From "Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic"
by Wendy Simonds.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
1996 Quotes from clinic personel:
"You're going from dealing with people to dealing with what most people here at the Center consider a real hurdle, to do sterile room, because you have to deal with the actual abortion tissue. And for some people, that's really hard. They can be abstractly in favor of abortion rights, but they sure don't want to see what an eighteen-week abortion looks like."
"It's just- I mean it looks like a baby. It looks like a baby. And especially if you get one that comes out, that's not piecemeal. And you know, I saw this one, and it had its fingers in its mouth...it makes me really sad that that had to happen, you know, but it doesn't change my mind. It's just hard. And it makes me just sort of stop and feel sad about it, the whole necessity of it. And also....it's very warm when it comes into the sterile room because it's been in the mother's stomach. It feels like flesh, you know..."
"It's going to be weird now because you're going to see the sono. You're going to see the heart beating- little hearts, you know- and then, all of a sudden, you're going to put his cardiac medicine in it to make it stop-to kill it. So you're going to see the exact moment when you kill the fetus. I won't kill it, the doctor will kill it...and, I mean, it might be more humane...if the fetuseses do feel something, why not kill it, you know, fast, rather than rip its leg off?"
"I feel some sadness about abortions and I think part of the problem is that we don't talk about that...we don't talk about it as much as we think about it...somehow your pro-choice stance is compromised by saying the word "baby."...We don't allow ourselves to say or think that word...."
"At nine weeks...you start seeing fetal parts. And by the second trimester it's, you know, it's a baby, and by eighteen weeks it's definitely a baby. And by like, you know, twenty-two weeks, you go in and you watch someone do a sonogram, and you're like, "Oh my." There it is, just moving, moving around. And it's really hard because I always thought of abortion in terms of just the woman, just her body."
"You're looking between the woman's legs; you're seeing, you know, what the doctor's doing. And it's what a lot of people would call kind of, I guess, gruesome- that's not really the word because- it's identifiable. I mean, when he, takes the forceps and pulls out a foot, you can see the foot, and my reaction, because I feel so strongly that women who want to have a twenty week abortion should be able to have that, but I mean when I lookes and was just like, you know, my first reaction was, you know, I was pretty horrified."
"So by it looking like a baby, you're associating it with yourself because...you used to be a baby, you used to be a fetus....when you're, you know, putting a fetus's feet in over its head in a baggie, there's just this brief moment of "This could have been me," which I fundamentally believe is okay.
She should have the right to choose......it looks like a baby, That's what it looks like to me. You've never seen anything else that looks like that. The only other thing you've ever seen is a baby...You can see a face and hands, and ears and eyes and, you know; feet and toes. It bothered me real bad the first time..."
"The destruction I can't deny. I wish we lived in a world where abortion didn't have to exist." You know, we still say "products of conception." Well, why don't we say it looks like, you know, a twenty-week fetus looks like a baby. Why can't we say that in public? Because that's what the antis say, you know."
"I think the tough part was seeing actual pieces of fetus being removed. And in the beginning, yes, I remember looking, standing behind this woman's shoulder [as she performed an early second trimester abortion, and thinking, "I can't do this...There's something emotionally upsetting about this. Features are discernible; you can count five fingers on a hand and five toes on a foot. You know, all the organ systems are formed. You know, you can see ears as structures, and the nose and eyes as structures...I have gotten to the point now that because I've been doing this work five months, four months, I look at it a little differently. I don't see the same things that I did. And, honestly, when I sit down to do one of these now, I am watching to be sure that I'm getting everything that I need to get. It's 'Do I have two lower extremities? Do I have two upper extremities? Is there a spine? - and the skull?. It does become a bit routine after a while. I don't fear it."
"I hate it when people put it together to look like a baby. I hate that! I don't want to look like it when its like that because it's like a broken doll, and that grosses me out."
From the author: "Many health workers told me they 'never look at the face' when processing tissue."
Submitted by: Sarah Terzo 4/23/97
Reconstructed by: Mary Ann Brown
Page designed and created by: Mary Ann Brown
