Dr. Carole Meyers, an OB GYN who has performed “hundreds of abortions” and worked as medical director for Planned Parenthood of Maryland, addressed a crowd of students at Johns Hopkins University. The lecture was intended for medical students who were considering becoming abortionists.
Away from pro-life ears, Meyers talked about the downside of being an abortionist. She spoke honestly about what she’s experienced…
If you are going to perform abortions, how is your family going to think about it? How will you tell your kids? What are you going to do if your church doesn’t want you to come anymore? How are you going to feel about a patient who admits she has picketed the clinic in the past? What about the woman who comes in for her third abortion and doesn’t want to hear about birth control? How are you going to feel about that? I’ll tell you how I feel. I get mad, frustrated, angry.(1)
One can understand how hard it must be to tell your children you kill babies for a living. Children have a way of seeing things adults have closed their minds to. They are more perceptive than many adults realize.
For example, pro-life activist Janet Folger wrote about how a pro-choice woman came up to her after her pro-life presentation with a child in tow. The angry pro-choice woman began to berate Folger and insist that abortion didn’t kill babies. “It’s not a baby – it’s a fetus” she yelled. At that very moment, her child pointed to the fetal models on display and said loudly, “Mommy, look at the babies!” The child could see through the euphemisms her mother was using and see the fetal models as what they were- models of babies.
No matter how much pro-abortion propaganda an abortionist force-feeds her children, the truth is hard to deny. Any children of Meyers may wonder if she would have taken their lives if they had been unwanted.
And what happens when an abortionist’s children get older and someone tells them the true facts about abortion? What do they think when a pro-lifer shows them pictures of babies in the womb or aborted children, similar to the ones their parent kills? They may come to look upon their parent as a dealer of death. Others in the family, as Meyer says, may oppose abortion. They may be against abortion from the beginning and become estranged when the abortionist starts her career. Or they may start out supporting the abortionist and then learn more about abortion. When they discover that their relative tears the arms and legs off babies for a living, they may be unable to look her in the eye. They may avoid her and her family or even cut off contact completely.
Abortionists make a great deal of money. One writer reveals that an abortionist at one clinic made $300,000 a year working only 20 hours a week, doing nothing but abortions.(2) But the price that abortionists pay is alienation from their children, their families, and their churches.
It’s also interesting to note that this abortionist, like many others who work in abortion centers, gets frustrated and angry at women who have multiple abortions. If abortion is such a benign procedure, merely the removal of some “products of conception,” only the ending of a pregnancy, what does it matter if a woman has more than one? Why does it upset Meyers when a woman relies on abortion for birth control? The truth is, abortionists see little babies torn apart in every abortion they do (warning: graphic link). Meyers knows that abortion isn’t like removing a wart or pulling a tooth. Otherwise, why would she be angry when women come in for repeat abortions?
Meyers was honest about the downside of performing abortions, although she probably never meant her words to be read by pro-lifers. We can only hope that the alienation and anger, as well as the emotional impact of killing children, will convince more abortionists to leave the industry or never to enter it in the first place.
Notes
- Patricia Meisol “A Hard Choice: A young medical student tries to decide if she has what it takes to join the diminishing ranks of abortion providers” Washington Post, Nov 23 2008
- Peter Korn Lovejoy: A Year in the Life of an Abortion Clinic (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996)