In early October, U.S. Navy SEALs secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq, Ahmed Hashim Abed, the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004.
Now, three of the SEALs who captured him are facing criminal charges because Abed claims he was hit in the stomach by one of the SEALs.
 | chas butterfield on DEMINT: White House land grab 5th Mar 10 Obviously, once again, just like HITLER, the BLUE_SHIRTED LIBERAL NAZIS are trying to control, NOT only the Banks/car companies/ healthcare ... |
 | Brian Wilson on Unsustainable 23rd Feb 10 America may be listening -- but they sure as hell aren't comprehending. At CPAC last week, the entire hotel population ... |
 | 1776 on Unsustainable 7th Feb 10 yeah, Steyn does nail it. But I think the majority of America is listening...now. And more people wake ... |
| 1776 on Tebow’s Super Story 7th Feb 10 I think the Pro-Choice movement is all about choice....but only if you agree with them. They don't seem to ... |
| Brian Wilson on Our National Blind Spot 7th Feb 10 Excellent piece! Hendrickson uses an economy of words to pronounce the absolute essence of America's problem. Indeed, neither Marx, Engle or ... |
 | Stoby Stobart on Unsustainable 7th Feb 10 Steyn nails it. Why isn't America listening? Or reading? "Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike" now THAT'S a picture a ... |
 | Stand Like A Rock is a fan of |
To those of you who retain some remnant of dignity and the will to live your lives for yourselves, you have the chance to make the same choice. Examine your values and understand that you must choose one side or the other. Any compromise between good and evil only hurts the good and helps the evil.
~John Galt
When a long train of abuses and usurpations,pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,it is their right,it is their duty,to throw off such government,and to provide new guards for their future securities.
~Declaration of Independence
Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” Rally Supports Special Ops Troops and Families.
RESTORING HONOR 8.28.10
Why so many abortion workers have turned pro-life.
by David Daleiden and Jon A. Shields
The Weekly Standard, January 25, 2010
Abortion rights activists have long preferred to hold themselves at some remove from the practice they promote; rather than naming it, they speak of “choice” and “reproductive freedom.” But those who perform abortions have no such luxury. Instead, advances in ultrasound imaging and abortion procedures have forced providers ever closer to the nub of their work. Especially in abortions performed far enough along in gestation that the fetus is recognizably a tiny baby, this intimacy exacts an emotional toll, stirring sentiments for which doctors, nurses, and aides are sometimes unprepared. Most apparently have managed to reconcile their belief in the right to abortion with their revulsion at dying and dead fetuses, but a noteworthy number have found the conflict unbearable and have defected to the pro-life cause.
In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, second-trimester abortions were usually performed by saline injection. The doctor simply replaced the amniotic fluid in the patient’s uterus with a saline solution and induced labor, leaving it to nurses to dispose of the expelled fetus. That changed in the late 1970s, when “dilation and evacuation” (D&E) emerged as a safer method. Today D&E is the most common second-trimester procedure. It has been performed millions of times in the United States.
But although D&E is better for the patient, it brings emotional distress for the abortionist, who, after inserting laminaria that cause the cervix to dilate, must dismember and remove the fetus with forceps. One early study, by abortionists Warren Hern and Billie Corrigan, found that although all of their staff members “approved of second trimester abortion in principle,” there “were few positive comments about D&E itself.” Reactions included “shock, dismay, amazement, disgust, fear, and sadness.” A more ambitious study published the following year, in the September 1979 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, confirmed Hern and Corrigan’s findings. It found “strong emotional reactions during or following the procedures and occasional disquieting dreams.”
Another study, published in the October 1989 issue of Social Science and Medicine noted that abortion providers were pained by encounters with the fetus regardless of how committed they were to abortion rights. It seems that no amount of ideological conviction can inoculate providers against negative emotional reactions to abortion.
Such studies are few. In general, abortion providers have censored their own emotional trauma out of concern to protect abortion rights. In 2008, however, abortionist Lisa Harris endeavored to begin “breaking the silence” in the pages of the journal Reproductive Health Matters. When she herself was 18 weeks pregnant, Dr. Harris performed a D&E abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. Harris felt her own child kick precisely at the moment that she ripped a fetal leg off with her forceps:
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 and 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.
Harris concluded her piece by lamenting that the pro-choice movement has left providers to suffer in silence because it has “not owned up to the reality of the fetus, or the reality of fetal parts.” Indeed, it often insists that images used by the pro-life movement are faked.
(Pro-choice advocates also falsely insist that second-trimester abortions are confined almost exclusively to tragic “hard” cases such as fetal malformation. Yet a review of the literature in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that most abortions performed after the first trimester are sought for the same reasons as first-trimester abortions, they’re just delayed. This reality only intensifies the guilt pangs of abortion providers.)
Hern and Harris chose to stay in the abortion business; one of the first doctors to change his allegiance was Paul Jarrett, who quit after only 23 abortions. His turning point came in 1974, when he performed an abortion on a fetus at 14 weeks’ gestation: “As I brought out the rib cage, I looked and saw a tiny, beating heart,” he would recall. “And when I found the head of the baby, I looked squarely in the face of another human being—a human being that I just killed.”
In 1990 Judith Fetrow, an aide at a Planned Parenthood clinic, found that disposing of fetal bodies as medical waste was more than she could bear. Soon after she left her position, Fetrow described her experiences: “No one at Planned Parenthood wanted this job. . . . I had to look at the tiny hands and feet. There were times when I wanted to cry.” Finally persuaded to quit by a pro-life protester outside her clinic, Fetrow is now involved in the American Life League.
Kathy Sparks is another convert formerly responsible for disposing of fetal remains, this time at an Illinois abortion clinic. Her account of the experience that led her to exit the abortion industry (taken from the Pro-Life Action League website in 2004) reads in part:
The baby’s bones were far too developed to rip them up with [the doctor’s] curette, so he had to pull the baby out with forceps. He brought out three or four major pieces. . . . I took the baby to the clean up room, I set him down and I began weeping uncontrollably. . . . I cried and cried. This little face was perfectly formed.
A recovery nurse rebuked Sparks for her unprofessional behavior. She quit the next day. Sparks is now the director of a crisis pregnancy center with more than 20 pro-life volunteers.
Handling fetal remains can be especially difficult in late-term clinics. Until George Tiller was assassinated by a pro-life radical last summer, his clinic in Wichita specialized in third-trimester abortions. To handle the large volume of biological waste Tiller had a crematorium on the premises. One day when hauling a heavy container of fetal waste, Tiller asked his secretary, Luhra Tivis, to assist him. She found the experience devastating. The “most horrible thing,” Tivis later recounted, was that she “could smell those babies burning.” Tivis, a former NOW activist, soon left her secretarial position at the clinic to volunteer for Operation Rescue, a radical pro-life organization.
Other converts were driven into the pro-life movement by advances in ultrasound technology. The most recent example is Abby Johnson, the former director of Dallas-area Planned Parenthood. After watching, via ultrasound, an embryo “crumple” as it was suctioned out of its mother’s womb, Johnson reported a “conversion in my heart.” Likewise, Joan Appleton was the head nurse at a large abortion facility in Falls Church, Virginia, and a NOW activist. Appleton performed thousands of abortions with aplomb until a single ultrasound-assisted abortion rattled her. As Appleton remembers, “I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. . . . After the procedure I was shaking, literally.”
The most famous abortion provider to be converted by ultrasound technology, decades ago, is Bernard Nathanson, cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the original NARAL. In the early 1970s, Nathanson was the largest abortion provider in the Western world. By his own reckoning he performed more than 60,000 abortions, including one on his own child. Nathanson’s exit from the industry was slow and tortured. In Aborting America (1979), he expressed anxiety over the possibility that he was complicit in a great evil. He was especially troubled by ultrasound images. When he finally left his profession for pro-life activism, he produced The Silent Scream (1984), a documentary of an ultrasound abortion that showed the fetus scrambling vainly to escape dismemberment.
This handful of stories is representative of many more. In fact, with the exception of communism, we can think of few other movements from which so many activists have defected to the opposition. Nonetheless, the vast majority of clinic workers remain committed to the pro-choice cause. Perhaps some of those who stay behind are haunted by their work. Most, however, find a way to cope with the dissonance.
Pro-choice advocates like to point out that abortion has existed in all times and places. Yet that observation tends to obscure the radicalism of the present abortion regime in the United States. Until very recently, no one in the history of the world has had the routine job of killing well-developed fetuses quite so up close and personal. It is an experiment that was bound to stir pro-life sentiments even in the hearts of those staunchly devoted to abortion rights. Ultrasound and D&E bring workers closer to the beings they destroy. Hern and Corrigan concluded their study by noting that D&E leaves “no possibility of denying an act of destruction.” As they wrote, “It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment run through the forceps like an electric current.”
Jon A. Shields is assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. David Daleiden is a student there.
Source: The Weekly Standard
Related posts:
Tags: abortion, Pro-Life, Roe v Wade | Category UNCATEGORIZED
The Slaughter Of America’s Democratic Republic
We all know liberals hold our nation in low esteem. But when this distaste for all things America is combined with their obsessive delusions of grandeur, we are learning these people will destroy anything in their path to prove their disastrous schemes (we are way beyond ‘risky’) are actually mana from Heaven!
standlikearock: CBO offers new estimate for Senate healthcare bill: $875B | http://bit.ly/aRNE3Kstandlikearock: The Slaughter Of America’s Democratic Republic | http://tinyurl.com/y9wmgw3standlikearock: The Constitutional Case Against Progressives | by Josie Wales | http://tinyurl.com/ydhgh9astandlikearock: Breaking: House GOP Adopts Unilateral Ban on All Earmarks | http://bit.ly/d0W5qwstandlikearock: How to Pollute a Mind: Lessons from John Dewey and Van Jones | http://tinyurl.com/yeh7bbmstandlikearock: The U.S. Census: “Rule of Law” or “Rule of Men”? | http://tinyurl.com/y9au7ll
jbkeener1776: got a letter from the govt today telling me expect my census form shortly and that I should fill it out and send it in. Was that necessary?jbkeener1776: Not to say that I doubt what he's said about Rahm's tactics... Rahm is one creepy dude...jbkeener1776: Really curious to see how this turns out with Massa. Is he a sleaze and looking to do some damage on his way out, or is he a victim?jbkeener1776: Interesting that the doctors advised Obama to cut his alcohol...wonder how much he admitted to drinking...& is he drinking more than that?jbkeener1776: Here's why Dems keep pushing 'dead' Obamacare despite growing public opposition | http://tinyurl.com/ybzd2p7jbkeener1776: ...its like saying that in the midst of the Revol. War...hey some of us might die...maybe we should rethink this. This is their Revolution.jbkeener1776: ...and they will seize it. They have been waiting for this time in history for over a hundred years...they don't care who gets reelected.jbkeener1776: I an honestly so tired of hearing how the dems are going to do in the midterm elections. They don't care. This is their moment...
You can already see us in several places: Twitter, RSS Feeds, Email subscription… and now we’re on Facebook too!
Our Facebook page and this website are hosted by different people and will generally bring you different stories.
So, don’t forget to become a fan of
Stand Like A Rock on Facebook!
Copyright © 2009 Stand Like A Rock. Theme by THAT Agency powered by WordPress.
PDF 
Comment By: DCNewsTrender
February 6th, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Pro-life activists descend on DC On the 37th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized aboion… http://bit.ly/8Zu0p7
Comment By: charleneCED
February 7th, 2010 at 12:19 am
Did you know the Plaintiff in Roe v. Wade has never had an aboion? She has been spearheading Pro-life movements for 10+ years!