As Michigan voters debate Proposal 3, which would enshrine abortion as a right within the state constitution, National Public Radio (NPR) has released audio from inside Northland Family Planning, an abortion chain that operates in the state. The NPR report features disturbing audio of an abortion procedure during which the woman can be heard moaning in pain.
NPR host Kate Wells went inside the Northland facility in Sterling Heights, a suburb of Detroit. There, she interviewed multiple abortion-seeking women and joined another unnamed woman as she underwent a first-trimester D&C abortion at 11 weeks, which Wells compared to childbirth. During the procedure, a staffer named Brandee encouraged the woman as she cried and moaned. Brandee instructed her to breathe when the “cramps get painful,” as explained by Wells, but the woman can be heard saying she can’t breathe. After the abortion is complete, Brandee and abortionist Audrey Lance both cheered the woman on, applauding her with exclamations of “You did it!” and “You did great!”
Throughout the audio, the loud sound of the vacuum of the suction machine — which suctions the preborn child from her mother’s womb with such force that the child is ripped to pieces — is heard.
What NPR did not delve into is what actually takes place during a D&C abortion on a living preborn baby. Also known as a dilation and curettage or suction abortion, a D&C is a surgical procedure in which the abortionist forcibly dilates the woman’s cervix and then inserts a cannula.
“The suction machine is turned on, and the abortionist slowly rotates the cannula inside the uterus,” Dr. Beverly McMillan, an OB/GYN with 45 years of experience, who previously worked as an abortionist, explained in a video for Live Action. “The fetus is rapidly torn to pieces as it is pulled through the cannula and tubing into a large glass bottle, followed by the placenta. Sometimes smaller embryos are pulled through whole. Occasionally the abortionist must remove the cannula and pull out body parts that have clogged the opening to complete the abortion. Once the abortionist thinks everything has been removed, she will sometimes use a long metal curette to scrape the lining of the uterus to make sure nothing is left behind.”
READ: After my D&C suction abortion, I saw the remains of my baby in a bucket
Risks of a D&C abortion include potential injury to the uterus, cervix, intestines, bladder, and nearby blood vessels. Other complications include hemorrhage, an incomplete abortion — in which parts of the baby are left inside the mother — infection, and death.
And Northland Family Planning is no stranger to these risks, which NPR also failed to mention.
Northland Family Planning has a history of injuring women; at their Sterling Heights location, profiled by NPR, a woman suffered a perforated uterus in 2019 during a D&C abortion — the same type of procedure listeners heard being committed in the NPR clip. At the time, it was the fifth injury that a facility client had suffered in just six months.
Other injuries have similarly taken place at the additional Northland facilities.
The arm of a human being killed in a first-trimester abortion. Photo courtesy of prolifesociety.com
Other abortion-minded women NPR featured were the abortionist as well as a woman going through a divorce, a woman pregnant with twins and fleeing an abusive relationship, and a woman who said she was merely over the parenting phase of her life and didn’t want to “just be a mother.”
“Melissa” complained of having to travel from Ohio to get an abortion, and how she had allegedly been “tricked” by a pregnancy resource center (PRC). Wells claimed the PRC wouldn’t “help” Melissa because they tried to convince her not to get an abortion. “It shouldn’t be this hard,” Melissa said, adding, “They were posing to be so pro-choice, and they’re not. [The nurse] wanted to pray for me.” Melissa was more than three months pregnant.
Another woman there for an abortion was pregnant with twins and already had two toddler daughters with a man she said is violent. She decided to leave the relationship after the man hurt her three-year-old.
“I don’t think I could survive if I knew that I had to have these babies with an abusive person. That’s insanity to me. I feel like a prisoner,” the woman, who went by “A,” said through tears, adding that she told her three-year-old that she was pregnant with twins and would be getting an abortion. “My daughter was so cute. She said, ‘OK, well, maybe another time, maybe later.’ I was like, ‘Yes, maybe later.’ Because she doesn’t know that at the end of the day I can’t physically, financially or mentally handle two more kids.”
Her babies, however, are not her abuser and did not deserve to die for their parent’s choices. And though her three-year-old is too young to understand yet, children who have lost siblings to abortion have spoken about the grief and pain they feel, along with the longing to know their lost siblings.
NPR and Wells glorified abortion, and in their rush to push forward a pro-abortion agenda, left out many of the necessary facts: how the abortion is committed, the pain the woman feels, the death of the preborn child, and the risks women face. Not once did NPR bother to explore the alternatives women have to abortion, but instead demonized organizations that help women choose life with confidence by providing free services and resources including safe homes for survivors of abuse and their children, along with financial help and material goods.
No woman should feel that killing her baby is a choice that she has to make. Women and children deserve better than abortion.
Editor’s Note, 11/4: This piece has been edited since original publication.
