Pro-choice author Magda Denes, Ph.D., interviewed abortionists and clinic workers for her book In Necessity and Sorrow, Life and Death inside an Abortion Hospital. Surprisingly, many of the abortionists she interviewed admitted that they were terminating life.
One abortionist, interviewed by Denes in Commentary magazine, made it clear that he knew he was killing.
He speaks first about how strange it was to be treating premature babies and helping them survive while at the same time killing preborn babies of the same age elsewhere through abortion:
You have to become a bit schizophrenic. In one room, you encourage the patient that the slight irregularity of the fetal heart is not important – that she is going to have a fine, healthy baby.
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Then, in the next room, you assure another woman on whom you just did a saline abortion, that it’s good that the heart is already irregular… She has nothing to worry about, she is not going to have a live baby.
The abortionist then describes how doing late-term abortions was easier for him because he started doing earlier abortions and “worked his way up” to the later ones. Because he was used to killing younger children, he was able to desensitize himself, which helped him progress to killing older children. These older babies actively reacted to his attempts to kill them.
At the beginning, we were doing abortions on smaller fetuses… And the kicking and heartbeat did not manifest itself as much.
I think if I had started with 24-weekers right off the bat, I would’ve had a much greater conflict in my own mind if this was the same as murder or not. But since we started off slowly with 15-16 weekers, the fetus just never got consideration.
Then, gradually, the whole range of cases started to become larger. All of a sudden, one noticed that at the time of the saline infusion, there was a lot of activity in the uterus.
It wasn’t fluid currents. It was obviously the fetus being distressed by swallowing the salt solution and kicking violently through the death trauma.
You can either face it, or turn around and say it’s uterine contractions. That, however, would be repressing, since as a doctor you obviously know that it is not.
He is speaking about saline abortions, an abortion method that was frequently used in the 1970s and ’80s not generally used now due in part to the large numbers of babies who were born alive, including Melissa Ohden. In this type of abortion, the abortionist injects a toxic saline solution into the mother’s womb, which slowly poisons and kills the child. It can take hours for a baby to die this way.
The abortionist says he never tells the women that their babies are struggling for their lives:
Now, whether you admit this to the patient is another matter. Her distress by unwanted pregnancy is to be the primary consideration, ahead of any possible consideration for the fetus.
Then, he makes the big admission:
We just have to face it. Somebody has to do it. Unfortunately, we are the executioners in this instance.
This abortionist compares himself to a person who kills convicted criminals. He casts himself as an executioner to justify his actions.
In making the comparison, the abortionist is saying that yes, he is killing, but the killing is acceptable. In our society, we don’t view those who execute criminals as murderers. It is, we say, justifiable killing.
The abortionist can tell himself that he isn’t the only one killing; executioners kill people, too. If there were no capital punishment in America, and the value of life was always respected, would it be more difficult for this abortionist to justify his actions?
If our nation took a strong stand against taking human lives, with no exceptions, if killing people was just unthinkable, would it make abortion less acceptable?
In the way that killing less developed preborn babies made it easier to kill larger babies, does the acceptance of the death penalty make it easier for us to accept other types of killing?
Source: Magda Denes, “Performing Abortions” Commentary, October 1979, 35, 37
LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.
