"The doctors would remove the fetus while performing hysterotomies and then
lay it on the table., where it would squirm until it died. ..They all had perfect forms and shapes. I couldn't take it. No nurse could." --Joyce Craig, director of a Brooklyn clinic of Planned Parenthood. who assisted in abortion for
two months, then quit. p 34

Edward Eichner, director of medicine at a Cleveland abortion facility said
"No doctor, for ethical, moral or honest reasons wants to do nothing but abortions...women don't like to do abortions over and over for moral reasons. Sometimes our women doctors become pregnant themselves, which upsets the patients. At the same time, if a woman is carrying a baby, she doesn't like to
abort someone else's. We have much more trouble keeping women doctors on the staff than men." --p 49
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"After an abortion, the doctor must inspect these remains to make sure that
all the fetal parts and placenta have been removed. Any tissue left inside the uterus can start an infection. Dr. Bours squeezed the contents of the sock into a shallow dish and poked around with his finger. "You can see a teeny tiny hand' he said. --abortion clinic worker quoted in "Is the Fetus Human?" and in Dudley
Clendinen, "The Abortion Conflict: What it Does to One Doctor" New York Times
Magazine Aug 11 1985 p 26
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"From May to November 1988, I worked for an abortionist. He specializes in
third trimester killings. I witnessed evidence of the brutal, cold blooded murder of over 600 viable, healthy babies at seven, eight and nine months gestation. A very, very few of these babies, less than 2%, were handicapped...I thought I was pro-choice and I was glad to be working in an abortion clinic. I thought I was helping provide a noble service to women in crisis....I was instructed to falsify the
age of the babies in medical records. I was required to lie to the mothers over the phone, as they scheduled their appointments, and to tell them that they were not 'too far along' Then I had to note, in the records that Dr. Tiller's needle had successfully pierced the walls of the baby's heart, injecting the poison what brought death...one day, Dr. Tiller came up the stairs from the basement, where the mothers were in labor. He was carrying a large cardboard box, and ducked
into the employees only area of the office so that he wouldn't have to walk
through the waiting room. He passed behind my desk as I sat working on the computer, and he turned the corner to go around a short hall. He called out for me to come and help him. the box was so big and heavy in his arms that he couldn't get the key into the lock. So I unlocked the door for him, and, pushing the door open, I saw very clearly the gleaming metal of the crematorium- a full sized crematorium, just like the one's used in funeral homes. I went back to my
computer. I could hear Dr. Tiller firing up the gas oven. A few minutes later I could smell burning human flesh. Mine was the agony of a participant, however reluctant, in the act of prenatal infanticide." --Luhra Tivis on her experience in the abortion business Quoted in Celebrate Life Sept/Oct 1994 "Where is the Real Violence?"
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>From the film "Meet the Abortion Providers"

"My heart got callous to against the fact that I was a murderer, but that
baby lying in a cold bowl educated me as to what abortion really was."
--former abortionist Dr. David Brewer

"I want the general public to know what the doctors know- that this is a
person, this is a baby. That this is not some kind of blob of tissue."
--Dr. Anthony Levantino

"I have taken the lives of innocent babies, and I have ripped them from their
mother's wombs with a powerful suction machine"
--McArthur Hill, M.D.
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"I am deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I have in fact
presided over 60,000 deaths. There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists from the very onset of pregnancy"
--Dr. Bernard Nathanson, "Deeper Into Abortion" New England Journal of
Medicine Nov 1974 p 1189
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"I dare say that any thinking, caring individual can't not realize that he is
ending life, or potential life."
--abortionist

"[Powell] said "Is this a fair way of expressing what you have just said,
Doctor? You tell the mother "because your baby is defective, you have the right to kill it or not to kill it. If you choose to kill it, I will do the killing." "Of course," he [the abortionist] said. "There is no other way to say it and be honest."

both from The Zero People pg 9
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"I wanted to be the world's best abortionist, for the good of my patients. If
I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. So, after I met each patient, reviewed the medical information gathered by my nurse, examined the patient and performed the abortion, I would then carefully sift through the remains to be sure all the parts were accounted for. I had to find four extremities (two arms and two legs) a spine, a skull, and the placenta, or my patient would suffer later from
an incomplete abortion...My attention was so focused on my perceived patient
that I managed to deny that there were, in fact, two patients involved- the expectant mother and a very small child...I had to wonder, how can having a child be so wrong for some people that they will pay me to end its life?"
--former abortionist Dr. McMillan "How One Doctor Changed Her Mind About
Abortion" Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs
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"Abortions are very draining, exhausting, heart-rending. There are a lot of
tears. Some patients turn on you...I do them because I take the attitude that women who are going to terminate babies deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry babies...I've done a couple thousand, and its been a significant financial boon...the only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman as my patient and block out the baby." --abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves
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>From the article "Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts" which appeared
in the July 12 1993 issue of AAA News, a publication of the American Medical Association:

"I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria, for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure that destroys a fetus, kills a baby."

"When I put my hands on somebody to feel how big they are and I get kicked, I
am barely able to talk at that moment."

an abortionist stated that 'somebody had asked her what they could say to the
staff to make them look less shocked when they look at a 20 week fetus.."It's hard to be in a profession where you have a hard time answering the questions that other people ask you about what you do."
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>From World magazine August 1995

"You would just look in the buckets and see arms and legs. I have horrible
dreams about that now. It was something you would see in a scary movie."
--Former clinic worker Kirsten Breedlove

"The babies were frozen in a freezer. Now I wished I had not looked." --Norma
McCorvey
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"Even if you are pro-choice, no one likes to see a dead fetus." -Vilma
Valdez, Education Director Planned Parenthood of Greater Miami, The Miami Herald, Oct 24 1992
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"I went up to the lab one day and on the pathologiest's table I saw what I
thought was little rubber doll until I realized it was a fetus. . .I got really shook up and upset and I couldn't believe it. It had all its fingers and toes, you know, hands and feet. . . I never thought it would look so -real. I didn't like it."
--Planned Parenthood employee quoted in Magda Denes book "In Necessity and
Sorrow" New York:Basic Books 1979
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In an interview by Mark Crutcher, former abortion clinic director Joy Davis
said "Each person who worked there had a different way of dealing with it. [One] would look at the ultrasound the entire time she was in the room, but she would never look down in the pan. She would never look at the tissue being removed. She never wanted to see that. She would never take her eyes off the screen. And I had one who would never look at the screen....she would never look at the
tissue and never look at the screen, she just didn't want to see anything."
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Also from the 1993 Chicago conference "Planned Parenthood is set up so clinic workers never have to see the babies. It's set up that way because having to look at the babies bothers the workers. ...Generally there is one clinic worker in charge of the babies...I was that clinic worker. I had to look at the babies. I had to store them, I had to send them to pathology. And I was the person who had to dispose of them.....in order to maintain my sanity, I established a personal mourning ritual. I said Shiva for the babies. I said prayers for the dead. I also named the babies as I put them in a waste container."
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"It [the fetus] is a form of life...This has to be killing...The question then becomes "is this kind of killing justifiable? In my own mind, it is justifiable, but only with the informed consent of the mother"
--abortionist quoted in "Democrat and Chronicle" 7/5/92
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>From the Dallas Observer 3/18/95 Former clinic administrator Charlotte Taft, "We were hiding from the women some of the piecesof truth about abortion that were threatening....It is a kind of killing."
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>From "Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic" by Wendy Simonds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996

Quotes from clinic employees:

"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."

"It's just- I mean it looks like a baby. It looks like a baby. And especially if you get one that comes out, that's not piecemeal. And you know, I saw this one, and it had its fingers in its mouth...it makes me really sad that that had to happen, you know, but it doesn't change my mind. It's just hard. And it makes me just sort of stop and feel sad about it, the whole necessity of it. And also....it's very warm when it comes into the sterile room because it's been in the mother's stomach. It feels like flesh, you know..."

"It's going to be weird now because you're going to see the sono. You're going to see the heart beating- little hearts, you know- and then, all of a sudden, you're going to put his cardiac medicine in it to make it stop- to kill it. So you're going to see the exact moment when you kill the fetus. I won't kill it, the doctor will kill it...and, I mean, it might be more humane...[if] the fetuses do feel something, why not kill it, you know, fast, [rather] than rip its leg off?"

"I feel some sadness [about abortions] and I think part of the problem is that we don't talk about that...we don't talk about it as much as we think about it...somehow your pro-choice stance is compromised by saying the word "baby."...We don't allow ourselves to say or think that word...."

"At nine weeks...you start seeing fetal parts. And by the second trimester it's, you know, it's a baby, and by eighteen weeks it's definitely a baby. And by like, you know, twenty-two weeks, you go in and you watch someone do a sonogram, and you're like, "Oh my." There it is just moving, moving around. And it's really hard because I always thought of abortion in terms of just the woman, just her body."

"You're looking between the woman's legs; you're seeing, you know, what the doctor's doing. And it's what a lot of people would call kind of, I guess, gruesome- that's not really the word because- it's identifiable. I mean, when he...takes the forceps and pulls out a foot, you can see the foot, and my reaction- because I feel so strongly that women who want to have a twenty week abortion should be able to have that- but I mean when I look and was just like, you know, my first reaction was, you know, I was pretty horrified."

"So by it looking like a baby, you're associating it with yourself because...you used to be a baby, you used to be a fetus."

"...when you're, you know, putting a fetus's feet in over its head in a
baggie, there's just this brief moment of "This could have been me," which I fundamentally believe is okay. She should have the right to choose..."

"...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 real bad the first time..."

"The destruction I can't deny....I wish we lived in a world where abortion didn't have to exist."

"You know, we still say "products of conception." Well, why don't we say it looks like- you know, a twenty-week fetus looks like a baby. Why can't we say that in public? Because that's
what the antis say, you know."

"I think the tough part was seeing actual pieces of fetus being removed. .And in the beginning, yes, I remember looking, standing behind this woman's shoulder [as she performed an early
second- trimester-abortion] and thinking, "I can't do this...There's
something emotionally upsetting about this..Features are discernible; you can count five fingers on a hand and five toes
on a foot. You know, all the organ systems are formed. You know, you can see ears as structures, and the nose and eyes as structures...I have gotten to the point now that because I've
been doing this work five months, four months, I look at it a little
differently. I don't see the same things that I did. And, honestly, when I sit down to do one of these now, I am watching to be
sure that I'm getting everything that I need to get. It's 'Do I have two
lower extremities? Do I have two upper extremities? Is t here a spine? ...and the skull?...It does become a bit routine after
a while. I don't fear it."

"I hate it when people put it together to look like a baby. I hate that...I don't want to look like it when its like that because it's like a broken doll, and that grosses me out."

>From the author: "Many health workers told me they 'never look at the face' when processing tissue."
--------------------------------------------------------------
"Another thing that bothered me as I went about my work at the clinic was the fact that I had seen an ultrasound abortion. We did first trimester abortions. This was a late first trimester, probably
second trimester. I handled the ultrasound while the doctor performed the procedure and I directed him while I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. I had seen the Silent Scream a number of times, but it didn't effect
me. To me it was just more pro-life propaganda. But I could'nt deny what I saw on the screen." 
--Joan Appleton, former clinic worker
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"So when I went back to doing abortions and saw the fetus on the ultrasound, I recalled the early days of my pregnancies, when I found out I was pregnant and saw the baby on the ultrasound,
and it really felt like this is a baby, a very real and potential being. Now, I do feel that this is a potential person and it does not have a life of its own outside of the mother, but I also am really aware that when you're ready to embrace a pregnancy, you can embrace it from the very moment you conceive or are aware that you are pregnant. Faye Wattleton said recently, "I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any  pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus, but it is the women's body, and therefore ultimately her choice." I believe that very firmly. You look at the ultrasounds and there's a fetus with a heartbeat and then after the procedure, there's the fetus, usually in pieces, in a dish. It was alive one moment and it's not the next. I don't believe it's a painful experience for the fetus because its
nervous system is not "wired" so that it can feel pain at that point. I don't believe, as some anti-abortion people would have you believe, that there's a "silent scream." But it's very clear to me that it's killing a potential life. And I found that hard at first. "

----anonymous, quoted by Camille Peri at
in Salon Magazine
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I hated putting babies in strainers and rinsing them off and putting them in zip-lock bags.
--former abortion clinic owner Eric Harrah

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By Dr. Arnold Halpern, former director of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic "There is no difference between a first trimester, a second trimester, a third trimester abortion or infanticide. It's all the same human being in different stages of development. I finally got to the point I couldn't look at those little bodies anymore."
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An abortion doctor describes his job: "... As you get into the second trimester, if we remove the pregnancy using forceps, and if a
heartbeat is the measure of being alive, that happens all the time."
Dr. Dennis Christensen, Madison Abortion Clinic, Wisconsin. From The New York Times; May 15, 1998; page A14.
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My official title at the mill was "health worker." I did various duties-lab work, leading groups (deceiving women about their
abortions), "advocating" (deceiving women during their abortions), and assisting the abortionist, which included helping during
the abortion and checking to make sure all the parts of the baby were there  in the collection jar afterwards. I will never forget,
in the second-trimester abortions, holding those little feet up to a chart on the wall to make sure of the age of the baby. --- Dina Madsen
------------------------------
My 23rd abortion changed my mind about doing abortions forever. This patient was a little overweight and ultimately proved to
be a little farther along than anticipated. This was not an uncommon mistake before ultrasound was readily available to confirm the gestational age. Initially, the abortion proceeded normally. The water
broke, but then nothing more would come out. When I withdrew the
curette, I saw that it was plugged up with the leg of the baby which had been torn off. I then changed techniques and used ring
forceps to dismember the 13 or 14 week size baby. Inside the remains of the rib cage I found a tiny, beating heart. I was finally
able to remove the head and looked squarely into the face of a human being --a human being that I had just killed....--------Dr. Paul Jarrett

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