BY SARAH TERZO
Much has been written about the emotional trauma that women go through after their abortions. But what most people don't realize is that abortion is so inherently evil and destructive that it devastates everyone involved: the mother, the father -- and the abortion provider. The doctors, nurses, and other clinic workers are human -- and repeatedly seeing the bodies of aborted babies and participating in their deaths leaves emotional scars.
After giving a graphic description of how to check body parts to make sure everything is out after an abortion, Dr. Don Sloan, abortionist, says the following:
Want to do abortions? Pay the price. There is an old saying in medicine: if you want to work in the kitchen, you may have to break an egg. The stove gets hot. Prepare to get burned. [1]
Regardless of the motive the clinic worker has in being in the abortion business, abortions are hard to deal with. According to one clinic worker interviewed by pro-choice author Wendy Simonds:
You're going from dealing with people to dealing with what most people here at the Center consider a real hurdle, to do sterile room, because you have to deal with the actual abortion tissue. And for some people that's really hard. They can be abstractly in favor of abortion rights, but they sure don't want to see what an eighteen-week abortion looks like. [2]
What is so upsetting about the "abortion tissue"? Pro-choicers often claim that abortion destroys collections of cells, painlessly ending a pregnancy. But according to another worker in the same clinic:
. . . it looks like a baby. That's what it looks like to me. You've never seen anything else that looks like that. The only other thing you've ever seen is a baby . . . You can see a face and hands and ears and eyes and, you know . . . feet and toes . . . It bothered me really bad the first time . . . [3]
It is not surprising that Simonds says that clinic workers "never look at the face" when "processing tissue" from abortions. [4]
The clinic worker quoted above is not the only one to express frustration at pro-choice activists who mouth slogans without knowing the reality of what they are defending. Author Sue Hertz, who observed in an abortion clinic for a year, described the feelings of one clinic worker who attended a pro-choice brainstorming session with local activists.
The group was discussing a plan to defend abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, up until birth:
These people are political activists, Fran thought. Their work was critical to protecting abortion rights, but how many of them knew the reality of abortion, had seen the reality of what it destroyed?
Fran felt like standing up and saying to those arguing for unrestricted abortions,
"You haven't seen the little feet. They look just like the little feet pushpins that the antis [pro-lifers] wear." As a provider at Repro once said, if half the pro-choice people saw the fetal remains of a 2nd trimester abortion, they would jump the fence into the antis' arms. [5]
It is not just second-trimester abortions that are disturbing for clinic workers. After all, an unborn baby has arms, legs, fingers, and toes by just eight weeks after conception. Jewels Green, who had an abortion as a teenager, worked in an abortion clinic that performed only first-trimester abortions. This is what she says about her job:
Working in the autoclave room was never, ever easy. I saw my lost child in every jar of aborted baby parts. [6]
While it is unknown exactly what percentage of clinic workers have had abortions in the past, interviews with former clinic workers suggest that the number is very high. And an article in The National Catholic Register cites a study showing that 70% of Planned Parenthood workers are post-abortive. [7] Perhaps many women working at abortion clinics are trying to justify past abortions. Maybe they are reaffirming their abortion decision with every woman they guide through the procedure. They may be living in extreme denial -- lying to themselves about what they have done to their own babies; embracing the pro-choice movement as a means of emotional self-defense. Former clinic worker Norma McCorvey, who was the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade and who also worked at several abortion clinics before becoming pro-life, describes the emotional impact of the work -- and touches upon the fact that so many clinic workers have had abortions themselves: