by Rachel MacNair

Meanwhile, the image of “safe” abortion clinics is, to my understanding, about as realistic as a Hollywood depiction of war as a drama in which the “good guys” win and the clear-cut villains lose. The human mind is commonly sickened by committing killing in all kinds of contexts – combat, executions, etc. – and such trauma symptoms can show up in terrible care for patients.

See for example:

Memoir: We Do Abortions Here; A nurse’s story, by Sallie Tisdale
Harper’s Magazine, October, 1987

Sallie Tisdale wrote the article from which this is excerpted while working as a registered nurse in an abortion clinic.

 

 

It is when I am holding a plastic uterus in one hand, a suction tube in the other, moving them together in imitation of the scrubbing to come, that women ask the most secret question. I am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about “the tissue” and “the contents” when the woman suddenly catches my eye and asks, “How big is the baby now?” These words suggest a quiet need for a definition of the boundaries being drawn. It isn’t so odd, after all, that she feels relief when I describe the growing bud’s bulbous shape, its miniature nature. Again I gauge, and sometimes lie a little, weaseling around its infantile features until its clinging power slackens.

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside . . .

I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. “Let’s do an abortion,” they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden. I woke from this dream barely able to breathe and thought of kitchen tables and coat hangers, knitting needles sniped with blood, and women all alone clutching a pillow in their teeth to keep the screams from piercing the apartment-house walls. Abortion is the narrowest edge between kindness and cruelty. Done as well as it can be, it is still violence — merciful violence, like putting a suffering animal to death . . .

For documentation on the abortion providers with the best reputation, see Problems at Planned Parenthood – and the list of problems that include some horrific health violations found by authorities at some centers, many ambulance calls and malpractice suits, and most horrifying, some cases in which sexual abuse of minors continued because Planned Parenthood gave an abortion without reporting the crime. When sexual predators are aware that abortion is handy to cover up, then the abortion facility amounts to an accomplice to the crime.