In an article in the New York Times, abortionist Christine Henneberg discusses committing abortions while pregnant. She recalls a conversation she had with another abortionist, who asked how she coped with this:
“Actually I was fine,” I said. “I know a lot of people have a hard time, but it wasn’t an issue for me.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Good for you. I was a mess.”
Some abortionists, apparently struggle emotionally with committing abortions while they themselves are nurturing children in their wombs.
Henneberg says she was “fine” but recalls one time when she “almost fell apart.” She was aborting a baby at 17 weeks:
I was in my second trimester, performing a 17-week procedure on a patient. The fetus, which is normally extracted in parts, came through the cervix intact. I dropped it in the metal dish and I saw it move, or thought I did. It was all I could do not to run from the procedure room crying.
This fully-formed child seems to have been aborted alive. At just 17 weeks, this baby could not have survived even if given medical care. But it is tragic that he or she (Henneberg doesn’t bother to tell us the child’s gender) died unattended in a hard, cold metal dish.
Late-term Planned Parenthood abortionist Lisa Harris also had an emotional experience when she aborted a baby while pregnant. She was 18 weeks pregnant while committing an 18-week procedure on a patient. In recalling the abortion, Harris says, “I was more interested than usual in seeing the fetal parts when I was done, since they would so closely resemble those of my own fetus.”
She then says:
I could see a small foot hanging from the teeth of my forceps. With a quick tug, I separated the leg.
Precisely at that moment, I felt a kick – a fluttery “thump, thump” in my own uterus. It was one of the first times I felt fetal movement.
There was a leg and foot in my forceps, and a “thump, thump” in my abdomen. Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes – without me – meaning my conscious brain – even being aware of what was going on.
Sadly, this experience did not stop her from committing late-term abortions. Having hardened her conscience long ago, she cried, but felt detached from her emotions. She was able to finish the abortion and has committed many late-term abortions since.
According to Henneberg, other than the momentary distress she suffered after the 17-week-old baby came out whole, she had no other emotional issues while doing abortions throughout her pregnancy. She mentions being worried about how the women coming in for abortions would react when her pregnancy became obvious. She says the woman were supportive. Yet she mentions one young woman who cried when she saw her. The woman expressed support for Henneberg’s choice to have a baby, but her tears showed that she was emotionally distressed at the sight of a pregnant abortionist.
READ: Late-term abortionist harvests baby body parts ‘within minutes’ of abortion
Henneberg says that her most difficult moment came when a protester outside the clinic saw the baby stroller in the trunk of her car and yelled at her. The male protester called her a baby-killer and shamed her for doing abortions while being a mother. Name-calling isn’t good way to reach out to those in the abortion industry and encourage them to quit. But Henneberg ran into the facility crying.
Henneberg ends her article by saying that she feels a harmony between her motherhood and her work as an abortionist. Then she rationalizes:
I do not mean it’s an easy job. Of course, it’s not. There is the protester on the sidewalk. There is the fetus in the dish, the perfect curl of its fingers and toes. Sometimes it reminds me of my daughter — how could it not? But that is precisely the point.
As a doctor, I can draw a distinction, a boundary, between a fetus and a baby. When I became a mother, I learned that there are no boundaries, really. The moment you become a mother, the moment another heartbeat flickers inside of you, all boundaries fall away.
Nevertheless, as mothers, we must all make choices. And we must live with the choices that aren’t ours to make.
When Henneberg says “boundaries fall away,” she seems to be tacitly admitting that there really isn’t a clean separation between a “fetus” and a baby. Although she does not directly come out and say it, motherhood may have taught her that a baby exists in the womb. She seems to have recognized her baby as a child as soon as she saw the heartbeat on the ultrasound, although she dances around the issue.
We can only hope that she will reflect further on the contradiction between killing babies and nurturing them — a contradiction she currently denies under the name of “choice.”
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