Abortion, a form of killing

" Listening to patients and letting them use words like "baby" and "killing"is one of a number of innovations that abortion activists are instituting to break away from the calcified approach to abortions and abortion rights post Roe." Jennifer Baumgardner Fairfield County Weekly: May 26, 2005 Listening to Women About Abortion

Completely formed after nine months

On November 11, 2005, the LA Times, reported in an article they entitled, Offering Abortion, Rebirth, that an abortion clinic nurse said that they tell patients, "If they truly feel they're killing a baby, we're not going to do an abortion for them..."

Later, the LA Times reporter observed her speaking with a patient. She told the girl this about her baby, "It's completely formed about nine weeks. Yours is more like a chicken yolk."

Killing, not what I like to think I'm doing

An abortionist said in the January 7, 1990, Los Angeles Times article, The Abortions of Last Resort, "Killing a baby is not a way I want to think about myself."

Potential life
In June 1997, Salon Magazine featured an article entitled, An intimate conversation with a woman on the front lines of America's most emotionally charged debate. The author, Camille Peri, begins the article by describing the abortionist she interviews this way, "She knows it is killing, but she doesn't believe it is wrong. As a doctor, she has performed hundreds of abortions, but as a mother of three small children, she has been forced to reexamine the values that propelled her to become pro-choice. Over time, says Dr. X, who requested anonymity out of concern for her safety and that of her family, her views about abortion have changed." In the article, Dr. "X" makes the profound statement, "It's very clear to me that it's killing a potential life. And I found that hard at first."

It [abortion] makes us all schizophrenic

Abortionist Richard Hausknecht, Associate Clinical professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology at Mount Sinai Hospital, specializes in high risk pregnancies. He opened up his first abortion clinic in New York City in July of 1970, in a building on the corner of 73rd Street and Madison, where he did thousands of abortions. He brags that women came from all over the United States because New York was one of three states that had made abortions legal. Hausknecht sounded almost conflicted when he said, in the February 15, 1984, NY Times article When abortion becomes birth: ''It makes us all schizophrenic. Nowadays we are asked to terminate a pregnancy that in two weeks doctors on the same floor are fighting to save.''

Preterm baby on ventilator in an incubator

According to Voices of Choice, Dr. Richard Hausknecht is a founding member and served on the Board of Directors of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health until 2004. Dr. Hausknecht pioneered the research on the safety and efficacy of methotrexate-misoprostol for medical abortion. He also served as the Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of New York City. During the sixties, Dr. Hausknecht was very active in abortion reform.

I've killed my baby, they are right

American Medical News ran a story about the conflicts that abortion staff have. The July 12, 1993 article entitled, Abortion providers share inner conflicts, talks about one abortion clinic nurse who described what she witnessed in the recovery room after the girls had their abortions. She stated that the abortion clinic patients would lie in the recovery room and cry and say, Ive killed my baby. Ive killed my baby. She went on to say, I dont know what to say to these women. Part of me thinks maybe they are right.

It's a Baby

On the Orlando Women's Center abortion clinic website abortionist James Pendergraft writes regarding later term abortions: "One of the main differences for third trimester patients having a pregnancy terminated for a fetal anomaly is that they may wish to have an intact fetus they can view and hold as part of the grieving process. For many of these patients, it isn't just a fetus - it is a baby."

Abortionist James Pendergraft

You said you were fine or that you were a murderer

Fairfield County Weekly's February 26, 2005 article, Listening to women about abortion, describes Charlotte Taft director of the Routh Street abortion clinic in Dallas.

Taft tells Fairfield, "I wanted to know if patients were afraid to be intimate sexually and emotionally after a procedure and [if] they felt adequately protected from another unintended pregnancy. So, I asked a lot of open-ended questions. . . I was shocked by how many who seemed fine during the procedure were now having thoughts and feelings that no one had anticipated." The article says that the biggest thing Taft noted was that woman felt sadder than they had anticipated. "They wondered, 'How could I feel sad about something I chose?'" "So these women had no idea who else in their lives had gone through this experience. We don't have good language even today for making a good but complex decision. Some women felt that if they said anything, it was ammunition to remove the right to choose. You either said you were fine or admitted you were a murderer."

I feel like I'm killing my baby

The Fairfield County Weekly May 26, 2005 article, Listening to women about abortion, reports that Peg Johnston, who worked at Southern Tier Women's Services, an independent abortion clinic, in Binghamton, NY, commented on what she heard the women seeking abortions at her clinic saying . In the article Johnston explains, "I don't know if I just started getting bored with Operation Rescue, but I definitely started to get interested in what women were saying instead." She'd sit in on a counseling session with a woman who'd say, "I feel like I'm killing my baby." At first, she said, she assumed that the patients were simply repeating what they'd heard outside, having internalized right-wing disinformation that Johnston needed to "correct." But she continues, "once I began listening more intently to her, I learned that she wasn't saying what the picketer was saying--although she used the same words. Frequently they were already mothers and they knew a time when, at that same stage of pregnancy, they had welcomed the life and felt like it was their baby. They weren't mouthing an antichoice message--they were acknowledging that this was serious stuff. How can I want one kid and not the other?" In the article, In Search of New Words: Redefining the Abortion Debate, posted on msn.com Johnston also talks about her conflicts. The article states that over the years, when protesters had conducted sit-ins and blockades and locked themselves inside the clinic, Johnston recalls, "I would go out there and scream at them. Then I would come back in and listen to a woman talk. Frequently the words were almost the same. The protesters would be saying, 'You're murdering your baby,' and the women inside would be saying, 'I feel like I'm killing my baby.' I used to think, well, they're just echoing what they are hearing. There was a time when I would correct them if they used those words." "The word killing was hard. It was so difficult to see women that guilty or distressed," continues Johnston, who has run the clinic since 1981. "But eventually we got into conversations about the difference between murder and killing. Now our reaction is more: well, does it feel like killing to you and how are you going to make peace with that?"

Abortionist, no concern for fetus

In the September 6, 2006 Daytona Beach News Journal, The Great Divide, Florida

abortionist Randal Whitney stated, "I sleep well, I have no concerns about what might have been if a fetus lived."

I end life for a good reason

In a December 2004 article, Confessions of an Abortion Doctor, an abortionist tells Boston Magazine's Cheryl Alkon this about doing abortions, "I have the utmost respect for life; I appreciate that life starts early in the womb, but also believe that Im ending it for good reasons. Often Im saving the woman, or Im improving the lives of the other children in the family. I also believe that women have a life they have to consider. If a woman is working full-time, has one child already, and is barely getting by, having another child that would financially push her to go on public assistance is going to lessen the quality of her life. And its also an issue for the child, if it would not have had a good life. Lifes hard enough when youre wanted and everythings prepared for." The abortion doctor ends the sentence this way, "So yes, I end life, but even when its hard, its for a good reason."

Abortion Coalition leader - Abortion is killing

On the ABC news program Nightline, Ron Fitzsimmons, the executive director of The National Coalition of Abortion Providers, said I lied thorough my teethwhen [I] said the partial birth abortion procedure was used rarely and only on women whose lives were in danger or whose fetuses were damaged.

Fitzsimmons also said that one of the facts of abortion is that women enter abortion clinics to kill their fetuses. "It is a form of killing," he said. "You're ending a life." This according to a February 26, 1997 article in the New York Times, An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied About a Procedure.

Fetal life on expulsion

In Chapter 5 of Warren Hern's book, Abortion Practice, Hern addresses second trimester abortions, where he states that, "midtrimester abortion is beset with numerous technical problems that are considerably more difficult to solve." Hern goes on to explain ambivalence for these abortions this way, "The signs of fetal life on expulsion and the repugnance of dismemberment plague the alternatives in midtrimester abortion." Later in the chapter (page 133), Hern defends the D & E (Dilation and Evacuation) abortion procedure stating that a benefit of this type of abortion is that the patient, "does not have to experience the expulsion of the fetus, which may or may not have signs of life..."