ex-abortionists: Why they quit, The

Human Life Review, Spring 2000 by Meehan, Mary

As a young doctor in the early 1970s, Paul E. Jarrett, Jr., did a number of legal abortions. He began having doubts, though, after the urea-induced abortion of a mental patient. The child, weighing two pounds, was born alive, and the mother screamed, "My baby's alive! My baby's alive!" Dr. Jarrett later said, "I often wondered what we did for her mental status. That baby lived several days:'

But it was a 1974 operation that "changed my mind about abortion forever." While doing a suction abortion, Jarrett found that the suction curette was obstructed by a torn-off fetal leg. So he changed techniques and dismembered the child with a ring forceps:

And as I brought out the rib cage, I looked and I saw a tiny, beating heart. And when I found the head of the baby, I looked squarely in the face of another human beinga human being that I'd just killed. I turned to the scrub nurse and said, "I'm sorry." But I just knew that I couldn't be a part of abortion any more.1

Dr. Jarrett is one of many people who used to be deeply involved in abortion but have turned against it. Their experience tells us a great deal about the effects of abortion-most obviously on the children it destroys, but also on the women it traumatizes and the clinic staff it corrupts. Yet their experience also offers hope for the future. If people whose livelihoods depended on abortion can turn around, then certainly there is hope for everyone who supports abortion. (Leading abortion defenders, of course, do not view the situation this way; included here are comments from several of them.)

Although supplemented by other sources, what follows is based mainly on a remarkable series of conferences called "Meet the Abortion Providers," sponsored by the Pro-Life Action League of Chicago from 1987 to 1997. Joseph Scheidler, the League's director, has been involved in street protest against abortion clinics for many years. In that work, and through friends and supporters around the country, he kept hearing about disillusioned clinic staff. They included doctors, administrators, secretaries, a nurse, an ultrasound technician, a clinic guard, and others. Scheidler brought them together, several at a time, for one-day conferences in which they described their clinic work and explained the often-tormenting process of disengaging from it.

While the League paid travel costs for many speakers, it did not pay them speaker fees.

Nearly all the ex-clinic staff had religious conversions that helped-or demanded-their exit. Religion was not their only motivation, but it certainly helped them see some truths they had refused to face for a long time.

What Abortion Does to Unborn Children

One truth involves the precise ways in which abortion destroys the unborn. Early abortions can be done by suction machines because the fetal bones and cartilage have not yet hardened. In the very earliest stages, this results in pureed remains. Even a little later, though, it brings out identifiable body parts that must be reassembled to ensure that nothing was left behind. (Parts left behind can cause terrible infections in the mother.) Dr. Beverly McMillan used to do such reassembly after performing abortions, but "I got to where I just couldn't look at the little bodies any more.."2 Many abortionists do not reassemble the parts themselves, but have other staff do it. Some staffers are not bothered by this; indeed, some are hardened enough to make jokes about it. Others do not want anything to do with it. "Clinic workers may say they support a woman's right to choose," said former Planned Parenthood clinic worker Judith Fetrow, "but they will also say that they do not want to see tiny hands and feet. They do not want to be faced with the consequences of their actions."

Fetrow herself was committed to abortion when she first went to work at a clinic in California. But her view changed, partly because it was her job to look at aborted body parts and then store them, send them to a pathology lab, or dispose of them. While she didn't especially want that job, she believed that the dead should be treated with respect. She did not want to hear a coworker make a sick joke about "taking the kids and putting them in daycare: ' So Fetrow mourned in the Jewish tradition: "I sat Shiva for the babies; I said the prayers for the dead. I also named each baby when I placed it in the contaminated waste container."3

That was far more respect than the bodies of the dead receive in most abortion clinics. Debra Henry, who once worked in a Michigan clinic, said that if a woman had insurance coverage for a suction abortion, the fetal remains were sent to a laboratory. But if she had no insurance, the remains were "put down the garbage disposal." As they prepared to open their second Texas clinic, Carol Everett reported to her abortionist business partner that it would have an "industrial-strength disposal-a double-action one that chops forward, reverses itself, and chops again as it reverses." Their first clinic's disposal had proved unable to handle the body of a child aborted at about thirty-two weeks.4 In the Illinois clinic where she once worked, Kathy Sparks found that remains of children aborted in the second trimester were put down "a continually flushing toilet." Late-term abortionist George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, had his own crematorium to deal with fetal remains. Luhra Tivis, once a medical secretary at his clinic, recalled a day when Tiller was carrying "a particularly heavy load of dead babies" into the crematorium. He asked her to help him with the door. She did so, then returned to her desk nearby. "I heard him fire it up. . . . And the most horrible thing was: I could smell those babies burning, because I was just around the corner." Tivis later exposed Tiller's practices in a letter to members of the Wichita City Council and in testimony before a state legislative committee.5