Read it for Yourself

Fr. Frank Pavone
National Director, Priests for Life

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Every pro-life activist should have on his or her desk the book by abortionist Warren M. Hern called Abortion Practice.  It is a medical textbook on how to do abortions, and it provides us with the educational material necessary to win the war on abortion – namely, the descriptions of the abortion procedures. So many argue about abortion, having never heard a description of what it is.

Take, for example, the abortion  procedure called Dilatation and Evacuation (D&E). Through this procedure, the child is dismembered within the womb. Hern describes the procedure at various stages of pregnancy, starting at 13 weeks. I quote here from the section "21 to 24 Weeks Fetal Age":

"The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks because the fetal tissues become much more cohesive and difficult to dismember. This problem is accentuated by the fact that the fetal pelvis may be as much as 5cm in width. The calvaria [head] is no longer the principal problem; it can be collapsed. Other structures, such as the pelvis, present more difficulty….A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus…"(p.154).

Another abortionist, Martin Haskell, describes the same procedure. The following words are from court testimony. Please note that he was testifying as an expert witness about legal activity.

"Let's just say for instance we took a different view, a different tact and we left the leg in the uterus just to dismember it. Well, we'd probably have to dismember it at several different levels because we don't have firm control over it, so we would attack the lower part of the lower extremity first, remove, you know, possibly a foot, then the lower leg at the knee and then finally we get to the hip."

"When the abortion procedure is started we typically know that the fetus is still alive because either we can feel it move …or…we actually see a heartbeat as we're starting the procedure. It's not unusual at the start of D&E procedures that a limb is acquired first and that that limb is brought through the cervix …prior to disarticulation and prior to anything having been done that would have caused the fetal demise."

"When you're doing a dismemberment D&E usually the last part to be removed is the skull itself and it's floating free inside the uterine cavity…like a ping-pong ball floating around … Finally … a nip is made out of some area of the skull that allows it to start to decompress. And then once that happens typically the skull is brought out in fragments rather than as a unified piece, the result being that sharp bony edges of the skull are exposed” (US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, Case No. 98‑C‑0305‑S) 

Some people are tired of the abortion controversy in our nation. Frankly, I often wonder whether it has even begun. Maybe when it becomes more widely known that things like what I quoted above are legally occurring every day -- maybe then the debate can begin. 

Find more details about abortion procedures at www.priestsforlife.org/images.

2007 Columns