Pro-Choice author Magda Denes, PhD, interviewed clinic workers and observed abortions in a busy abortion clinic shortly after Roe versus Wade. Her book, In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death inside an Abortion Hospital is still valuable reading, even after all these years.
One of the doctors that Magda Denes interviewed describes his reaction to being called upon to save some unborn babies while aborting others:
You have to become a bit schizophrenic. In one room you encourage the patient that the slight irregularity of the fetal heart is not important – that she is going to have a fine, healthy baby. Then in the next room you assure another woman on whom you just did a saline abortion, that it’s good that the heart is already irregular… She has nothing to worry about, she is not going to have a live baby.
A saline abortion was performed by injecting caustic saline solution into the amniotic fluid around the baby. This salt solution would poison the baby, often burning the baby’s skin and damaging the child’s lungs as he breathed in the toxic fluid. The woman would then go through labor and deliver her dead child. This technique was abandoned for two reasons. For one, it was dangerous to the mother. For another, it often resulted in live births. For example, Gianna Jessen was aborted by saline, survived, and found a loving adoptive family. Most babies who survived being aborted by saline, however, were not as lucky. Today, the poison of choice is digoxin. Babies are still sometimes born alive.
The abortionist goes on:
… At the beginning we were doing abortions on smaller fetuses… And the kicking and heartbeat did not manifest itself as much. I think if I had started with 24 weekers right off the bat, I would’ve had a much greater conflict in my own mind if this was the same as murder or not. But since we started off slowly with 15 – 16 weekers, the fetus just never got consideration. Then gradually, the whole range of cases started to become larger.
Other abortion doctors have described similar processes of desensitization.
The abortionist then says:
All of a sudden, one noticed that at the time of the saline infusion, there was a lot of activity in the uterus. It wasn’t fluid currents. It was obviously the fetus being distressed by swallowing the salt solution and kicking violently through the death trauma. You can either face it, or turn around and say it’s uterine contractions. That, however, would be repressing, since as a doctor you obviously know that it is not. Now whether you admit this to the patient is another matter. Her distress by unwanted pregnancy is to be the primary consideration, ahead of any possible consideration for the fetus. We just have to face it. Somebody has to do it. Unfortunately, we are the executioners in this instance.
This doctor does not admit to his patient that her baby is suffering pain. I would be surprised if he told her, before her abortion, that her baby would die violently and painfully. In his own words, he is the “executioner” of the baby.
There is much to take away from this quote. There is the fact that since abortion was legalized, women have had the ultimate power of life or death over their children. In one case, doctors will aggressively fight to save the life of an unborn baby; in another, they will go to great lengths kill the child. The irony of doctors fighting one day to save a child’s life and then, later, to kill another child of the same age, is striking.
The second thing to take away is that babies suffer violently in abortions. The methods of performing an abortion today are no more humane than those of the past. Today, babies are poisoned with digoxin or, more often, dismembered in utero in a procedure called a or D&E. (You can see an illustration of how these abortions are performed here )
Finally, abortion doctors know exactly what they’re doing when they abort children – they kill babies. You could read other quotes from abortionists admitting this fact here.
These disturbing revelations should encourage pro-lifers to continue to speak out against abortion.
Source: Magda Denes, “Performing Abortions” Commentary, October 1979, 35, 37
