This is not a right to choose. It’s a license for homicide.
Blood Confession – How Lying Marketers Sold America on Unrestricted Abortion – David Kupelian
“In 1985, intrigued by the question of what really happens during an abortion in the first three months of a pregnancy, Nathanson decided to put an ultrasound machine on the abdomen of a woman undergoing an abortion and to videotape what happens.
“We got a film that was astonishing, shocking, frightening,” he says.
“It was made into a film called The Silent Scream. It was shattering, and the pro-abortion people panicked. Because at this point, we had moved the abortion debate away from moralizing, sermonizing, sloganeering and pamphleteering into a high-tech argument. For the first time, the pro-life movement now had all of the technology and all of the smarts, and the pro-abortion people were on the defensive.”
Nathanson’s film provoked a massive campaign of defamation on the part of the pro-abortion movement, including charges that he had doctored the film. He hadn’t. “I was accused of everything from pederasty to nepotism. But the American public saw the film.”
In 1987 Nathanson released another, even stronger film called Eclipse of Reason, introduced by Charlton Heston. “The Silent Scream dealt with a child who was aborted at twelve weeks,” said Nathanson. `But there are four hundred abortions every day in this country that are done after the third month of pregnancy. Contrary to popular misconception, Roe v. Wade makes abortion permissible up to and including the ninth month of pregnancy. I wanted to dramatize what happens in one of these late abortions, after the third month.
“They took a fetuscope, which is a long optical instrument with a lens at one end and a strong light at the other. They inserted the fetus-cope into the womb of a woman at 19 1/2 weeks, and a camera was clamped on the eyepiece and then the abortionist went to work.
“This procedure was known as a D&E (dilation and evacuation). It involves dilating the cervix, rupturing the bag of waters, taking a large crushing instrument and introducing it way high up into the uterus, grabbing a piece of the baby, pulling it off the baby, and just repeating this procedure until the baby has been pulled apart, piece by piece.
“Then the pieces are assembled on a table, put together like a jigsaw puzzle, so the abortionist can be sure that the entire baby has been removed. We photographed all this through the fetuscope. This is a shattering film.”
…
Ultrasound, the great awakener of Bernard Nathanson, is routinely employed today to check on the progress of developing babies. In an ironic and shadowy parallel, ultrasound is also used to aid in abortions.
Joseph Randall observed: “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.”
What about the women having the abortions? Do they see the ultrasound?
“They are never allowed to look at the ultrasound because we knew that if they so much as heard the heartbeat, they wouldn’t want to have the abortion,” said Randall.
A peculiar problem in the abortion clinic is fetal disposal.
“We basically put them down the garbage disposal if they were small enough,” said Nita Whitten. “We hardly ever sent anything to the laboratory for pathology unless there was something weird going on and the doctor wanted to make sure he wouldn’t get sued.”
Kathy Sparks recalled a different disposal method: “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.”
Every year in the United States more than a million abortions are performed—including tens of thousands of late-term abortions (after the twelfth week). Some of these late abortions are carried out by means of amniotic infusion (the injection of a foreign substance into the amniotic sac) of saline, prostaglandin, urea, or another agent designed to kill the unborn baby.
“Saline abortions have to be done in the hospital because of complications that can arise,” says ob-gyn staffer Debra Henry.
“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 swallows it. 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 inside of her, because the baby starts fighting violently for his or her life. He’s just fighting inside because he’s burning.”
“One night a lady delivered, and I was called in to see her because she was uncontrollable,” said David Brewer, M.D., of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. As a military physician in Fort Rucher, Alabama, Brewer performed abortions for ten years. “I went in 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,” lamented Anthony Levantino. “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.”
Commenting on late-term D&E abortions, Carol Everett recalled: “My job was to tell the doctor where the parts were, the head being of special significance because it is the most difficult to remove. The head must be deflated, usually by using the suction machine to remove the brain, then crushing the head with large forceps.”
The question of how doctors could tear apart a virtually full-grown baby is painful, perplexing, mystifying.
“Psychologically,” noted Everett, “the doctors always sized the baby at `twenty-four 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 doctor pulled the head off the body.”
Kathy Sparks described a second-trimester abortion: “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 forceps, in about three or four major pieces. Then he scraped and suctioned and 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.”
“There are no words to describe how bad it really is,” added Carol Everett. “I’ve seen sonograms of the baby pulling away from the instruments as they are introduced into the vagina. And I’ve seen D&E’s through thirty-two weeks done without the mother’s being put to sleep. And yes, they hurt and they are very painful to the baby, and yes, they are very, very painful to the woman. I’ve seen six people hold a woman on the table while they did her abortion.”
Physicians manipulated into going against their consciences and performing abortions, says David Brewer, all in the name of helping women. He described witnessing a suction abortion for the first time during his medical training.
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 stockingette stocking and opened that little bag. The resident doctor said, “Now put it on that blue towel and check it out. We want to make sure that 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 for me 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 folks 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 every 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 convictions settled yet.
One particular abortion changed Brewer’s life. I remember an experience as a resident on a hysterotomy (a late-term abortion delivered by Caesarean section). I remember seeing the baby move underneath the sack of membranes as the caesarean 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 the first suction abortion. And then he delivered the baby, and I couldn’t touch 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 the 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 that baby when we were done with the surgery and the baby was still alive. You could see the chest was moving and the heart beating, and the baby would try to take a little breath like that, and it really hurt inside, and it began to educate me as to what abortion really was.
David Kupelian, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell us Corruption Disguised as Freedom, Nashville, 2005. pp. 193-194, 199-203.