file: /pub/resources/text/ProLife.News/1991: pln-0105s.txt ---------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ProLife News SPECIAL ISSUE Vol 1, No 5s ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789 This issue is a gift from Phil Sevilla in California: "WHY DOCTORS DO ABORTION" Many doctors who perform abortions cite the same contributory factors to their getting started - the media, women's rights groups, and their medical training itself. In addition, doing abortions makes for a very lucrative practice. Joseph Randall, M.D., of Atlanta, frankly admits that he was attracted to the large income potential that abortions offered. Over the 10 years that he did abortions, Randall estimates that he performed 32,000 of them. "The media were very active early on," recalls Randall. "They were probably one of the major influences on us, telling us that abortions were not only legal, but that it was to serve women. It was to give women a choice, more or less give them a freedom to grow and to take their rightful place in society where they had been kind of pushed down prior to that. We also believed the lie that there were tens of thousands of women being maimed and killed from illegal abortions prior to legalization of abortion law." Editor's note: In 1972, the year prior to Roe v. Wade, 28 deaths were reported from illegal abortions in the U.S. "As part of our medical training," added Randall, "abortions became a necessary procedure, according to the chief of my department. This was in 1971, before the law had changed in the country, but it had changed in New York a few years before. We needed to serve women, and we had to know how to do them well. Otherwise, we weren't considered effectively trained. Our chief said that if we didn't do the abortions, we might as well get out of obstetrics and gynecology because we just wouldn't be complete physicians." "Why do doctors do abortions?" asks Anthony Levantino, M.D., an OBGYN who provided abortions for his patients in his Albany, N.Y. office for eight years. "Why did I do abortions? If you are pro- choice, or, as a lot of people like to say, `morally neutral' on the subject, and you happen to be a gynecologist, then its up to you to take the instruments in hand and actively perform abortions. Its part of your training. I've heard it many times from other obstetricians: `Well, I'm not really pro-abortion, I'm pro-woman.' The women's groups in this country have done a very good job of selling that bill of goods to the population, that somehow destroying s life is being pro-women... "Along the way," says Levantino, "you find out that you can make a lot of money doing abortions. I worked 9 to 5. I was never bothered at night. I never had to go out on weekends. ANd I made more money than my obstetrician brethren... "In my practice, we were averaging between $250 and $500 per abortion-and it was cash. Its the one time as a doctor you can say, `Either pay me up front or I'm not going to take care of you.' Abortion is totally elective. Either you have the money or you don't. And they get it." One interesting phenomenon of the abortion industry is that cash payment is almost always required. Carol Everett: "I've seen doctors walk out after three hours' work and split $4,500 dollars between them on a Saturday morning - more if you go longer into the day. Of the four clinics I've worked in, none of them ever showed that they collected the doctors' money; they collect it separately, and do not show it on any of the records in those clinics. That way, the doctors are independent contractors, and the clinic doesn't have to be concerned with their malpractice insurance, and don't have to report their income to the IRS." ******************************** [Excerpts from NEW DIMENSIONS The Psychology Behind The News, October 1990, Special Election Report, "Pro-Choice 1990" by David Kupelian and Mike Masters, pp. 24-27] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- SLOGANS AS POWERFUL MARKETING TOOLS By diverting attention from the core issue of exactly what abortion does to both the unborn and to the mother, slogans are the single most effective defense the pro-abortion camp has against a public focus on the issue iteslf. The original abortion rights slogans from the early '70s - they remain virtual articles of faith for today's "pro-choice" movement - were "Freedom of choice" and "Women must have control over their own bodies." "I remember laughing when we made those slogans up," recalls Bernard Nathanson, M.D., co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, reminiscing about the early days of the abortion rights movement in the late '60s and early '70s. "We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were very cynical slogans then, just as all these slogans today are very, very cynical." Besides having served as Chairman of NARAL's Executive Committee, as well as its Medical Committee, Nathanson was one of the key architects and strategists of the abortion movement in the United States. He tells an astonishing story. CHANGING THE LAW ON ABORTION "In 1968 I met Lawrence Lader," says Nathanson. "Lader had just finished a book called ABORTION, and in it had made the audacious demand that abortion should be legalized throughout the country. I had just finished a residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology and was impressed with the number of women who were coming into our clinics, wards, and hospitals suffering from illegal, infected, botched abortions. Lader and I were perfect for each other. We sat down and plotted out the organization now known as NARAL. With Betty Friedan, we set up this organization and began working on the strategy." In New York, the law outlawing abortion had been on the books for 140 years. "In two years of work, we at NARAL struck that law down," says Nathanson... New York immediately became the abortion capital for the eastern half of the UNited States. "to that end, I set up a clinic...at the end of the two years that I was the director, we had done 60,000 abortions... After two years, Nathanson resigned ... and became CHief of the Obstetrical Service at St. Luke's Hospital... at that time, in 1973, a number of new technologies and apparatuses had just become available, all designed to afford physicians a "window into the womb." Nathanson rattles off the dazzling array of technologies: REAL-TIME ULTRASOUND...ELECTRONIC FETAL HEART MONITORING... FETOSCOPY...CORDOCENTESIS... "Anyway," recalls Nathanson, "as a result of all this technology- looking at this baby, examining it, investigating it, watching its metabolic functions, watching it urinate, swallow, move and sleep, watching it dream, which you could see by its rapid eye movements via ultrasound, treating it, operating on it-I finally came to the conviction that this was my PATIENT. This was a PERSON! I was a physician pledged to save my patients' lives, not to destroy them. So I changed my mind on the subject of abortion. "There was nothing religious about it," he hastens to add. "This was purely a change of mind as a result of this fantastic technology, and the new insights and perceptions I had into the nature of the unborn child." In 1985, intrigued by the question of what really happens during an abortion in the first three months of a pregnancy, Bernard Nathanson decided to put an ultrasound machine on the abdomen of a woman undergoing an abortion, and videotape what happens. "We got a film that was astonishing, shocking, frightening," says Nathanson... It was shattering, and the pro-abortion people panicked. Because at this point, we had moved the abortion debate away from moralizing, sermonizing, sloganeering, and pamphleteering, into a high-tech argument..." Nathanson's film provoked a massive campaign of defamation on the part of the pro-abortion movement, including charges that he had doctored the film. He hadn't. "I was accused of everything from pederasty to nepotism. But the American public saw the film." In 1987 Nathanson released another, even stronger, film called "Eclipse of Reason," introduced by Charlton Heston. "`The Silent Scream' dealt with a child who was aborted at 12 weeks," said Nathanson. "But there are 400 abortions every day in this country that are done after the third month of pregnancy. Contrary to public misconception, Roe v. Wade makes abortion permissible up to and including the ninth month of pregnancy..."They took a fetuscope, which is a long optical instrument with a lens at one end and a strong light at the other. The inserted the fetuscope into the womb of a woman at 19 1/2 weeks, and a camera was clamped on the eye piece and then the abortionist went to work. "This procedure was known as a D&E...It involves dilating the cervix, rupturing the bag of waters, taking a large crushing instrument and introducing it way up into the uterus, grabbing a piece of the baby, pulling it off the baby, and just repeating this procedure until the baby has been pulled apart piece by piece. Then the pieces are assembled on a table, put together like a jigzaw puzzle, so the abortionist can be sure that the entire baby has been removed. We photographed all this through the fetuscope. This is a shattering film." Thus did Bernard Nathanson, once a founder and top strategist of the pro-abortion movement, come to be staunchly committed to the cause of ending legalized abortion in America... Nathanson is by no means the only abortionist to switch sides in the abortion war. Just a few years ago, approximately 4-5 percent of American physicians performed abortions. Today that figure is about 2 percent. Indeed, in recent years, hundreds of abortion providers have left their profession, especially since the widespread use of ultrasound began. [Excerpts from NEW DIMENSIONS The Psychology Behind The News, October 1990, Special Election Report, "Pro-Choice 1990" by David Kupelian and Mike Masters, pp. 24-27] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- DECEPTIVE COUNSELING Carol Everett of Dallas, Texas, got involved in the abortion industry in 1973 after having an abortion herself. She set up referral clinics in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, then worked in two clinics in which 800 abortions were performed monthly, and eventually ran five abortion clinics. She described how women coming to her clinics were counselled: "...Those kids, when they find out that they are pregnant, may not want an abortion; they may want information, but when they call that number, which is paid for by abortion money, what kind of information do you think they're going to get? Remember, they sell abortions-they don't sell keeping the baby, or giving the baby up for adoption, or delivering that baby. They only sell abortions. "The counselor asks, `How far along are you? Whats the first day of your last normal period?' They've got their wheel there and they figure it out. The counselor is paid to be this girl's friend and authority figure. She is supposed to seduce her into a friendship of sorts-to sell her the abortion." FACT: Professional public relations firms are commonly brought in to sell women on the abortion option. Nita Whitten worked as chief secretary at another Dallas abortion clinic, that of Dr. Curtis Boyd. Whitten concurs with Carol Everett about the often obsessive profit motive of abortion clinics" "I was trained by a professional marketing director in how to sell abortions over the telephone... the object was, when the girl called, to hook the sale so she wouldn't get an abortion somewhere else, or adopt out her baby, or change her mind." With disarming candor, Whitten adds: "We were doing it for the money." Kathy Sparks who worked in a Granite City, Illinois, abortion clinic, describes the manipulative counseling practices used at her clinic: "One particular worker was very good. She could sit down with these girls during the counseling and cry with them at the drop of a pin... Whatever that pressure point, she would magnify it. If the girl was afraid her parents would kill her, the counselor would proceed by saying, ~Well, that's why abortion is here; we want to help you; this is the answer to your problems.' If it was money, she would tell the girl how much baby items cost: `You know it costs $3,000 to have a baby right now,'...But you know, that's what's so wonderful about abortion. We can take care of this problem and you don't have to worry about it until you are financially prepared...'" The salesmanship at her abortion clinic was so effective, says Sparks, that 99 out of every 100 women would go ahead and have an abortion...` "The women were never given any type of alternatives to abortions," says Debra Henry, who worked as an assistant and counselor for six months at an OB/GYN office in Levonia, Michigan. "They were never told about adoption agencies, that there were people out there willing to help them, to give them homes to live in, to provide them with care, and even financial support." Carol Everett relates what happens after the initial counseling of her clinic's clients: "After the basic questions, the girls were told briefly about what was to happen to them after the procedure. All they were told about the procedure itself was that they would experience slight cramping, similar to menstral cramps. They were not told about the development of the baby, or about the pain that the baby would be experiencing, or the physical or emotional effects the abortion would have on them. "The two questions they always ask are: #1) `Does it hurt?' And the answer would always be, `Oh, no. Your uterus is a muscle. Its a cramp ...' And the girl thinks, `That's no problem. I can stand that. I've been through it before.' Then the client asks question #2) "Is it a baby?' `No,' would come the answer, `its a product of conception,'... There are two standard reactions in the recovery room, says Everett. "The first is: `I've killed my baby.' It amazed me that this was the first time the patients called it a baby, and the first time they called it murder. But the second reaction is: `I am hungry...Let me out of here.' That woman is doing what I did when I had my abortion. She's running from her abortion, not dealing with it." THE HEART OF THE MATTER Editor's note: In the U.S., one in three pregnancies now ends in abortion. Despite the staggering incidence of abortions, very little media coverage has been given to examining the procedure itself. After all, the core of the abortion issue is the abortion itself. One reason for this conspicuous lack of news coverage may be... Abortion is such a gruesome thing that most people would rather not hear or read about it. Both viewer and newsman find it a distasteful subject... Ultrasound, the great awakener of Bernard Nathanson, is routinely employed today to check on the progress of developing babies. In an ironic and shadowy parallel, ultrasound is also used to aid abortions. Dr. Randall: "The nurses have to look at the ultrasound...to gauge how far along the baby is for an abortion, because the larger the pregnancy, the more you get paid... "But the turnover definitely got greater when we started using ultrasound. We lost two nurses - they couldn't take looking at it. Some of the other staff left also." What about the women having the abortion?...they are never allowed to look at the ultrasound because we knew that if they so much as heard the heartbeat, they wouldn't want to have the abortion." A peculiar problem in the abortion clinic is fetal disposal. "We basically put them down the garbage disposal," says Whitten, "if they were small enough..."Oftentimes, second trimester abortions were performed and these babies we would not put in the little jar with the label to send off to the pathology lab. We would put them down a flush toilet..." THERE'S NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE IT Every year in the U.S., approximately 120,000 late term abortions (after the 12th week) are performed. Of these, approximately 35-40 percent are done by amniotic infusion...of saline, prostaglandin, urea, or another agent designed to kill the baby. "Saline abortions have to be done in the hospital because of complications that can arise," says Debra Henry. "Not that they can't arise during other times, but more so now. The saline, a salt solution, is injected into the woman's sac and the baby swallows it. The baby starts dying a slow, violent death. the mother feels everything, and many times it is at this point when she realizes that she really has a live baby inside her, because the baby starts fighting violently for his or her life. He's just fighting inside because he's burning." "One night a lady delivered and I was called to come and see her because she was uncontrollable," says David Brewer, M.D., of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. As a military physician in Ft. Rucker, Alabama, Brewer performed abortions for 10 years. "I went into the room, and she was going to pieces; she was having a nervous breakdown, screaming and thrashing. The nurses were upset because they couldn't get any work done, and all the other patients were upset because this lady was screaming. I walked in, and here was her little saline abortion baby kicking. It had been born alive, and was kicking and moving for a little while before it finally died of those terrible burns, because the salt solution gets into the lungs and burns the lungs too." "I'll tell you one thing about D&E," adds Levantino. "You never have to worry about a baby's being born alive. I won't describe D&E other than to say that, as a doctor, you are sitting there tearing, and I mean tearing - you need a lot of strength to do it - arms and legs off of babies and putting them in a stack on top of a table." Commenting on late term D&E abortions, Carol Everett recalls: "My job was to tell the doctor where the parts were, the head being of special significance because it is the most difficult to remove. The head must be deflated,usually by using the suction machine to remove the brain, then crushing the head with large forceps." ... we did an abortion on one baby I feel was almost full term. The baby's muscle structure was so strong that it would not come apart. The baby died when the doctor pulled the head off the body." Kathy Sparks describes a second trimester abortion: "The baby's bones were far too developed to rip them up with this curette, and so he would have to try to pull the baby out with forceps, in about three or four pieces. Then he scraped and suctioned, and then this little baby boy was lying on the tray. His little face was perfectly formed, little eyes closed and little ears - everything was perfect about this little boy." "There are no words to describe how bad it really is," says Everett. "I've seen sonograms of the baby pulling away from the instruments as they are introduced into the vagina. And I've seen D&E's through 32 weeks done without the mother's being put to sleep. And yes, they hurt and they are very painful to the baby, and yes, they are very, very painful to the woman. I've seen six people hold a woman on the table while they did her abortion." EVERYTHING CHANGES Dr. Anthony Levantino, now an obstetrician/gynecologist in Troy, New York, relates the revealing and very personal story of what happened that caused him to stop performing abortions. "There was this tremendous conflict going on within me. Here I am, doing my D&C's (..suction abortion), 5 and 6 a week, and I'm doing salines on a nightly basis whenever I was on call. The resident on call got the job of doing the salines, and there would usually be two or three of those. They were horrible, because you would see one intact, whole baby being born, and sometimes they were alive. And that was very,very,very frightening. It was a very stomach-turning kind of existence. "My wife and I were looking desperately for a baby to adopt, even while I was throwing them in the garbage at the rate of nine and ten a week. The though occurred to me even then, `I wish one of these people would just let me have their child.' But it doesn't work that way. We were lucky; it just took four months before we adopted a healthy little girl, and we called her Heather. "We can talk about why doctors do abortions, and I think that the reasons tend to be more or less universal. But why doctors change their minds, I think, is very personal, very different from one doctor to the next. My reasons for quitting were very personal: "Life was good until June 23, 1984. On that date I was on call, but I was at home at the time... AT 7:25 that evening, we heard the screech of brakes out in front of the house. We ran outside, and Heather was lying in the road. We did everything we could, but she died. "Let me tell you something. When you lose a child, your child, life is very different. Everything changes. And all of a sudden the idea of a person's life becomes very real. It's not an embryology course anymore; its not just a couple of hundred dollars. Its the real thing. Its your child you buried. "The old discomforts came back in spades. I couldn't even think about a D&E abortion anymore, no way. Then you start to realize, this as somebody's child. I lost my child - someone who was very precious to me. And I'm taking somebody's child, and I'm tearing them right out of their womb. I'm killing somebody's child. "That's what it took to get me to change. My own sense of self-esteem went down the tubes. I began to feel like a paid assassin. That's exactly what I was... It got to a point that it just wasn't worth it to me anymore. Poor women, my butt... This was coming out of my hide, costing me too much...So I quit." [Excerpts from NEW DIMENSIONS The Psychology Behind The News, October 1990, Special Election Report, "Pro-Choice 1990" by David Kupelian and Mike Masters, pp. 27-33 ] ******************** As Phil repeadedly claims: [Excerpts printed without permission. Mispelling is mine.]