“Abortion is nothing to do with death”
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“Abortion is nothing to do with death.” Okay, this paper is by Lisa Harris, an abortion provider. If you Google it, I’m pretty sure the second link is to a PDF where you can read the entire paper, “Second Trimester Abortion Provision: Breaking the Silence and Changing the Discourse,” which is a little bit ironic because I don’t feel like the discourse has changed much at all since she published it in 2008.
And by that I mean Lisa Harris wanted to have a more blunt and direct conversation about the realities of abortion, and yet even to this day I still see comments like the one I just showed you, constantly: “It has nothing to do with death; it has nothing to do with killing; it has nothing to do with fetal parts; there’s no such thing as late term elective abortion,” and on and on—a bunch of pleasant fictions to, I assume, make it more comfortable to be pro-choice.
Anyway, I’m going to read you a passage from this paper where she was pregnant in the second trimester herself and providing a second trimester abortion to another woman at the same time:
“I went about doing the procedure as usual, removed the laminaria I had placed earlier, and confirmed I had adequate dilation.
“I used electrical suction to remove the amniotic fluid, picked up my forceps, and began to remove the fetus in parts as I always did.
“I felt lucky that this one was already in the breach position—it would make grasping small parts (legs and arms) a little easier.
“With my first pass of the forceps, I grasped an extremity and began to pull it down. I could see a small foot hanging from the teeth of my forceps. With a quick tug, I separated the leg. Precisely at that moment, I felt a kick—a fluttery ‘thump, thump’ in my own uterus. It was one of the first times I felt fetal movement. There was a leg and foot in my forceps and a ‘thump, thump’ in my abdomen.
“Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning, my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on, I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand to my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.”
Stop kidding yourself. Of course abortion has to do with death.
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