More and more, people are understanding the nature of abortion, and the fact that it involves the taking of human life. They are beginning to understand what a gruesome and unconscienable procedure it is. This is especially true in the United States, although I am seeing more evidence of opposition in Canada. Once people discover what abortion involves, they are certainly less enthusiastic about it, and many begin to actively oppose it.
So much so that now the legalized abortion crowd is seen to be trying harder to get people to speak out about abortion.
Dr. LeRoy Carhart, a Nebraska abortionist who successfully sued to get an injunction on the Partial Birth Abortion Ban in the United States, is profiled in the International Herald Tribune. He says:
If women are "not willing to stand up for abortion rights in public, then I feel we're eventually doomed to lose Roe v. Wade or the right to abortion," he said.
Why is it that women are not willing to speak out in favour of abortion?
For one thing, many women who go for abortions don't really want them to begin with, but they feel it's their only choice. They often feel backed into a corner, if not by their circumstances, then by a partner or relatives.
The other is that there's just no denying that it takes away human life. It's a gruesome procedure.
Most people do not feel a first trimester abortion should be criminal. But MANY people feel that a first trimester abortion is morally wrong (especially in the United States). In Canada, as it is, thirty percent of the population believes that there should be legal protection for unborn children in the first trimester (see here). If thirty per cent think that way, you know there are more who believe that abortion is immoral, without believing it should be illegal.
So even though abortion is legal, it's not necessarily widely accepted. For most people, abortion is nothing to shout about. If anything, people wonder why you needed the abortion in the first place.
Another reason why abortions are not openly spoken of is that they are very gruesome procedures, especially in the later stages. Partial Birth Abortion, or dilation and extraction (or intact dilation and evacuation) is an especially heinous act. Even though this method has received widespread media publicity, there are still people who do not know what it is, or believe that there must be some kind of exaggeration as to what it entails.
Let Dr. Carhart explain himself what goes on during a PBA. Here is part of his testimony in 1997 that led to the US Supreme Court striking down the ban on PBA:
*Question: Are there times when you don't remove the fetus intact?
Carhart: Yes, sir.
*Question: Can you tell me about that, when that occurs?
Carhart: That occurs when the tissue fragments, or frequently when you rupture the membranes, an arm will spontaneously fall out through the vaginal opening... When the patient...the uterus is already starting to contract and they are starting to miscarry, when you rupture the waters, usually something falls out through the uterine, through the cervical opening, not always, but very often an appendage will.
*Question: What do you do then?
Carhart: My normal course would be to dismember that appendage and then go back and try to take the fetus out either foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first.
*Question: How do you go about dismembering that appendage?
Carhart: Just pulling and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get a hold of which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the opening, using the internal opening as your counter-traction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be. Sometimes you will get one leg and you can't get the other leg out.
*Question: In that situation, when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?
Carhart: Yes
*Question: Do you consider an arm, for example, to be a substantial portion of the fetus?
Carhart: In the way I read it, I think if I lost my arm, that would be a substantial loss to me. I think I would have to interpret it that way.
*Question: And then what happens next after you remove the arm? You then try to remove the rest of the fetus?
Carhart: Then I would go back and attempt to either bring the feet down or bring the skull down, or even sometimes you bring the other arm down and remove that also and then get the feet down.
*Question: At what point does the fetus die during that process?
Carhart: I don't really know. I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.
The Court: Counsel, for what it's worth, it still is unclear to me with regard to the intact D&E (partial-birth abortion) when fetal death occurs.
*Question: Okay, I will try to clarify that. In the procedure of an intact D&E where you would start foot first, with the situation where the fetus is presented feet first, tell me how you are able to get the feet out first.
Carhart: Under ultrasound, you can see the extremities. You know what is what. You know what the foot is, you know, what the arm is, you know, what the skull is. By grabbing the feet and pulling down on it or by grabbing a knee and pulling down on it, usually you can get one leg out, get the other leg out and bring the fetus out... I just attempt to bring out whatever is the closest portion of the fetus.
*Question: At the time that you bring out the feet in this example, is the fetus still alive?
Carhart: Yes.
*Question: Then what's the next step you do?
Carhart: I didn't mention it. I should. I usually attempt to grasp the cord first and divide the cord, if I can do that.
*Question: What is the cord?
Carhart: The cord is the structure that transports the blood, both arterial and venous, from the fetus to the back to the fetus, and it gives the fetus its only source of oxygen, so that if you can divide the cord, the fetus will eventually die, but whether this takes five minutes or fifteen minutes and when that occurs, I don't think anyone really knows.
*Question: Let's take the situation where you haven't divided the cord because you couldn't, and you have begun to remove a living fetus feet first. What happens next after you have gotten the feet removed?
Carhart: We remove the feet and continue pulling on the feet until the abdomen and the thorax came through the cavity. At that point, I would try ... you have to bring the shoulders down, but you can get enough of them outside, you can do this with your finger outside of the uterus, and then at that point the fetal ... the base of the fetal skull is usually in the cervical canal.
*Question: What do you do next?
Carhart: And you can reach that, and that's where you would rupture the fetal skull to some extent and aspirate the contents out. [Translation: The skull is punctured with scissors and the contents sucked out]
*Question: At what point in that process does fetal death occur between initial...removal of the feet or legs and the crushing of the skull, or I'm sorry, the decompressing of the skull?
Carhart: Well, you know, again, this is where I'm not sure what fetal death is. I mean, I honestly have to share your concern, your Honor. You can remove the cranial contents and the fetus will still have a heartbeat for several seconds or several minutes, so is the fetus alive? I would have to say probably, although I don't think it has any brain function, so it's brain dead at that point.
*Question: So the brain death might occur when you begin suctioning out the cranium?
Carhart: I think brain death would occur because the suctioning to remove contents is only two or three seconds, so somewhere in that period of time, obviously not when you penetrate the skull, because people get shot in the head and the don't die immediately from that, if they are going to die at all, so that probably is not sufficient to kill the fetus, but I think removing the brain contents eventually will.
source.
This is the brutal procedure he and the hardcore feminist crowd is defending for abortions performed in the late second and early third trimester.
Feminists have many responses to these objections.
One is that the unborn child is often "euthanized" with an injection of a heart drug of digitalis to kill the child before he is dismembered.
Some consolation. Imagine getting jabbed in the heart with a two-foot needle and suffering a heart attack.
But the fact is, that measure is not always taken, and even if it's attempted sometimes the needle doesn't make it to the heart.
Second they say that these abortions are usually performed when there is a major health issue involving the mother.
That's not always true either. A good number of these abortions are done on teenagers in denial until several months into their pregnancy, or mothers who don't want to care for children diagnosed with Down's Syndrome, Cystic fibrosis or other conditions.
Third is that they claim only a small number of late-term abortions are performed.
Small is a relative term. Canada sees 100 000 abortions a year. Any fraction of that number, in human terms, is significant. What we do know that an average of 200 late-term abortions are reported a every year; but we do not know the exact numbers, because the reporting of gestational age is not obligatory. I suspect, given the numbers, there may be around 700 late-term abortions in Canada. We have about 40 000+ reports where we know the gestational age; about 200 of them are late-term for sure; so use a bit of math, and you get about 700 a year. But that's a guess. There could actually be more, but the practitioners are not reporting this. Many of these babies are viable.
But the hardcore abortion crowd defends disarticulating unborn children in this manner as a means to an end. That's perfectly okay to them! So what if a baby gets his arm ripped off and his brain sucked out. Their attitude is: big deal! Only the mom matters.
This is not a caricature of the feminist position. That is precisely what they say: the fetus does not matter. It's the mom that matters, and if the fetus has to get his brains sucked out for an abortion to be performed,and if he has to suffer excruciating pain, so be it.
This is what they're fighting for. This is what they defend.
