Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 From: Sarah Terzo Subject: A Few New Quotes Dan Lyons and Billy James Hargis "Thou Shalt Not Kill...My Babies" Christian Crusade Publications P.O Box 977 Tulsa, OK 74102 p 27 Dr. Selzer witnessed an abortion "I felt- in that room, a pace away, life prodded, life fending off. I saw life avulsed-swept by a flood, blackening, then out...It is a person carried here...Whatever else may be said in abortion's defense, the vision of that other defense will not vanish from my eyes...you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?" -------------------------------------------------------------- 10/16/95 OUR BODIES, OUR SOULS: RETHINKING PRO-CHOICE RHETORIC Naomi Wolf "It was when I was four months pregnant, sick as a dog, and in the middle of an argument, that I realized I could no longer tolerate the fetus-as-nothing paradigm of the pro-choice movement. I was being interrogated by a conservative, and the subject of abortion rights came up. "You're four months pregnant," he said. "Are you going to tell me that's not a baby you are carrying?" The accepted pro-choice response at such a moment in the conversation is to evade: to move as swiftly as possible to a discussion of 'privacy' and 'difficult personal decisions' and 'choice.' Had I not been so nauseated and so cranky, and so weighted down with the physical gravity of what was going on inside me, I might not have told what is the truth for me. "Of course it's a baby," I snapped. And went rashly on: "And if I found myself in circumstances in which I had to make the terrible decision to end this life, then that would be between myself and God." Startlingly to me, two things happened: the conservative was quiet; I had said something that actually made sense to him. And I felt the great relief that is the grace of long-delayed honesty." ------------------------------------------------------------------ In July 9, 1995, Brenda Pratt Shafer, R.N. sent a letter to Congressman Tony Hall in which she related her experience as a nurse whose agency assigned her to work at Dr. Haskell's Dayton abortion clinic in 1993. Nurse Shafer said she had no difficulty accepting the assignment because she was strongly pro-choice. But she quit after witnessing three partial birth (D & X) abortions. Here is how described the abortion of a six month old fetus: 'The baby's body was moving. His little fingers were clasping together. He was kicking his feet. All the while his little head was till stuck inside. Dr. Haskall took a pair of scissors and inserted them into the back of the baby's head. Then he opened the scissors up. Then he stuck the high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby's brains out. I almost threw up as I watched him do these things." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet" By David Kuperlain and Mark Masters in "New Dimensions" "I was trained by a professional marketing director in how to sell abortions over the telephone. He took every one of our receptionists, nurses, and anyone else who would deal with people over the phone, through an extensive training period. The object was, when the girl called, to hook the sale so that she wouldn't get an abortion somewhere else, or adopt out her baby, or change her mind. We were doing it for the money." --Nina Whitten, chief secretary at a Dallas Abortion clinic under Dr. Curtis Boyd Anthony Levantino, M.D., who did abortions for patients in his office for eight years. "Along the way, you find out that you can make a lot of money doing abortions. I worked 9 to 5. I was never bothered at night. I never had to go out on weekends. And I made more money than my obstetrician bretheren. And I didn't have to face the liability. That's a big factor, a huge perk. I almost never, ever had to worry about her lawyer bothering me. In my practice, we were averaging between $250 and $500 per abortion- and it was cash. It's the one time as a doctor you can say, "Either pay me up front or I'm not going to take care of you." Abortion is totally elective. Either you have the money or you don't. And they get it." "The nurses have to look at the ultrasound picture to gauge how far along the baby is for an abortion, because the larger the pregnancy, the more you get paid. It was very important for us to do that. But the turnover definitely got greater when we started using ultrasound. We lost two nurses- they couldn't take looking at it. Some of the other staff left also...They [the women] are never allowed to look at the ultrasound because we knew that if they so much as heard the heart beat, they wouldn't want to have the abortion." --Dr. Randall "OFtentimes, second trimester abortions were performed and these babies we would not put in the little jar with the label to send off to the pathology lab. We would put them down a flush toilet. That's where we would put these babies." --Kathy Sparks, former abortion worker "Saline abortions have to be done in the hospital because of complications that can arise. Not that they can't arise during other times, but more so now. The saline, a salt solution, is injected into the woman's sac, and the baby starts dying a slow, violent death. The mother feels everything, and many times it is at this point when she realizes that she really has a live baby insider her, because the baby starts fighting violently for his or her life. He's just fighting inside because he's burning." --Debra Henry "One night a lady delivered and I was called to come and see her because she was 'uncontrollable.' I went into the room, and she was going to pieces; she was having a nervous breakdown, screaming and thrashing. The nurses were upset because they couldn't get any work done, and all the other patients were upset because this lady was screaming. I walked in, and here was her little saline abortion baby kicking. It had been born alive, and was kicking and moving for a little while before it finally died of those terrible burns, because the salt solution gets into the lungs and burns the lungs too. I'll tell you one thing about D & E. You never have to worry about a baby's being born alive. I won't describe D & E other than to say that, as a doctor, you are sitting there tearing, and I mean tearing- you need a lot of strength to do it- arms and legs off of babies and putting them in a stack on top of a table." --Dr. David Brewer of Glen Ellyn, Illinois "Psychologically, the doctors always sixed the baby at '24 weeks.' However, we did an abortion on one baby I feel was almost full term. The baby's muscle structure was so strong that it would not come apart. The baby died when the abortionist pulled the head off the body." --Carole Everett "The baby's bones were far too developed to rip them up with this curette, and so he would have to try to pull the baby out with forcept, in about three or four major pieces. Then he scraped and suctioned, and then this little baby boy was lying on the tray. His little face was perfectly formed, little eyes closed and little ears-everything was perfect about this little boy." --Kathy Sparks "I can remember...the resident doctor sitting down, putting the tube in, and removing the contents. I saw the bloody material coming down the plastic tube, and it went into a big jar. My job afterwards was to go and undo the jar, and to see what was inside. I didn't have any views on abortion; I was in a training program, and this was a brand new experience. i was going to get to see a new procedure and learn. I opened the jar and took the little piece of stockingnette stocking and opened the little bag. The resident doctor said, "Now put it on the blue towel and check it out. We want to see if we got it all." I thought, "That'll be exciting-hands on experience looking at tissue." I opened the sock up and put it on the towel, and there were parts of a person in there. I had taken anatomy, I was a medical student. I knew what I was looking at. There was a little scapula and an arm, I saw some ribs and a chest, and a little tiny head. I saw a piece of a leg, and a tiny hand and an arm and, you know, it was like somebody put a hot poker into me. I had a conscience, and it hurt. Well, I checked it out and there were two arms and two legs and one head and so forth, and I turned and said, "I guess you got it all." That was a very hard experience to go through emotionally. Here I was, with no real convictions, caught in the middle. And so I did what a lot of us do throughout our life. We don't do anything. I didn't talk with anybody about it. I didn't talk with my folds about it, I didn't think about it. I did nothing. And do you know what happened? I got to see another abortion. That one hurt too. But again, I didn't do anything, and so I kept seeing abortions. Do you know what? It hurt a little bit less each time I saw one. Then I got to sit down and do an abortion. Well, the first one that I did was kind of hard. It hurt me again, like a hot poker. But after a while, it got to where it didn't hurt. my heart got calloused. I was like a lot of people are today: afraid to stand up. I was afraid to speak up. Or some of us, maybe we aren't afraid, but we just don't have our own convictons settled yet. I remember an experience as a resident on a hysterectomy (a late term abortion delivered by ceaserean section) I remember seeing the baby move underneath the sack of membranes, as the cesarean incision was made, before the doctor broke the water. The thought came to me. "My God, that's a person." Then he broke the water. And when he broke the water, it was like I had a pain in my heart, just like when I saw that first suction abortion. And then he delivered the baby, and I couldn't tough it. I wasn't much of an assistant. I just stood there, and the reality of what was going on finally began to seep into my calloused brain and heart. They took that little baby that was making little sounds and moving and kicking, and set it on that table in a cold, stainless steel bowl. And every time I would look over while we were repairing the incision in the uterus and finishing the Caesarean, I would see that little person kicking and moving in that bowl. And it kicked and moved less and less, of course, as time went on. I can remember going over and looking at the baby when we were done with the surgery and the baby was still alive. You could see the chest was moving and the heart was beating, and the baby would try to take a little breath, and it really hurt inside, and it began to educate me as to what abortion really was." -------------------------------------------------------------- Quoted by 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 Dr. James MacMahon, who performs D&X said in the American Medical News. "If I see a case...after twenty weeks, where it frankly is a child to me, I really agonize over it because 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." -------------------------------------------------------------- Olga Fairfax, phD "101 Uses for a Dead (or Live) Baby" "A baby is becoming property. We kill, keep or sell the property." --abortionist name withheld "After a baby is delivered, while it is still linked to its mother by the umbilical cord, I take a blood sample, sever the cord, and then, as quickly as possible remove the organs and tissues." --Dr. Robert Schwartz, chief of pediatrics at the Cleveland Metropolitan Hospital, on Hysterotomy abortions Christian Contender Vol 1 No 3 April 1984 by Anton Johnson ----------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------- quotes compiled by sarah terzo ---------------------------------------------- file: /pub/resources/text/contemp: abort-2.txt .