In many online forums you aren't allowed to post pictures, but you can post quotes. These are stories straight from the horse's mouth about abortion...abortionists and clinic workers talking about what they do. All of these sources are nonbiased or pro-choice.
Wendy Simonds, a pro-choice feminist, wrote a book on life in an abortion clinic and even included a chapter describing how the clinic workers foiled the awful 'antis' that came to picket their clinic. But she also has a chapter about how the clinic workers dealt with fetal remains:
From "Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic" by Wendy Simonds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996
Quotes from clinic employees:
"You're going from dealing with people to dealing with what most people here at the Center consider a real hurdle, to do sterile room, because you have to deal with the actual abortion tissue. And for some people, that's really hard. They can be abstractly in favor of abortion rights, but they sure don't want to see what an eighteen-week abortion looks like."
"It's just- I mean it looks like a baby. It looks like a baby. And especially if you get one that comes out, that's not piecemeal. And you know, I saw this one, and it had its fingers in its mouth...it makes me really sad that that had to happen, you know, but it doesn't change my mind. It's just hard. And it makes me just sort of stop and feel sad about it, the whole necessity of it. And also....it's very warm when it comes into the sterile room because it's been in the mother's stomach. It feels like flesh, you know..."
"It's going to be weird now because you're going to see the sono. You're going to see the heart beating- little hearts, you know- and then, all of a sudden, you're going to put his cardiac medicine in it to make it stop- to kill it. So you're going to see the exact moment when you kill the fetus. I won't kill it, the doctor will kill it...and, I mean, it might be more humane...[if] the fetuses do feel something, why not kill it, you know, fast, [rather] than rip its leg off?"
"I feel some sadness [about abortions] and I think part of the problem is that we don't talk about that...we don't talk about it as much as we think about it...somehow your pro-choice stance is compromised by saying the word "baby."...We don't allow ourselves to say or think that word...."
"At nine weeks...you start seeing fetal parts. And by the second trimester it's, you know, it's a baby, and by eighteen weeks it's definitely a baby. And by like, you know, twenty-two weeks, you go in and you watch someone do a sonogram, and you're like, "Oh my." There it is just moving, moving around. And it's really hard because I always thought of abortion in terms of just the woman, just her body."
"You're looking between the woman's legs; you're seeing, you know, what the doctor's doing. And it's what a lot of people would call kind of, I guess, gruesome- that's not really the word because- it's identifiable. I mean, when he...takes the forceps and pulls out a foot, you can see the foot, and my reaction- because I feel so strongly that women who want to have a twenty week abortion should be able to have that- but I mean when I look and was just like, you know, my first reaction was, you know, I was pretty horrified."
"So by it looking like a baby, you're associating it with yourself because...you used to be a baby, you used to be a fetus."
"...when you're, you know, putting a fetus's feet in over its head in a baggie, there's just this brief moment of "This could have been me," which I fundamentally believe is okay. She should have the right to choose..."
"...it looks like a baby, That's what it looks like to me. You've never seen anything else that looks like that. The only other thing you've ever seen is a baby...You can see a face and hands, and ears and eyes and, you know...feet and toes...It bothered me real bad the first time..."
"The destruction I can't deny....I wish we lived in a world where abortion didn't have to exist."
"You know, we still say "products of conception." Well, why don't we say it looks like- you know, a twenty-week fetus looks like a baby. Why can't we say that in public? Because that's what the antis say, you know."
"I think the tough part was seeing actual pieces of fetus being removed..And in the beginning, yes, I remember looking, standing behind this woman's shoulder [as she performed an early second- trimester-abortion] and thinking, "I can't do this...There's something emotionally upsetting about this..Features are discernible; you can count five fingers on a hand and five toes on a foot. You know, all the organ systems are formed. You know, you can see ears as structures, and the nose and eyes as structures...I have gotten to the point now that because I've been doing this work five months, four months, I look at it a little differently. I don't see the same things that I did. And, honestly, when I sit down to do one of these now, I am watching to be sure that I'm getting everything that I need to get. It's 'Do I have two lower extremities? Do I have two upper extremities? Is t here a spine? ...and the skull?...It does become a bit routine after a while. I don't fear it."
"I hate it when people put it together to look like a baby. I hate that...I don't want to look like it when its like that because it's like a broken doll, and that grosses me out."
From the author: "Many health workers told me they 'never look at the face' when processing tissue."
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"You have to become a bit schizophrenic. In one room, you encourage the patient that the slight irregularity in the fetal heart is not important, that she is going to have a fine, healthy baby. Then, in the next room you assure another woman, on whom you just did a saline abortion, that it is a good thing that the heartbeat is already irregular....she has nothing to worry about, she will NOT have a live baby...All of a sudden one noticed that at the time of the saline infusion there was a lot of activity in the uterus. That's not fluid currents. That's obviously the fetus being distressed by swallowing the concentrated salt solution and kicking violently and that's to all intents and purposes, the death trauma. ..somebody has to do it, and unfortunately we are the executioners in this instance..."
--abortionist Dr.Szenes
"And then to see, to be with somebody while they're having the injection when they're twenty or twenty-four weeks, and you see the baby moving around, kicking around, as this needle goes into the stomach, you know."
--Susan Lindstrom, M.S.W.
"I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person in there, floating in a bloody liquid- plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But hen perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises and the face has the agonized tauntness of one forced to die too soon. I have seen this face before, on a Russian soldier lying on a frozen snow-covered hill, stiff with death, and cold."
--Pro-choice doctor and author Magda Denes
"Performing Abortions" by Magda Denes, M.D. "Commentary" Oct. 26 1976 p 35-37 (some years have past, but human development (and human nature)have not changed.
Also quoted Magda Denes, "[the doctor] pulls out something, which he slaps on the instrument table. "there," he says, "A leg." . . . I turn to Mr. Smith. . . He points to the instrument table, where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about three inches long. . . "There, I've got the head out now." ...There lies a head. It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a person."
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"If I see a case...after twenty weeks, where it frankly is a child to me, I really agonize over itbecause the potential is so imminently there...On the other hand, I have another position, which I think is superior in the hierarchy of questions, and that is "who owns this child?" It's got to be the mother."
--Dr. James MacMahon, who performs D & X abortions, in Nat Hentoff "It's Just Too Late: Third Trimester abortions are an Outrage and an Insult to the Human Race" July 27, 1993 Pittsburg Post-Gazette
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Describing an abortion that apparently did not prevent the child from being born alive, Dr. Haskell said this, "It came out very quickly after I put the scissors up in the cervical canal and pierced the skull and spread the scissors apart...in the previous two, I had used the suction to collapse the skull."
--Dayton Daily News Sun Dec 10 1989
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"The first time, I felt like a murderer, but I did it again and again and again, and now, 20 years later, I am facing what happened to me as a doctor and as a human being. Sure, I got hard. Sure, the money was important. And oh, it was an easy thing, once I had taken the step, to see the women as animals and the babies as just tissue."
--abortionist quoted from a radio talk show by John Rice in "Abortion" Litt D. Murfreesboro, TN.
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"I have never known a woman who, after her baby was born, was not overjoyed that I had not killed it."
--Abortionist Aleck Bourne "A Doctor Speaks" London Express, Jan 25
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"We know that its killing, but the state permits killing under certain circumstances"
--Dr. Neville Sender, abortionist
"Even now I feel a little peculiar about it, because as a physician I was trained to conserve life, and here I am destroying it."
--abortionist
"There was not one [doctor] who at some point in the questioning did not say "This is murder."'
--Magda Denes on her two years of research done for her book In Necessity and Sorrow; Life and Death Inside an Abortion Clinic.
Also
"I do think abortion is murder- of a very special and necessary sort. And no physician ever involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that."
"You know there is something in there alive that you are killing."
--another abortionist interviewed by Denes
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"Clinic workers may say they support a woman's right to choose, but they will also say that they do not want to see tiny hands and tiny feet....there is a great difference between the intellectual support of a woman's right to choose and the actual participation in the carnage of abortion. Because seeing body parts bothers the workers."
--Judith Fetrow, former clinic worker from San Francisco quoted in "Meet the Abortion Providers III" from a taped conference in Chicago 4/3/93
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..the emotional turmoil that the procedure inevitably wreaks on the physicians and staff...There is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator...the sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current."
--Abortionist quoted in "Meeting of American Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians" OBGYN News P 196
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"Abortion Practice" by Warren Hern, M.D., Boulder Colorado Abortionist published in 1984 by the J.B. Lippenott Company. Hern performs abortions up until the 4th month of pregnancy.
"The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks because fetal tissues become much more cohesive and difficult to dismember" p 154
"A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus." - 154
"The aggregate fetal tissue is weighted, then the following fetal parts are measured, foot length, knee to heel length, and biparietal diameter" p 164
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"Nobody wants to perform abortions after ten weeks, because by then you see the features of the baby, hands, feet. It's really barbaric."
--abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves by John Pekkanen p 93
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"I dare say that any thinking, caring individual can't not realize that he is ending life, or potential life."
--abortionist
"[Powell] said "Is this a fair way of expressing what you have just said, Doctor? You tell the mother "because your baby is defective, you have the right to kill it or not to kill it. If you choose to kill it, I will do the killing." "Of course," he [the abortionist] said. "There is no other way to say it and be honest."
both from The Zero People pg 9
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"Abortions are very draining, exhausting, heart-rending. There are a lot of tears. Some patients turn on you...I do them because I take the attitude that women who are going to terminate babies deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry babies...I've done a couple thousand, and its been a significant financial boon...the only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman as my patient and block out the baby."
--abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves
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>From the article "Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts" which appeared in the July 12 1993 issue of AAA News, a publication of the American Medical Association:
"I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria, for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure that destroys a fetus, kills a baby."
"When I put my hands on somebody to feel how big they are and I get kicked, I am barely able to talk at that moment."
an abortionist stated that 'somebody had asked her what they could say to the staff to make them look less shocked when they look at a 20 week fetus.."It's hard to be in a profession where you have a hard time answering the questions that other people ask you about what you do."
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In an interview by Mark Crutcher, former abortion clinic director Joy Davis said "Each person who worked there had a different way of dealing with it. [One] would look at the ultrasound the entire time she was in the room, but she would never look down in the pan. She would never look at the tissue being removed. She never wanted to see that. She would never take her eyes off the screen. And I had one who would never look at the screen....she would never look at the tissue and never look at the screen, she just didn't want to see anything."
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"It [the fetus] is a form of life...This has to be killing...The question then becomes "is this kind of killing justifiable? In my own mind, it is justifiable, but only with the informed consent of the mother"
--abortionist quoted in "Democrat and Chronicle" 7/5/92
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>From the Dallas Observer 3/18/95
Former clinic administrator Charlotte Taft, "We were hiding from the women some of the pieces of truth about abortion that were threatening....It is a kind of killing."
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From "Lovejoy: A Year in the Life of an Abortion Clinic" one worker says
"I have never denied that human life begins at conception. If I have a complaint about our society, its that we don't deal with death and dying. Do we believe human beings have a right to make decisions about death and dying? Yes we do, and those decisions are made every day in every hospital."
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"So when I went back to doing abortions and saw the fetus on the ultrasound, I recalled the early days of my pregnancies, when I found out I was pregnant and saw the baby on the ultrasound, and it really felt like this is a baby, a very real and potential being. Now, I do feel that this is a potential person and it does not have a life of its own outside of the mother, but I also am really aware that when you're ready to embrace a pregnancy, you can embrace it from the very moment you conceive or are aware that you are pregnant. Faye Wattleton said recently, "I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus, but it is the women's body, and therefore ultimately her choice." I believe that very firmly. You look at the ultrasounds and there's a fetus with a heartbeat and then after the procedure, there's the fetus, usually in pieces, in a dish. It was alive one moment and it's not the next. I don't believe it's a painful experience for the fetus because its nervous system is not "wired" so that it can feel pain at that point. I don't believe, as some anti-abortion people would have you believe, that there's a "silent scream." But it's very clear to me that it's killing a potential life. And I found that hard at first. "
----anonymous, quoted by Camille Peri at http://www.salonmagazine.com/june97/mot ... 70623.html in Salon Magazine
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An abortion doctor describes his job:
"... As you get into the second trimester, if we remove the pregnancy using forceps, and if a heartbeat is the measure of being alive, that happens all the time."
Dr. Dennis Christensen, Madison Abortion Clinic, Wisconsin. From The New York Times; May 15, 1998; page A14.
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From the book "Past Due" by Anne Finger, published by The Seal Press in 1990
"I am walking out the back door, and I see a plastic jar of tissue and blood waiting to be sent to the path lab, and in the plastic jar a tiny perfect white hand. . . That flat palm reaching up through a wine-red wash of blood. Why does that stay with me?
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From "Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of The Abortion Wars" by Cynthia Gorney (New York: Simon& Schuster, 1998.)
"Never. I would never look down. Some of the nurses watched as he removed the tissue, but I never looked. If I looked, I would never be able to work there [the clinic]again." --Carlean Turner, Kansas City, on D&E abortions
-------------------------------------------------------In the book "Abortion: Debating the Issue" (New York:Enslow Publishing, Inc., 1995) Nancy Day quotes abortionist Dr. Ed Jones, who had worked at a Planned Parenthood Clinic for 4 years at the time of the interview, saying the following:
"This can burn you out very, very quickly...not so much by the physical labor as the emotional part of what's going on. When you do an ultraound, particularly if you have children, and you see a fetus there, kicking, moving, living, doing things that your own child does, bringing it's thumb to its mouth, and things like that- it's difficult. Then, after the procedure, sometimes we have to actually look at the specimen, and you see arms and legs and things like that torn off...It does take an emotional toll."
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"Is abortion murder? All killing isn't murder...."
--Don Sloan, MD, abortion provider, author of "Abortion: A Doctor's Perspective, A Woman's Dilemma." Quoted in "Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints" edited by Tamara L. Roleff.
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In "Caught in the Crossfire: A Year on Abortion's Front Line" by Sue Hertz (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991)the author documents what she saw in and at one busy abortion clinic. Here are some excerpts.
Dr. Waldo Fielding, "I don't sugarcoat it. There is no question what I'm doing in a second trimester. I'm destroying potential life..."
From the author:
"It was easy to shrug off an aborted pregnancy as nothing more than a sack of blood and globs of tissue - as many pro-choice activists did- if one never saw fetal remains, or products of conception (POC) as they were known in medical circles. But the nurses, medical assistants, and doctors who worked inside procedure rooms ...knew that an eleven week old POC harbored tiny arms and legs and feet with toes. At twelve weeks, those tiny hands had tiny nails. Althouth the fetal head was too small at this stage to withstand the evacuation machine's suction, pieces of face- a nose and mouth, or a black eye...were sometimes found in the aftermath...Later abortions spawned even more grusome fetal remains...the head did not come out whole during the evacuation, but the legs and arms and rib cage made it through intact. The hand of a second trimester fetus, as a Preterm doctor described it, seemed big enough to shake."
"The counselor/medical assistants (CMAs) met regularly to discuss their feelings about their work...Inside a procedure room, facing the contents of the uterus, there was no denying whawt abortion was."
"During the procedure, Doris [Merrill] would offer her hand for the patient to squeeze, or if the abortion were particularly painful, a notepad for the patient to bite...Doris knew what Waldo was doing at the end of the examination table as he pored over the legs and ribs and hands, but she chose not to look. It wasn't that Doris ignored the truth, but rather that her commitment was to the woman, not the fetus..."
"...Waldo removed from the glass jar cheesecloth sack which caught the fetal parts, dumping the parts into a basin at the end of the table, between [the patient's]feet. Two legs, two arms, two fists, a skull, a backbone, a placenta. "We've got it" he announced."
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"After an abortion, the doctor must inspect these remains to make sure that all the fetal parts and placenta have been removed. Any tissue left inside the uterus can start an infection. Dr. Bours squeezed the contents of the sock into a shallow dish and poked around with his finger. "You can see a teeny tiny hand' he said.
--abortion clinic worker quoted in "Is the Fetus Human?" and in Dudley Clendinen, "The Abortion Conflict: What it Does to One Doctor" New York Times Magazine Aug 11 1985 p 26
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Quoted in Melody Green and Sharon Bennett "The Crime of Being Alive: Abortion, Euthanasia, Infanticide" p 3
"Remember, there is a human being at the other end of the table taking that kid apart. We've had a couple of guys drinking too much, taking drugs, even a suicide or two."
--Dr. Julius Butler, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School
"Arms, legs, and chests come out of the forceps. It's not a sight for everybody"
--Dr. William Benbow Thompson at the University of California at Irvine
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