The Horror of Abortion Procedures
Dear Pro-Life Friend,
On November 13, 2008, we received a message from a twenty-nine-year-old woman from Rochester, MN. She had just seen our abortion pictures and said: “I have always considered myself pro-life but I have never felt the rage of the injustice until seeing this.” On November 16, a twenty-nine-year-old woman from Warner Robins, GA, told us: “…seeing these videos has made me more proactive about speaking out against this heinous act.”
On November 16, a seventeen-year-old boy from Statesville, NC, said: “I can’t believe this really happens. It never hit me this hard till I saw this website. THESE ARE REAL PEOPLE.” On November 15, a thirty-eight-year-old woman from Northern Virginia said: “I … have been far too complacent about my personal involvement in the issue.” Then a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Surprise, AZ, said on November 16: “I didn’t know how to explain to people that they were killing a person because that always seemed to be the argument. However, after seeing some of these images, all I would have to do is send them to this site to see baby fingers laying on a U.S. quarter.” On November 17, a forty-one-year-old man from St. Leonard, MD, told us that the pictures “Made me stronger in my belief that the unborn need my help.”
Simon Heller, abortionist LeRoy Carhart’s attorney before the U.S. Supreme Court in the partial-birth abortion case of Stenberg v. Carhart, told Justice Antonin Scalia that “Abortion methods are, by their nature, unsightly” (The Supreme Court in the Intimate Lives of Americans, Ball, NYU Press, 2004). That is why the abortion industry tries to cover up what we are working to expose.
PLEASE HELP US SAVE LIVES BY FORWARDING THIS LETTER TO YOUR PRO-LIFE FRIENDS!
Heritage Clinic for Women, in Grand Rapids, MI, for instance, says on their website, HeritageClinic.com, that after dilating the cervix, “the physician removes the pregnancy with sterile instruments.” Bland.
WebMD.com describes D&E abortion procedures as involving passage of “a grasping instrument (forceps) into the uterus to grasp larger pieces of tissue.” Still bland. But when we get an abortionist on the witness stand and force him to testify under oath, under penalty of perjury, the descriptions are anything but bland.
PhysiciansForLife.org reports that Dilatation and Evacuation (D&E) abortions are one of the two most commonly used abortion procedures in second-trimester abortions. They note that approximately 12% of all abortions (about 156,000 per year) occur after the 13th week of pregnancy. The site quotes Dr. Martin Haskell, an abortionist, in sworn testimony he gave in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin (Madison, WI, May 27, 1999, Case No. 98-C-0305-S):
‘And typically when the abortion procedure is started we … know that the fetus is still alive because either we can feel it move as we’re making our initial grasps or if we’re using some ultrasound visualization when we actually see a heartbeat as we’re starting the procedure. It’s not unusual at the start of D&E procedures that a limb is acquired first and that that limb is brought through the cervix and even out of the vagina prior to disarticulation and prior to anything having been done that would have caused the fetal demise up to that point.’
The site next quotes from the testimony of abortionist LeRoy Carhart, the litigant in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart, decided in 2000: “‘…[W]hen you rupture the membranes, an arm will spontaneously fall out through the vaginal opening ….'” It gets worse. “‘My normal course would be to dismember that appendage and then go back and try to take the fetus out whether foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first.'” When asked how he performed this “dismemberment,” he replied: “‘Just pulling and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get hold of which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the opening, using the internal opening [of the uterus] as your counter-traction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be.'” Then he explains that “‘Sometimes you will get one leg and you can’t get the other leg out.'” The attorney next asks: “‘In that situation, when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?'” Carhart answers: “‘Yes.'” He adds: “‘I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.'” Not quite so horrific as a picture but close.
On March 2, 2009, the Los Angeles Times published a front page story titled “Drug war casts its shadow over a spring break mecca.” The article tells of the Cancun, Mexico police chief who is accused of involvement in the kidnapping, torture and murder of “… a retired army general [Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello] who had been hired to revamp the city’s police force.” The General and two others “disappeared in downtown Cancun ….” The story goes on to say “Their bodies, riddled with bullets, were found the next morning beside a highway ….” The most chilling part of the tale is that “The general’s arms and legs had been broken, apparently as a result of torture.” The pain of this experience is unimaginable but that is the point. “Authorities believe the slaying was the work of the Zetas, much-feared enforcers for drug-smuggling gangs.”
Can it be any less excruciating when Drs. Haskell and Carhart, and many other killers just as depraved as they, break the arms and legs of late-term babies who are old enough to be in neonatal care units if born alive at the stage of pregnancy at which they are being tortured to death? No wonder our pictures sicken.
Yet the Congress has refused to enact the “Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act,” which would have forced abortionists to offer aborting mothers anesthesia for their preborn babies if the child was at least twenty weeks old.
Late-term abortions are no more depraved than killing preborn children in embryonic stem cell research but to the public, they seem much worse. Perhaps these abortions shock the conscience because they so closely resemble massacres such as the one reported by the Associated Press on January 23, 2009, under the headline “2 Infants, 1 Adult Killed in Stabbing Spree at Belgian Day Care.” The article begins: “A young man with a gruesomely painted black-and-white face went on a rampage at a Belgian day care center Friday, stabbing two babies and a female worker to death and seriously wounding twelve others.” The story continues: “‘This was a particularly violent attack. All the kids had multiple stab wounds on their legs, arms, all over their bodies,’ Dr. Ignace Demeyer, head of emergency services at Our Lady Hospital in nearby Aalst, told reporters.” Infanticide shocks almost everyone but Barack Obama.
Researcher Don Surber is credited by crushliberalism.com (“Obama’s ‘pay grade,”August 19, 2008) with the discovery of a revealing Obama quote on the issue of infanticide when he was a state senator in 2001. Opposing legislation which would have obligated doctors to provide care to any baby born prematurely or surviving a failed abortion, he said, “… whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person … what we are really saying … is that they are … entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a – a child, a 9-month old – child that was delivered to term. That determination … would forbid abortions to take place.”
This sort of deceit is characteristic of Mr. Obama’s slippery approach to abortion and other difficult issues. He distorts the traditional definition of the term “viable” so it no longer means the age at which a baby is able to survive outside the womb with proper neonatal care. His new definition denies viability until a baby has been delivered through full-term birth. Then, without missing a beat, he expands the definition of the word “abortion” to legitimize the killing of newborn babies who have survived failed abortions. If the mom doesn’t want the baby, it isn’t “viable,” no matter how old it is. The abortionist, therefore, has a duty to kill it in the womb but no obligation to save it if it survives the abortion. This is the man which Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) recently and rightly called the “abortion president” (FoxNews.com, March 6, 2009). He could also have called him the “infanticide president.”
Infanticide is not merely a theoretical problem. A WorldNetDaily.com story on April 25, 2005 titled “Abortion staff ignores baby boy born alive?” carries a subheadline which reads “Woman pleads for help with ‘Rowan’ after delivering son in clinic restroom.” The story opens: “A woman who was scheduled to have her 22-week-along pregnancy ended at a Florida abortion clinic instead delivered the baby alive in a restroom and says her pleading for help from medical staff went unheeded, even when an employee saw that the tiny boy was moving.” She had requested a “digoxin” abortion instead of a bone-crushing D&E because she wanted it to be “as humane and painless as possible for my son.” Apparently no one told her that injecting this poison into her baby’s heart would induce an excruciatingly painful heart attack.
A February 7, 2009 CNN.com story (“Doctor loses license in live birth abortion case”) reports similar terror in another Florida clinic when a twenty-three-week abortion failed to kill the baby. The abortionist botched the job so the non-physician clinic operator finished the baby off herself. The mother had paid them $1200 to kill her child while still in her womb but she is now suing the clinic for killing the baby moments after it emerged. What changed her mind about whether her baby should live or die? Her attorney, Tom Pennekamp, said: “She came face to face with a living human being …. And that changed everything” (Buffalonews.com, February 5, 2009). This is, of course, why we show people abortion pictures. We want them to come face to face with the baby because the pictures change everything. The CNN.com story says:
…[The abortionist] was not present when … [the pregnant woman] ‘felt a large pain’ and delivered a baby girl, according to the suit. ‘The staff began screaming and pandemonium ensued. … [The mother] watched in horror and shock as her baby writhed with her chest rising and falling as she breathed.’ A clinic co-owner entered the room and used a pair of shears to cut the baby’s umbilical cord …. She ‘then scooped up the baby and placed the live baby, placenta and afterbirth in a red plastic biohazard bag, which she sealed, and then threw [the] bag and the baby in a trash can.’
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‘The complainant … observed the baby moving and gasping for air for approximately five minutes ….’
The Associated Press quotes the lawsuit as further alleging that “Gonzalez [the clinic operator] knocked the baby off the recliner chair where she [the mother] had given birth, onto the floor. The baby’s umbilical cord was not clamped, allowing her to bleed out.” This wasn’t just murder, it was also torture.
Did they charge the clinic owner with murder? Of course not. The March 4, 2009 SunSentinel.com (“Hialeah abortion clinic denies throwing newborn away after botched abortion”) reports that Melkis Gonzalez was merely charged with “practicing medicine without a license and tampering with evidence….”
Something of a trend could be developing here. The January 31, 2009 Los Angeles Times reported a story headlined “Woman sentenced to 3 years for performing unlicensed abortions.” It opens: “A Granada Hills office manager who ran six family planning clinics across Southern California was sentenced … for performing abortions on women, some of whom were given no pain medication during the procedures.” The near-sighted judge in the case attempted to minimize the defendant’s culpability by saying: “I do not see before me an evil person or a hardened criminal. What I see before me is a defendant who is a person who attempted to lead an industrious and successful life.” Yes, by taking the lives of children and risking the lives of their mothers.
This is almost as bad as a January 8, 2009 story at Telegraph.co.uk, with a subheadline which read “The mother and brother of a 14-year-old Afghan rape victim face charges after they cut her open and removed her foetus without anesthetic, it has been reported.” The U.N. High Commissioner For Human Rights has issued a “Special Rapporteur on Torture” (www2.ohchr.org, see also ChinaAid.org) which defines forced abortion as torture but this forced abortion was unimaginably torturous. The article adds that “The rural family apparently decided to perform an abortion when the girl was five months’ pregnant to protect the family’s honor.”
Since some babies have survived outside the womb at five months, five-month abortions amount to infanticide. But are they any less barbaric than the msnbc.msn.com article on January 4, 2009 headlined “Cops: Dad angry over child support kills son”? The story reports that a two-year-old baby was killed by his father who told police he “‘would kill either his wife or his child before he paid child support’.” Evil abortionists and evil dead-beat dads and evil presidents may be beyond the reach of reason but the two Florida women who went to kill their babies relented when they saw the terrible truth. That is why our billboard trucks and campus displays and aerial billboards and website photos are so important. Please keep helping us show the pictures which prove that baby-killing is equally demonic no matter the age of the child. We really need your help now more than ever!
Lord bless,
Gregg Cunningham
Executive Director
P.S. On March 7, 2009, a twenty-one-year-old Pennsylvania woman wrote us to say: “I am twelve weeks pregnant and I had many family members offer to pay for an abortion. After I looked at the [CBR] pictures I knew that I made the right decision not to get the abortion.” With so many family members pressuring her to abort, she could have flipped back in the direction of killing her baby had she not seen our pictures.