Buffalo, New York is now home to one of the most bizarre abortion clinic undertakings in America. At Buffalo Women’s Services, abortions and births take place in the same facility. Whether or not a baby is “wanted” is the only criterion that determines what procedure — birth or killing — its mother will request. Life and death coexist here in stark contrast: the first gasping screams of a newborn can be heard in one room, while at the same time a pre-born child may be struggling to free itself of the calipers that are about to rip her limb from limb in another.
The combined birthing/killing center is the brainchild of Katharine Morrison, the abortionist who has owned Buffalo Women’s Services since 2004. Morrison describes the abortion landscape in Buffalo as “oppressive.” A generation ago, women could abort their children at any number of facilities in upstate New York, including hospitals. Today, legislation representing the pro-life views of the residents of New York has changed that. Morrison told Cosmopolitan magazine:
Fast-forward to today and you cannot have an abortion in any hospital in Buffalo, N.Y. We’re hanging on by our fingernails.
“Barely hanging on by their fingernails” may be what prompted the move to add a birthing center onto her abortion mill; profits will struggle in the face of an increasingly pro-life generation. But Cosmopolitan gushes over Morrison’s “love for natural birth” as the impetus behind her decision to blend birth with death at her facility (emphasis added):
It’s a different culture of birth. A woman isn’t subjected to anything she doesn’t want. She doesn’t need an IV [for drugs or fluids]. She can eat and move around. No one’s checking her every hour. She can go at her own pace, and even have a water birth. There’s no rush to cut the umbilical cord as there is at a hospital. And if labor is progressing slowly, no one’s pressuring the patient to have a C-section, as can happen at a hospital. All of these things were part of my routine in my previous practice. But when I saw this woman-centered care, I was hooked.
Woman-centered care may not have been what Morrison was used to, as an abortionist, considering the profession’s infamous reputation for being cold, assembly-line, and money-focused; not woman-centered.
Cosmopolitan asked Morrison how she went about “transforming” her business, pointing out the obvious fact that her facility being an abortion mill “had to be a major obstacle.” Morrison says that the patients who give birth and those who have abortions are the “same” people:
I knew it was going to be the elephant in the room. I knew that upon hearing I wanted to open a birthing center in an abortion facility, everyone would react with disbelief… I have patients who have had an abortion with me, had a baby, and had an abortion, or had a baby, had an abortion, or had a couple of abortions and had a baby, then had a couple of abortions. There are so many doctors out there in Buffalo who think their patients don’t get abortions. I can’t violate patient confidentiality, but I think, Well, I do them all day long on your patients. These doctors think they have the “good patients” who get pregnant and have the baby and I’ve got all the “lousy patients” who get pregnant and have abortions. But it’s the same patient.
The abortionist admits to Cosmopolitan that she got into the industry to make money. She says that her abortion practice and her decision to buy her own abortion mill ten years ago were decisions based on money, but that her birthing center is a “passion for reproductive choice:”
But when I went to do a birthing center, that was not a career move. That was a passion for reproductive choice. To be honest, it probably isn’t a good career move. The money I spent on this, I could have bought an apartment building and be collecting rent. Except, there is incredible satisfaction in all of this.
When asked how combining the abortion business with the birthing business changes things for American women, Morrison said that having existing abortion mills in New York open freestanding birthing clinics themselves could “give women more options for natural birth.” It’s funny that giving women “options” about their pregnancy decisions suddenly becomes appealing to the abortion industry when it stands to profit off of more than just the abortion choice. Too bad the phony pro-woman rhetoric has already been lost on America due to a long-standing track record suggesting that the industry advocates exactly the opposite.
