” by observing abortions up through the third trimester at Warren Hern’s Boulder Abortion Clinic in Colorado, and participated in third trimester abortions. She wrote, “I have always felt that choice was such a simple concept. How could anyone not want this ability to choose?”
And yet, when it came to her child, suddenly things weren’t so clear, and weren’t so “simple.”
Receiving an unnamed diagnosis
Chen writes of how surreal it was to undergo an abortion herself, instead of committing one on someone else. “Two weeks ago, I was the one lying on this exact hospital bed about to undergo the same procedure that I specialize in performing: an abortion. I remember thinking ‘This can’t be real. I’m supposed to be on the other side of this. Why am I lying on this bed? Am I doing the right thing?'”
Chen said she previously experienced a miscarriage before discovering she was pregnant with another child. All went well until Chen went for an ultrasound at 20 weeks, when, after the sonographer seemingly “checked off each anatomical landmark: normal heart, normal stomach and bladder, 10 toes, 10 fingers,” the doctor came back and told them “there is something wrong with the baby” — a diagnosis which Chen does not name.
“Over the next few weeks I saw a fetal diagnostic specialist, underwent bloodwork, had ultrasounds every 3 days, had a fetal echocardiogram and magnetic resonance imaging, and experienced the aching pain of an amniocentesis. Finally, our doctor confirmed our worst fears. Our baby may not survive this pregnancy, and if he did, he may suffer gravely in life,” Chen added.
Parents who hear the news that their child may not live (implying the child’s death is not imminent) or may suffer should ask what they can do to care for their child, how to prepare for his birth, and what medical care he will require. But because of the normalization of prenatal homicide as a way to target children with health conditions and disabilities, Chen’s baby was suddenly determined to be better off dead — killed by abortion.
Chen strays from abortion ‘training’
In discussing her own preborn son, instead of using the terminology she was trained to use as an abortionist — terminology that serves to dehumanize an entire group of human beings — Chen referred to her preborn son as a “baby.”
“As a patient, I strayed far away from my training as a physician. Instead of using the terms the pregnancy, the embryo, or the fetus, I called him our baby and our little boy. Instead of detaching myself from this desperately planned for and wanted baby, I melted,” wrote Chen. “I melted into our love for him and the enormity of this goodbye. I held him through my belly and savored every kick he gave me, I sang to him with my husband, and I let my tears shower over him during our final days together.”
Chen appears to have been filled with internal conflicts as she navigated the philosophy of abortion versus the reality of executing her own preborn child. As an abortionist, Chen was programmed to downplay the humanity of the preborn child in the womb, denying his personhood and many of his gestational markers. But as a mother, she instinctively knew that her child was human, not just a clump of cells or a parasite, but a real, existing, living, kicking human being.
In 2016, Live Action News documented that the Early Abortion Training Workbook published by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) suggested that it was best for an abortionist to avoid using the word ‘baby’ with a perspective abortion client in favor of the terms ‘fetus’ or ‘pregnancy.’
The latest published edition (7th edition/2022 – see below) of the Training in Early Abortion for Comprehensive Healthcare (TEACH) curriculum also recommends using “pregnancy” instead of the word “baby.”
TEACH abortion training uses ‘pregnancy’ not ‘baby’ in 7th edition 2022.
But to Chen, this was her baby and despite all of her training, and all of the times she had killed other women’s babies, she could not so easily dehumanize her own child.
The ‘luxury’ of ‘choice’
Chen wrote, “There I was in my bed, agonizing and frantically Googling questions like “will my baby feel pain,” “can my baby hear my voice,” and “am I a bad person.” While this seems puzzling considering Chen’s medical training, someone who kills preborn children for a living would likely have little interest in studying the prenatal development of human beings in the womb, since that person would necessarily dehumanize that child (or ignore his existence entirely) in order to do his or her “job.”
As Live Action News has documented, some studies have indicated that a child in the womb may feel pain as early as eight weeks gestation, and others have shown that at the very latest, preborn children can feel pain by the end of the first trimester. And preborn babies begin to hear and respond to sound by approximately 22 weeks gestation (20 weeks after fertilization).
“Trying to be pragmatic, my husband and I made dozens of pros and cons lists, read all the published literature available, and consulted with every physician we knew about our baby’s condition,” Chen claimed.
The very concept that humans would create a pros and cons list regarding whether they should kill their child is horrifying. Perhaps this is why Chen, despite being an abortionist, described the decision to abort her baby as the “luxury of choice.”
“In the end, no matter what conversations or conclusions we had drawn throughout the course of the day, it never felt like a simple choice. Were we willing to take the risk that our child may live a life of pain and suffering or were we willing to say goodbye? After all my advocacy in helping others achieve the ability to choose, I suddenly felt burdened by the luxury of choice,” she said (emphasis added). Perhaps that is because deciding whether an innocent person should live or die isn’t truly meant to be the decision of finite human beings.
Abortion to “protect our baby”
But ultimately, Chen and her husband framed their decision to kill their child as one of “protect[ing]” him. And yet, the most common abortion procedure in the second trimester is a D&E, which involves the dismemberment of the living baby in utero, who, according to the latest research, can feel pain. The other abortion procedure Chen may have undergone was an induction abortion, in which the abortionist injects a drug to cause a child to go into cardiac arrest. (A less common method is to transect the umbilical cord before dismemberment or delivery).
“In many ways I am lucky and grateful for many things: I live in a place that allows for abortions to occur up to 24 weeks, I have the friendship and expertise of the pro-abortion providers and staff that have chosen to take care of me, and I have a husband who supports me and reminds me that, in the end, only I can make this choice to protect our baby,” she wrote.
“As my doctor consented me for my procedure, words I’ve repeated hundreds of times in my own practice, everything in my body screamed ‘NO!’ while I heard my voice tremble ‘ok,'” Chen admitted.
Chen fully understood what she had consented to. Her fellow abortionists have described the second-trimester D&E abortion procedure as “destructive and violent.”
Planned Parenthood abortionist Lisa Harris once acknowledged the hesitancy of abortionists who commit dismemberment abortions, writing, “I trained to do D&E procedures to about 23 weeks as a resident…. I began working as a staff physician at a clinic that provided surgical abortion… The process of moving the gestational age limit beyond 14 weeks was slow… some staff members were initially uncomfortable with the prospect of dealing with larger fetal parts.”
Late-term abortionist Warren Hern concluded that these abortions create an “unusual dilemma.” He said, “[The D&E] procedure is rapidly becoming recognized as the procedure of choice in late abortion, but those capable of performing or assisting with the procedure are having strong personal reservations about participating in an operation which they view as destructive and violent.”
Abortionist William Rashbaum told The New York Times that a D&E abortion is ”a horrible procedure.”
As for an induction abortion, OB/GYN and former abortionist Dr. Patti Giebink explained in a video for Live Action:
Because the child is so large and developed, an abortion procedure at this point takes two to three days to complete. … On day one, mifepristone is given orally. Mifepristone blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone causing the lining of the uterus to degenerate, starving the fetus of vital nutrients and oxygen. Mifepristone alone doesn’t necessarily kill the fetus, so fetal demise [death] is often induced beforehand. This is often only done for babies 20 weeks or older.
A syringe with a large needle is filled with a drug called digoxin. Digoxin is used to treat heart problems, but an overdose of digoxin will cause fetal cardiac arrest. A long needle is inserted through the woman’s abdomen or vagina and the digoxin is injected into the fluid surrounding the fetus under ultrasound guidance.
She noted that digoxin does not kill the preborn baby immediately, which is why it is administered one to two days before the abortion is completed. For digoxin to be more effective, it is often injected directly into the fetus in the heart, body, or umbilical vein. If the baby doesn’t die within 24 hours, the injection is repeated. Twenty-four hours later, the woman is given misoprostol to cause contractions and labor if she hasn’t already delivered a premature living baby, as women undergoing this procedure are warned can happen.
There hundreds of are known cases of babies surviving abortions and being left to die, and there are cases of babies being killed after surviving an abortion attempt.
Choosing death as the act of a ‘loving mother’
“I have very few words of wisdom as I am still walking this path of grief, heartbreak, and even guilt,” wrote Chen. “What is this thing we call ‘choice’ made up of anyway? For me, the many excruciating components of our choice have deepened my perception of this concept. I believe I have made an impossible choice and felt deep pain to protect my baby and my family.”
“Although I have no living children, I believe I have chosen to be a loving mother,” Chen wrote.
“The last thing I remember before the anesthesiologist injected midazolam [which puts a person quickly and relatively briefly into a hypnotic, sedated state] into my veins was begging my doctors, my colleagues and friends, to please tell my baby that my husband and I love him very much. They promised they would.”
Then they killed her baby.
Sadly, because Chen feels that homicide was a “loving act” that she as a mother chose for her baby, it seems unlikely that she will stop killing other women’s babies anytime soon.
Call on President Trump to pardon the FACE Act prisoners on his first day in office.
