PHILADELPHIA, May 15, 2013 (Family Research Council) – Pro-abortion groups are reacting to the Gosnell verdict with predictable spin. It’s all the fault of those anti-choice people, they say. If more women had greater access to free abortion, things like Gosnell’s abattoir would never have happened, they claim.
Brenda Pratt Shafer is a nurse who once worked in a facility that does late-term abortions. In 1996, she testified under oath before Congress about what a day is like in one of those well-appointed, well-lighted, clean, approved centers, the kind that are being offered to Americans today as the answer to Kermit Gosnell’s filthy house of horrors.
The abortionist in Nurse Shafer’s story did not want his patient to see what he had done to her unborn child. “Try to discourage her from seeing the baby,” he said.
The what? Didn’t he let his mask slip here? Isn’t he supposed to maintain the fiction that it is just a fetus? A mass of cells? A clump of tissue? Or is it alright to call it a baby after the unborn child’s dead body has been removed from the womb and thrown in a cold metal pan?
The late ABC News Anchor Peter Jennings once reminded us of how you are supposed to talk about such stories. In one of his evening broadcasts, Jennings described a new advance in pre-natal surgery. Through ultra-sound, it was determined that an unborn child had a condition known as hydrocephaly, water on the brain. Mr. Jennings said the fetus was surgically removed from the mother’s womb. A shunt was placed in the skull of the unborn child, relieving the pressure on that child’s developing brain. The unborn child was replaced in its mother’s womb. And the woman carried the fetus to term.
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Fetus—Unborn child—Fetus. It all depends on where this baby is at the specific moment we are talking about him. In the following testimony, Nurse Brenda Shafer takes us inside a late-term abortion center, just like one of those facilities operated and approved by Planned Barrenhood and blessed by President Obama.
Nurse Shafer’s sworn testimony:
…This one particular lady didn’t want the abortion. She had this Downs 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 I.V. of Valium to calm her down. We did not use a general anesthesia and knock her out. …We brought the ultrasound machine in and hooked it up to her stomach.
I could see the baby…
I could see the baby. I could see the heartbeat. And the doctor 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 lady’s in stirrups, just like you have a baby or just like you’re having an ob/gyn examination. And the baby, the only thing that was supporting the baby was the doctor was holding it in with his two fingers, holding the neck so the head was just inside the mommy.
And the baby was kicking his feet, hanging there, moving his little fingers and his little arms. I couldn’t believe — I don’t know what I thought killed it in three days, but he was moving and 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 supposed to handle this, I’m a nurse. He then took a pair of scissors and jammed them into the back of the baby’s head. And the baby jerked out, like a startle reflex, like a baby does if you throw him up a little bit and he jumps. And then the baby was real rigid. The doctor then 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.
I’ve seen that in my mind a thousand or more times…
And I have seen that in my mind a thousand or more times, of that baby, watching the life just drain out of it. And like I said before, I’ve seen babies die in my hands, I had people die in my hands. But it wasn’t anything like seeing that vision of watching this abortion. 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 gonna be embarrassed if you do this.” So I tried not to.
He pulled the head out, he cut the umbilical cord and threw it 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. And the doctor 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 the baby.
The mother held her dead baby in her arms…
…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 it and rocked it, and told him that she loved him. And I looked in that baby’s face, and he had the most angelic perfect face I’ve ever seen, and I just kept thinking, he’s an angel now, he’s in heaven. And I couldn’t take it. In all the years I’ve been a nurse, [for the first time] I lost it. And I pardoned myself and excused myself and I ran to the bathroom and I cried and prayed.
…I saw two more that day, 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…
The abortion technique described by Nurse Shafer in the above passages was outlawed by the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act passed by Congress in 2003 and signed by President George W. Bush. That law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 on a 5-4 vote.
That law was strongly supported by Family Research Council and the vast majority of Americans. Now, the law relies for its enforcement on the administration of President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. The president is required by the Constitution to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” We will see if there are any prosecutions under that law.
When he spoke to Planned Parenthood recently, President Obama did not see the baby. Or any of the 334,000 unborn children these traffickers tell us they killed in 2011. They went unmentioned and unseen in his lavish praise for the group.
Even now—especially now—the abortion forces and their liberal cohorts are trying to discourage all Americans from seeing the baby. What the Gosnell verdict does is to lift the bloody curtain and let us see.
This article originally appeared on the Family Research Council and is reprinted with permission.