Under oath in July 1997, abortionist Carhart comments on how he performs abortions. Here he is questioned by his attorney:"I know that the fetus is alive..." There are no words.Question: Are there times when you don’t remove the fetus intact?
Carhart: Yes, sir.
Question: Can you tell me about that, when that occurs?
Carhart: That occurs when the tissue fragments, or frequently when you rupture the membranes, an arm will spontaneously prolapse through the oz. I think most...statistically the most common presentation, we talk about the forehead or the skull being first. We talked about the feet being first, but I think in probably the great majority of terminations, it’s what they world call a transverse lie, so really you’re looking at a side profile of a curved fetus. When the patient...the uterus is already starting to contract and they are starting to miscarry, when you rupture the waters, usually something prolapses through the uterine, through the cervical os, not always, but very often an extremity will.
Question: What do you do then?
Carhart: My normal course would be to dismember that extremity and then go back and try to take the fetus out either foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first.
Question: How do you go about dismembering that extremity?
Carhart: Just traction and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get a hold of which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the os, using the internal os as your counter-traction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be. Sometimes you will get one leg and you can’t get the other leg out.
Question: In that situation, are you, when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?
Carhart: Yes.
Question: In that situation, are you, when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?
Carhart: Yes
Question: Do you consider an arm, for example, to be a substantial portion of the fetus?
Carhart: In the way I read it, I think if I lost my arm, that would be a substantial loss to me. I think I would have to interpret it that way.
Question: And then what happens next after you remove the arm? You then try to remove the rest of the fetus?
Carhart: Then I would go back and attempt to either bring the feet down or bring the skull down, or even sometimes you bring the other arm down and remove that also and then get the feet down.
Question: At what point is the fetus...does the fetus die during that process?
Carhart: I don’t really know. I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.
Please remember that Obama is fully in support of this atrocity being fully legal.
(HT: Jeff Lewis)
13 comments:
you fail to mention this information from the Newsweek article:
"He bases his practice on a conservative interpretation of Nebraska law and will operate only when another physician has declared the fetus unable to live more than momentarily outside the womb.
as well as
"Past viability, no doctor will terminate a pregnancy without a compelling reason. But what is a compelling reason, and who decides? Some would count a serious fetal abnormality, mental or physical; others would not. What if the baby has a 50 percent chance of surviving outside the womb? A 30 percent chance? While most of us navigate these questions in theory, Carhart deals with them in practice. At Tiller's clinic, he saw a rape victim in the third trimester of pregnancy. Every time she felt the baby move, she said, it brought back the rape all over again. She'd made three suicide attempts. Carhart performed her abortion. "If a woman is going to kill herself, then I think you have to look at it for her health," he says. The day before Tiller's death, a woman came into Carhart's Nebraska clinic 28 weeks along. Carhart asked her what she would do if she had to carry the baby to term. "She didn't say she was going to kill herself," he says. "She said she would put it up [for adoption]." He turned her away."
and finally this
"His life seemed set in a comfortable mold— . . . It all changed in 1987, when a nurse prevailed on him to spend a day at the abortion clinic where she worked. Talking to the women reminded him of the patients he had seen as a medical student, in the days before Roe: women whose botched abortions, anywhere from the first to the third trimester, left them with perforated uteruses, intestines protruding from the vagina, or untreatable pelvic infections. The way Carhart remembers it, it was a good week for the emergency room if only five women died."
And for God's sake, regardless of your position, my position, or anyone else', stop blaming all of this on Obama. As if it's all his fault and he's chiefly responsible for every single abortion. Right. It's just getting really really tiring to hear that kinda bs.
The information left out is not the basis of this post; it's about how an abortion is performed. No comments were made about the legality of abortion. Nothing was said about the woman's mental or physical health. Solely about the practice of an abortion from a first-hand account.
While it's true Obama isn't chiefly responsible for the last 37 years of legal abortion, his health care reforms imply that he supports and intends to further the legal boundaries of abortion.
Regardless of political stance, I don't know how one can ignore this statement from Carhart, who is fully aware of the baby's vital signs during dismemberment:
"My intent in every abortion I have ever done is to kill the fetus and terminate the pregnancy."
Smile, reader. Your mom was pro-life.
Nothing is really said however that this abortion procedure, and the nature of the doctor's work, is very "extreme case" natured and not true of every single abortion. In the case of an extreme situation with the mother, such as the one that had tried to commit suicide 3 times over the rape and pregnancy, he is one of the few doctors that was willing to undertake the abortion. The original post and interview it cited (which was from 1997 btw) made it appear that this was routine every day abortion. Not so.
Curious - if it was your daughter who was raped, pregnant, and had attempted suicide 3 times, what would your stance be? I think it's easy to be against abortion until you find yourself in this position. How would you feel if she had succeeded in her suicide attempt? While I'm never for abortion, if this were the case, and knowing my daughter had the right to make up her own mind over her body and life, I'd at the very least want her to have a SAFE alternative with abortion, rather than having one done "on the street" or a back room by who knows who, or worse yet, being so traumatized that she commits suicide. What would you do?
Bottom line, this stuff is never as black and white as we'd all like to easily make it. Thus, while I'm against abortion 100%, I think there HAS to be a legal option for some cases. As well as for those that don't share our moral or spiritual beliefs, sad to say. It's about the fact that we as humans are placed on this earth via no choice of our own, and with really very little obvious to go on. (sorry, the bible for every day man is just NOT obvious in my opinion.) It's a human right that people should be able to make up their own mind when it comes to their body, regardless of what you or I believe to be "truth" or spiritual truth. Just not everyone buys into that, sad to say. But I'd no more like for someone to impose my belief system by law on someone else, than I would someone imposing their belief system on me that would rule out my Christian beliefs by law. We can't have it both ways.
Looks like John C is struggling with some guilt.
John C,
When a woman has a growing human life (with its own DNA) in her stomach, it is no longer simply a matter of "her and her body." I know that it is all too easy for me to say that, as a man, but there are millions of Christian women who agree-- and the Bible agrees, when God tells Jeremiah that before he was born, God knew him and appointed him to be a prophet.
Is it only in Jeremiah's case that he was a human life, with a call from God, even from the womb? If Jeremiah's mother had wished to abort him, and we had been alive at that time, should we have said, "Oh well-- it's a matter of her and her body?"
When one's body is temporarily housing a human life, how is it just "one's body" anymore? Even if a person does not believe and agree with the Bible, how can one ignore the fact that at the moment of conception, the newly conceived life has his/her own DNA, apart from the mother or the father-- which means that this new life is actually a *human being* who is *temporarily residing* within his/her mother?
Although this made me physically sick, literally, it was good to read. I am thankful that someone is talking about what is physically being done to these children. As I prepare to have my second child (37 weeks now) after almost losing my first, I became sick to my stomach reading this. I also think it's a moot point whether or not the doctor has "declared the fetus unable to live more than momentarily outside the womb..." as my child certainly wasn't expected to live and who am I to dictate life? God is the giver of life, no matter what the odds are. I walked beside many friends in the NICU whose babies weren't supposed to live outside the womb, but PRAISE THE LORD that they didn't have them aborted b/c many of them are walking miracles and absolute gifts from God, including Jack's little roommate on heart and lung bypass born with a serious birth defect who was told she probably wouldn't live. I will never cease to be thankful that their parents didn't share the same opinion and let God be the deciding factor rather than themselves. And I continue to be amazed at Christians who allow themselves to justify abortion~ may we never stop fighting for life and I pray that I will never rationalize the right to take it~ I am thankful that right rests in the Lord's hands only and not my simple human ones. I can't fathom taking the life of something I feel moving within me, something obviously very much alive, for whatever reason I attempt to rationalize. I don't care how anyone tries to justify it. It's selfishness~
@Sife: Guilt? Please explain. Not sure I'm following you there. Nothing "guilt" wise that I know I'm struggling with!
Christopher: See, you don't get it: Now keep in mind - I'm a believer - I don't support or agree with abortion. But you base all of your arguments backing them up with Biblical command and reasoning. All GOOD - IF you believe in all that like you and me. But many people don't. Many people believe that scientifically, as long as a baby is in the womb, attached to the mother, they have their own right to decide what can be done with it. While I don't agree, it's obviously not agreed upon as a universally held innate truth among everyone out there. You'll use the argument of "well then should murder of anyone then be legal?" And I would counter that murder appears to be a universally held innate truth that throughout man it's accepted as "wrong" in most everyone's eyes. Abortion is still up for debate among many for many reasons. Yes, they may be selfish reasons, but they're grounded in the fact that they currently have the right to decide this for themselves, and that's probably not going to change in their minds. Hence, there should be legal and SAFE ways for these people to run their own course.
I've yet to see anyone address my question about "what if it was your daughter that had been raped and tried to commit suicide three times?" - ??
If abortion were to be made illegal based on our moral and religious beliefs, and America is a country with freedom of religion, should a Muslim living under Sharia law be able to stone to death a member of his family or community caught in adultery? Shouldn't law based on religious/moral belief be distributed fairly across the board then?
From a strictly health vantage point, women who had dealt with botched abortions prior to the Roe ruling were having a low mortality rate compared to being able to go to a clinic in sanitary conditions and have this procedure done in the midst of caring professionals. It prevents conditions such as Uterine Prolapse and pelvic infections that are detrimental to the one who received it. In this day and age, it is vital that these conditions can still be met despite any restrictions a country or state may have on this procedure.
Personally, I'm thankful that our country does have some "moral beliefs" that help protect my child and myself and that we fight for them as Americans- and I'm sure some other countries and people in the past have been thankful for America's "religious" and "moral" beliefs that fought for people groups who were being exterminated (among many other situations, the Holocaust). Otherwise, who am I to say that child pornography is wrong, or murder is wrong? I think we all agree we need to have some sort of moral standard as humans in order to ensure life and freedom to all, we just disagree on whether or not abortion is one of them. I believe it is. I believe it's murder. I believe it's a moral standard we need to fight the same as child pornography or murder, other things that some may find acceptable, and there are definitely those that do. There are far more children killed via abortions than women committing suicide b/c they were raped and are pregnant. The numbers aren't even comparable.
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