"The last patient I saw one day was 23 weeks pregnant. I performed an uncomplicated D&E procedure. Dutifully, I went through the task of reassembling the fetal parts in the metal tray. It is an odd ritual that abortion providers perform - required as a clinical safety measure to ensure that nothing is left behind in the uterus to cause a complication - but it also permits us in an odd way to pay respect to the fetus (feelings of awe are not uncommon when looking at miniature fingers and fingernails, heart, intestines, kidneys, adrenal glands), even as we simultaneously have complete disregard for it. Then I rushed upstairs to take overnight call on labour and delivery. The first patient that came in was prematurely delivering at 23-24 weeks. As her exact gestational age was in question, the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) team resuscitated the premature newborn and brought it to the NICU. Later, along with the distraught parents, I watched the neonate on the ventilator. I thought to myself how bizarre it was that I could have legally dismembered this fetus-now-newborn if it were inside its mother's uterus - but that the same kind of violence against it now would be illegal, and unspeakable." Lisa Harris, abortionist
I was reading an article on a pregnant abortionist. She specializes, I think, in second-trimester abortions. She spoke of how, while preforming an abortion on a women just as far along as she is, the child inside of her started kicking for the first time. "Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes - without me - meaning my conscious brain - even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling - a brutally visceral response - heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics."
She stated that she, and most abortionists, agree with pro-lifers- that abortion is violent, gruesome, and murder. She said the pro-choice arguements made "don't accurately reflect the full extent of our experience of abortion and in fact contradicts an enormous part of it." She says, "anti-abortion discourse and imagery that may actually be more closely aligned to our experience but is based in values we do not share."
Translation? "We know it's a baby, we know it's a violent death; we just don't care."
She believes if the pro-abort front can accept that yes, it is a baby and it is violent, the movement will gain more stability. The child has no legal rights and thus the mother comes first. If they can accept this, then she believes they can regain much lost stability.
Maybe she's right. However, I believe an essay like this can help our cause. No one who truly knows that the fetus is a baby can rationalize abortion in a moral sense. For Lisa Harris, abortions have gotten harder to preform. "Doing second trimester abortions did not get easier after my pregnancy; in fact, dealing with little infant parts of my born baby only made dealing with dismembered fetal parts sadder."
We need to remember to pray for the conversion of abortionists and abortion clinic workers. This woman is truly confuse, and I'm sure others are as well.
