**PARTIAL BIRTH (D&X) ABORTION**

"I have never witnessed anything like this."

Nurse Brenda Pratt Schafer

STEP ONE Guided by ultrasound, the abortionist grasps the baby's leg with surgical forceps.
STEP TWO The baby's leg is pulled out, in breach position, into the birth canal.
STEP THREE The abortionist delivers the baby's entire body, except for the head.
STEP FOUR The abortionist jams scissors into the baby's skull. The scissors are then opened to enlarge the hole.
STEP FIVE The scissors are removed and a suction catheter is inserted. The child's brain is then sucked out and the baby is "evacuated" by the abortionist.

QUOTES

To Prevent Survivors!

Dr. Martin Haskell, leading exponent of partial birth abortion (D&X he calls it), was interviewed by American Medical News (5 July 1993). They asked him why, when a child is born all except the head, would he not complete the delivery so the baby might survive? He replied: "The point here is, you're attemping to do an abortion ... not to manipulate the situation to get a live birth instead.

"In the same article, the late Dr. James McMahon says, "I do have moral compunctions ... after 20 weeks when it frankly is a child to me, I really agonize over it ... on the other hand, 'Who owns the child?' It's got to be the mother." The mother, of course, is not expecting the "dreaded complication" ...

After 20 weeks of development survival becomes a possibility, and at 26 weeks a premature infant has a better than 50% chance of survival. So Dr. Haskell says that he "routinely preforms this procedure on all patients 20 through 24 weeks." Dr. McMahon, in a statement to the House of Representatives subcommittee, said that he performed it even in the ninth month for psychiatric indications (e.g. depression) or "pediatric indications" (youth of the mother).

Prolife News, June/July 1996, p. 2

What The Nurse Saw

"I have been a nurse for a long time and I have seen a lot of death — people maimed in auto accidents, gunshot wounds, you name it. I have seen surgical procedures of every sort. But in all my professional years, I have never witnessed anything like this. ... After I left that day, I never went back."

Nurse Brenda Pratt Schafer
(Testifying to the U.S. Senate Judiciary on her experience with partial birth abortions: D&X.)

[Editor's note: The following are excerpts from a speech by Brenda Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse with two teen-aged daughters, who has participated in three partial-birth abortions. Prior to that experience she considered herself 'pro-choice'.]

I worked for a nursing agency at the time and they did everything — staffed clinics, staffed hospitals, nursing homes, and I did the whole gamut. They called me one day and they said, "Brenda, will you work in this Women's Medical Center in Dayton?" and I said, "Well, what do they do?" They said, "Well, they do abortions. They do D&C abortions."

That's what they told me. I had never even heard of the partial-birth abortion before I walked in there. So I told them I would do it, I didn't have a problem with it; that I was pro-choice, and that's the way I felt about it. I was even interviewed when I got to the clinic about my views — I guess because they wanted to make sure, at that point, that I wasn't a 'plant'.

The first day I was there we did what's called D&C abortions. It's a suction abortion, of babies around six weeks of age. The thing that really sticks out in my mind about that day — there was a 15 year old girl there, having her third abortion and she laughed the whole way through. And I thought, you know — this could by my 15 year old, sitting on this bed and having this abortion. A partial-birth abortion is a three day procedure. ... The first two days, the women come in and they insert something called laminaria, it's made out of seaweed. They insert it into the cervix and when it gets wet it expands, thus dilating the cervix.

When a woman goes through labour that is what's happening — the cervix is dilating to enlarge it, to bring the baby out. So we also have to do it in an abortion, because you just can't pull it out of an undilated cervix. ... They came in, they had their laminaria inserted, and we sent them home or to an area hotel, with an emergency phone number.

The second day we brought them back in again and changed the laminaria, to dilate the cervix even more. Also on the second day they did what's called the D&E abortions. And for this abortion ... they brought the ultrasound machine in and attached it to the woman's stomach, and you could see the baby, you could see the heartbeat. D&E abortions are done up to about four and a half months pregnant, that's about as far as they go on these. And I stood at the doctor's side, about three feet away from him; and I watched him take a pair of forceps and go up inside the uterus and literally tear a baby from limb to limb. He went in and tore off an arm and threw it in the pan, went in and tore off a leg and put it in the pan. He continued until he got to the head, then went up and with the forceps crushed the head and pulled it out.

And I'm standing there looking in the little pan that he had the body in, and I'm thinking to myself, wait a minute, where's the blob of cells, where's the mass of tissue? I see a leg, I see an arm, with toes and fingers on them, and it really started to bother me at that point ... The third day I went in, the first abortion I saw was a lady who was twenty-six and a half weeks pregnant. The baby had Down syndrome, and the nurse called her their special case. And I said, "Why is she a special case?" "Well, the doctor doesn't like to do them past 26 weeks, and she is a little bit past."

This one particular lady didn't want the abortion. She had this Down syndrome baby, she was unmarried, her boyfriend didn't want the baby, and her parents didn't want the baby. She cried the whole three days she was in there. So we did her first to get her over with. We brought her in, prepped her, started an IV of Valium to calm her down. We did not use a general anesthetic and knock her out. We brought in the ultrasound machine, and hooked it up to her stomach. I could see the baby, I could see the heartbeat.

The doctor, Martin Haskell, wanted me to stand right beside him, because he wanted me to see everything there was about partial-birth abortion. So I stood there. He went in guided by ultrasound. He took a pair of forceps and went in and turned the baby, because it wasn't in this position at the time. He found a foot, and he pulled the baby's foot down through the birth canal, bringing it down, and grabbed another foot and literally started pulling the baby out, breech position, feet first. And he kept pulling it down, and I'm seeing this baby come pulled out of the mommy, his butt, his chest, and then he delivered both these arms. ... And the baby, the only thing that was supporting the baby was the doctor holding him in with his two fingers, holding the neck in ... only the baby's head was still inside.

The baby's body was moving. His little fingers were clasping together. He was kicking his feet. All the while his little head was still inside. I kept watching that baby move, and I kept thinking to myself, this isn't happening; and I thought I was going to pass out. And I kept telling myself, I'm a professional, I can handle this; you know, this is right, this is supposed to be, and I'm supposed to be able to handle this, I'm a nurse. He then took a pair of scissors and jammed them in the back of the baby's head. And the baby jerked out, like a startle reflex, as a baby does if you throw him up a little bit and they jump. And then the baby was real rigid. He them opened up the scissors to make a hole. He took a high-powered suction machine with a catheter and stuck it in that hole, and suctioned the baby's brains out. And the baby went completely limp.

And I have seen that in my mind a thousand times or more, that baby, watching the life just drain out of it. I've seen babies die in my hands, I've had people die in my hands. But it wasn't anything like watching that. And I almost threw up all over the floor. I was literally just breathing and saying, "Don't throw up, don't throw up, you're going to be embarrassed it you do ..." So, I tried not to. He pulled the head out, he cut the umbilical cord and threw the baby in a pan, and delivered the placenta and threw it in the same pan, he covered it up and took it out.

Well ... this mommy wanted to see her baby. The doctor had told us ahead of time, he said, "Try to discourage her from seeing the baby." He doesn't like that. But she had the right to see it. So they cleaned it up, and we cleaned her up, and we walked her out of the operating room, and took her to a room and handed her her baby. She held that baby in her arms, and she screamed and prayed to God ... to forgive her, and for that baby to forgive her, and she held him and rocked him, and told him that she loved him.

And I looked in that baby's face, and he had the most perfect, angelic face I've ever seen. And I couldn't take it. After all the years I've been a nurse, I lost it. I excused myself and I ran to the bathroom ... I cried and I prayed. I saw two more that day, each about 25 weeks. But I was in shock. I stood there and I knew what was happening but I didn't want to be there. I was walking on a beach in Hawaii somewhere, trying to get myself out of that room. ... The other ones were perfectly healthy mothers with perfectly healthy babies. One was a 40 year old woman who had a 19 year old son, and she was getting a divorce so she didn't want the baby. The other was a teenage mom who hid the pregnancy from her parents, and then the parents found out she was pregnant and made her abort the baby. I wish I hadn't seen what I saw, in a way, because it was very terrifying ... the most horrifying experience of my life. I've had a lot of nightmares ... this is one way of healing, of trying to get over this, and teach people about what really does go on.

We've got to get the truth out. What I saw that day shouldn't be allowed in this country

Harder Hearts On Abortion

"Partial birth" abortions are unsettling even to read about — the only version of abortion in which fetuses, either viable or near viability, are partly visible outside the body while alive and inches away from birth before being dispatched.

They are typically performed at 20 to 24 weeks, but sometimes later. The fetus is manipulated so that its feet and sometimes part of its body are outside the mother. The head is left in the uterus. Then the skull is pierced and the brain is suctioned out. causing skull collapse and death.

Brenda Shafer, a registered nurse who supports abortion rights, says she witnessed three of these operations during a brief assignment to assist Dr. Martin Haskell at an Ohio abortion clinic in 1993. She says the three fetuses, two normal and one with Down's syndrome, all three 25 or more weeks along, were alive when Dr. Haskell inserted scissors into their skulls. "I still have nightmares about what I saw," she said in a letter to an antiabortion congressman in urging passage of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act.

Abortion-rights supporters have greeted the partial birth issue as the beginning of a new crusade to undermine Roe v. Wade. For some abortion opponents, it obviously is. But it also is true that a great many Americans, on both sides and in the middle, are deeply troubled by the brutality and questionable morality of this particular procedure. It deserves to be judged on its own.

"Costly vote." In the House vote, a dozen pro-choice congressmen, including Ted Kennedy's son Patrick, joined the lopsided majority and voted to ban partial birth procedures. They did this knowing they face some aggressive retribution from the abortion-rights lobby without gaining any support from the antiabortion side. "It was a costly vote," said Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia, an abortion-rights backer. "I'm not going to vote in such a way that I have to put my conscience on the shelf."

If should be noted that the abortion lobby is having trouble getting its facts straight. After Brenda Shafer made her statement, Dr. Haskell said he didn't recall any such person working at his clinic. An employment card was produced. Then Rep. Patricia Schroeder and others extracted a non-denial denial from Dr. Haskell's head nurse, saying that Brenda Shafer "would not" have been present at the three abortions she said she saw.

Kate Michelman and other abortion-rights lobbyists insisted that partial birth abortion is "confined to extraordinary medical circumstances" and that anaesthesia "causes fetal demise ... prior to the procedure." Not true. A 1993 interview with Dr. Haskell in an American Medical Association newspaper quotes him as saying that 80 percent of these procedures are elective and two thirds occur while the fetus is alive. Dr. Haskell wrote a letter strongly implying he was misquoted. But an audio tape was produced showing that he wasn't.

And Michelman said, "It's not only a myth, it's a lie" that partial birth abortions are used to eliminate fetuses for minor defects such as cleft palates. But abortion practitioner Dr. James McMahon already had told Congress he had personally performed nine of these procedures solely because of cleft palates. Compared with the abortion-rights lobby, the O.J. defence looks obsessively ethical and tightly focused on verifiable truth.

In an article last month in the New Republic, feminist Naomi Wolf, an abortion-rights advocate, wrote that "with the pro-choice rhetoric we use now, we incur three destructive consequences ... hardness of heart, lying and political failure." She wrote: "By refusing to look at abortion within a moral framework, we lose the millions of Americans who want to support abortion as a legal right but still need to condemn it as a moral iniquity."

The partial birth issue is a good time for abortion-rights supporters to reclaim the moral framework that Wolf says they have relinquished. This repellent procedure goes way too far. No other Western nation, to my knowledge, allows it. It was unanimously condemned by the American Medical Association's council on legislation. (The full association later decided to duck the issue and take no position.)

Those who defend it reflexively because it may lead to other legislation are in the exact position of gun lobbyists who shoot down bans on assault weapons because those bans may one day lead to a roundup of everybody's handguns. They refuse, on tactical grounds, to confront the moral issue involved. More of the abstract hardness that Wolf writes about.

Killing a five-month or six-month fetus that's halfway down the birth canal raises a moral issue way beyond that of ordinary abortion. It's perfectly possible to support a woman's right to abort and still think that the anything goes ethic of this horrific procedure has no place in a culture with any reverence left for life.

You Call This Comforting?

Dr. Tiller, known as "Tiller the Killer", is an abortionist in Wichita Kansas who specializes in second and third-trimester abortions. The instruction which Dr. Tiller provides to the mother (or parents) of a late-term baby being aborted reads in part as follows:

"The time following your delivery is very important. Many couples elect to view or hold the baby after they have recovered from anesthesia. Some couples initially find this a very frightening thought but, in our experience, couples who wish to view or hold their child are able to work through the grief process better. When couples elect not to see their child, they may later regret omitting this option."

"Grief is a very complex process, and we attempt to make your experience in our center comforting under very stressful circumstances. Unless previous arrangements have been made for funeral transportation of the baby to your local funeral home, or further scientific studies are needed, the baby will be cremated in our mortuary-type crematorium located at our center. If your doctor or genetic counsellor suggests an autopsy or other confirmatory studies, they must call prior to your arrival to make these arrangements."

Right To Life Newsletter of Greater Cincinnati, February 1996

Repentance ...

James McMahon, an enthusiastic proponent of the partial-birth abortion technique (also called D&X abortion) died in Los Angeles on October 28, 1995 of a rapidly growing brain cancer. Dr. McMahon was proud of his prominence in this field. In a 1990 article in the Los Angeles Times he told the interviewer, "That's my specialty — that's my expertise. That's my passion." The article reports that about one-third of the 1,200 abortions he averaged a year were 'partial-birth' abortions, for which he charged $8,000 (only $500 for earlier abortions).

Such fees are justified, he said, because "... there's a great deal of craft to this procedure ... frankly I don't think I was any good at all until I had done three-to-four thousand." McMahon explained that "I frankly think the soul or personage comes in when the fetus is accepted by the mother." However, Congressman Robert Dornan reports that "he repented of his entire life's work and begged for Extreme Unction, the last rites of the Catholic Church. He is buried in consecrated ground."

Right To Life Newsletter of Greater Cincinnati, January 1996