ex-abortionists: Why they quit, The

Human Life Review, Spring 2000 by Meehan, Mary

Some doctors and clinic staffers are shocked by abortion techniques and tiny body parts when they first see them, but gradually become used to them. When the late Dr. David Brewer, as a young resident, first had to examine body parts after a suction abortion, "it was like somebody put a hot poker into me." The next abortions bothered him, too, but he found that it "hurt a little bit less every time I saw one. And you know what happened next? I got to sit down and do one: ' Again it felt like a hot poker, but again he got used to it. He compared his hardening to the way he developed calluses on his hands when he ran a lawn service as a teenager. With the calluses, he found, "my hands could work all day-and no blisters and no pain. And that's what happened to my heart as I saw the abortions and then began doing them. My heart got callused."

One night, after a saline abortion, Brewer saw a badly burned little baby "kicking and moving for a little while before it finally died of those terrible burns:' He assisted with a hysterotomy, which is like a Caesarean section but is intentionally done early enough that the baby dies soon after delivery. "And they simply took that little baby-that was making little sounds and moving and kicking-over and set it on the table in a cold, stainless-steel bowl," he recalled. The baby "kicked and moved less and less, of course, as time went on."6

Far more common than abortions involving live births are the "Dilation and Evacuation" (D&E) type. This euphemistic term actually means dismemberment by instrument within the womb. It takes over as the usual form of abortion at the point when fetal bone and cartilage have hardened, or calcified, so that suction abortion cannot be done. Dr. Joseph Randall, who did abortions for about ten years, explained that after a D&E, "you have to reassemble that baby-arms, legs, head, chest, thorax-everything. That's when it gets rough even for old timers like me: ''7

At least one clinic worker, nurse Brenda Pratt Shafer, turned against abortion almost immediately after witnessing a partial-birth abortion. (This is also called a "D&X" abortion for "dilation and extraction.") Shafer, who was "very pro-choice" at the time, accepted a temporary agency's assignment to Dr. Martin Haskell's abortion clinic in Dayton, Ohio, in 1993. On her third day at the clinic, she observed the D&X abortion of a Down Syndrome baby in the sixth month of gestation. She saw Haskell deliver most of the little boy's body, keeping only his head inside the womb:

The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the [surgical] scissors in the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out . . .

The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby went completely limp.

I was really completely unprepared for what I was seeing. I almost threw up as I watched Dr. Haskell doing these things. . . .