Cheryl Chastine (via abortiondocs.org)
Pro-lifers may recognize the name Cheryl Chastine. She is the notorious abortionist who now works as the director of George Tiller’s former clinic, now known as South Wind Women’s Center. Chastine has, in the past, said that the public should not get to decide abortion laws, has complained about informed consent laws, and has a tendency towards public vulgarity. While Chastine originally tried to hide her identity as an abortionist, she’s long past that — now, she’s in Rolling Stone magazine, talking about how “rewarding” it is to dismember preborn babies.
She was interviewed by pro-abortion blogger Andrea Grimes, who has a history of gushing over how fabulously decorated abortion facilities are, even when they have multiple safety violations, including rusty equipment and expired medicines. (Because in Grimes’ world, it apparently doesn’t matter if a woman has rusty equipment shoved into her uterus as long as the walls are painted a pretty shade of pink.) Grimes says that she wanted to interview someone who wasn’t a “pundit or a politician,” with the goal of making readers believe that they would get a balanced, unbiased perspective. But as the person being interviewed is an abortionist, and the interviewer is an extreme abortion fanatic… right away we should suspect that the article is going to be biased – nothing more than a glowing ode to abortion.
And on top of this bias, Chastine drops this little nugget:
I didn’t go to med school thinking I wanted to provide abortions. I’d always been politically conscious, though, so I worked with some fellow University of Kentucky students to start a chapter of Medical Students for Choice (MSFC). I figured we ought to have one. But I had no real intention of providing abortions myself.
Medical Students for Choice made a new connection for me: for abortion to remain a meaningful option, we need doctors who are trained and willing to do them. With the providers at the time aging and retiring, I realized, there would be people who would need abortions and not be able to have them, unless I stepped up.
Even though she didn’t go to school to become an abortionist, Chastine is thrilled to be providing abortions now:
I have no regrets about my path. This is even more important, and more rewarding, than I’d thought it could be. Every day I go to work, I can make it possible for someone to leave an abusive relationship, care for their children, continue their education, deal with an illness. Every day, my patients hug me and thank me and tell me I’ve helped them get their life back.
It’s especially interesting that she mentions women needing abortion in order to leave abusive relationships. 1 in 4 women seeking abortions are victims of domestic violence… but getting an abortion doesn’t solve the issue of domestic violence for those women. In fact, they’re at higher risk for domestic violence in the future than women who don’t have abortions.
But abortionists have to justify their evil somehow, right?
Chastine then moved on to complain about how there aren’t many people willing to get the training to become abortionists:
Given how much abortion stigma has mounted since then, and how much more difficult it is now to learn something mid-career, you don’t become an abortion provider unless you decide before you finish med school that you’re going to do it. In most cases, you have to fight to get training. If you have to do that, you know you’re going to be putting yourself on the line. So now, the only people who become providers are ones who start off ideologically committed to abortion care. Understandably, those physicians are hesitant to then make their homes providing abortions in actively hostile environments.
She’s right that not many medical students are choosing to learn how to perform abortions. The ones who do are shunned, probably because the other medical students thought being doctors meant their mission was to save lives, not take them. What Chastine doesn’t mention is that the abortion stigma doesn’t come as a result of evil pro-lifers ruining everything; even other doctors look down on abortionists and, as late-term abortionist Susan Robinson described it, see them as the “lowest of the low.” They evidently aren’t respected and are made to feel irrelevant. So if Chastine wants to figure out what is causing the abortion stigma, she might want to ask the medical industry.
Chastine also complained about how your friendly neighborhood abortionist just isn’t trusted anymore (and of course, it’s all the fault of pro-lifers):
Somehow, anti-abortion activists have succeeded in convincing the general public that abortion providers are not to be regarded as experts on abortion. The claim is that providers’ status as providers somehow makes us suspect or biased. It’s implied that we can’t be trusted. This is simply bizarre and without precedent in the medical world.
It’s not really without precedent — it’s just that the rest of the medical world has, you know, standards. The abortion industry is rife with lawbreaking, criminal behavior and refuses to be held to the same standards and regulations that every other medical professional is held to, including informed consent laws (one standard Chastine herself dislikes). They also regularly lie to women. Maybe that’s why there’s such a problem with people being able to trust abortionists… because they’ve proven themselves to be inherently untrustworthy.
Chastine wasted no time in smearing pro-lifers as terrorists:
So once the national anti-abortion domestic terrorist organizations found out who I was, I was bombarded with calls to my office, nasty comments and veiled threats online (“I wonder if someone will shoot the new provider…”).
Anyone threatening Chastine is obviously crossing a line, and pro-lifers continually denounce violence or threats against abortionists and abortion workers. But when abortion activists are violent towards pro-lifers – like the teenager assaulted by a college professor, or another teenager assaulted by a post-abortive couple, or the abortion activist who tried to run over a pro-life high school student – there’s never a peep from the abortion lobby. In fact, at Chastine’s own abortion facility last year, an abortion worker poured cow manure on pro-lifers.
Chastine tries to paint herself as some kind of pro-woman warrior, fearlessly advocating for the poor and downtrodden of the world while fighting off evil terrorists. But the truth is, a pro-abortion cheerleader just painted a rosy portrait of her in an overly sympathetic magazine… and even that couldn’t mask the truth about her.
She is an abortionist – someone who profits off of death and violence – and tries to make it seem noble.
