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MY LIFE WAS CHANGED FOREVER 

ABORTION DOCTORS RAISE THEIR VOICE AGAINST ABORTION

Many abortion doctors began performing abortions because they felt they were helping women but later stopped and began speaking out against having abortions. Here are direct quotes from some of these doctors.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson - New York City, New York

I am personally responsible for 75,000 abortions. This legitimizes my credentials to speak to you with some authority on the issue.

I am often asked what made me change my mind. How did I change from prominent abortionist to pro-life advocate? I became director of obstetrics of a large hospital in New York City and had to set up a prenatal research unit, just at the start of a great new technology which we now use every day to study the fetus in the womb. A favorite pro-abortion tactic is to insist that the definition of when life begins is impossible; that the question is a theological or moral or philosophical one, anything but a scientific one.

Fetology makes it undeniably evident that life begins at conception and requires all the protection and safeguards that any of us enjoy. Why, you may well ask, do some American doctors who are privy to the findings of fetology, discredit themselves by carrying out abortions? Simple arithmetic at $300 a time, 1.55 million abortions means an industry generating $500,000,000 annually, of which most goes into the pocket of the physician doing the abortion.

It is clear that permissive abortion is purposeful destruction of what is undeniably human life. It is an impermissible act of deadly violence. One must concede that unplanned pregnancy is a wrenchingly difficult dilemma, but to look for its solution in a deliberate act of destruction is to trash the vast resourcefulness of human ingenuity and to surrender the public weal to the classic utilitarian answer to social problems.

As a scientist I know, not believe, know that human life begins at conception.

Although I am not a formal religionist, I believe with all my heart that there is a divinity of existence which commands us to declare a final and irreversible halt to this infinitely sad and shameful crime against humanity.

Dr. Beverly McMillan - Jackson, Mississippi

I was not a reluctant participant in abortion. I was a radical feminist. During my residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago I made my decision to be an abortionist. At the hospital I noticed that quite a number of women who were bleeding and running a fever were being admitted. I started IV's and gave blood and antibiotics to the patients. About halfway through the night, it dawned on me that these women were coming from Chicago's illegal abortion mills.

At the end of six weeks, I was angry at what I had seen. I thought that women should have a safe abortion and I would provide it. At that time, there was not one abortion center in the entire state of Mississippi. A group of "concerned citizens and clergy" had already lined up a place to rent and had hired nurses and counselors. Everything was ready to open the first abortion mill in Mississippi, except that they needed a physician willing to become the "town abortionist." I initially declined, but later determined that I would run the best abortion facility in the country.

The new abortion mill was running smoothly. We only offered first trimester (first 12 weeks of pregnancy) abortions because I felt later abortions were riskier. Nevertheless, I did experience complications, the worst of which was perforating a uterus and suctioning a piece of small bowel into the tube. I was so depressed I couldn't stand it. I started considering Christianity, and at one point prayed the scripture, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." One day an employee at the mill asked to see the contents of the sock in the suction machine. I saw a beautiful arm, and I thought, "What are you doing?" That was one of the last abortions I did.

Dr. McMillan resigned from the abortion clinic and became an advocate against abortion.

Dr. Anthony Levatino - Albany, New York

Dr. Anthony Levatino did abortions for eight years as part of his Albany, NY, practice, performing dilation and evacuation in late-term abortions. As Dr. Levatino stated, In a D&E abortion, you are pulling out pieces of unborn children.

From the onset, Dr. Levatino was vaguely troubled by the work but continued to do it for the money. It's highly profitable. I could do three abortions in my office in an hour and a half and make more than caring for a woman nine months and delivering her baby.

It took a personal tragedy to prompt a change of heart. While he was doing abortions as a resident, he and his wife were trying desperately to have a child. There I was throwing kids in the garbage, five or six a week. Just give me one, I thought.

Eventually, they adopted a little girl and named her Heather. Several years later, Heather was killed by an auto in front of their home. She died in her father's arms. If you lose a child, you look at things differently. What was once uncomfortable becomes intolerable. You feel that you're destroying a human being for money, like a paid assassin. This is somebody's child. I lost my child, someone who was very precious to us. And now I am taking somebody's child and I am tearing him right out of their womb. I am killing somebody's child.

That is what it took to get me to change. All the money in the world wouldn't have made a difference. So I quit. I slept a lot better at night after that.

Dr. Joseph Randall - Atlanta, Georgia

Dr. Joseph Randall operated an abortion clinic in Atlanta, GA, and estimates he performed 32,000 abortions. He used the dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedure.

After the operation you have to reassemble that baby - arms, legs, head, chest - everything. That's when it got rough, even for old-timers like me.

When you looked at an ultrasound, there was no mistaking that this was a baby. Ladies who came in for mid-trimester (four to six months of pregnancy) abortions were shielded from the images. Several nurses quit. They would bond with the baby they saw on the screen; they couldn't take it.

Dr. Randall finally stopped performing abortions when a Christian woman came to work in his office and convinced him of their immorality. He switched from doing abortions to volunteer counseling at a facility offering alternatives to abortion.

Dr. Yvonne Moore - Memphis, Tennessee

Once I graduated from medical school, I returned to Memphis for residency in ob-gyn at the University of Tennessee. It had become a tradition within our residency program that the most lucrative and sought after moonlighting jobs were found in the three local abortion clinics. You could make good money without having to leave town to work nights in hospital emergency rooms.

I knew there were good residents who chose not to do abortions for religious reasons, but I never really understood what one thing had to do with the other. My best friend in college had an abortion, and I had been very supportive of her decision at the time. We were thankful that the Supreme Court had made abortion legal the year after we started college. It seemed only logical that when I was offered the chance to provide those services that I had an obligation to do it. After all, if doctors who believed in a woman's right to choose didn't do abortions, who else would?

By the time I was a senior resident, I was medical director of one of the clinics and spent my vacation time at pro-abortion seminars and political functions.

It was not until I was pregnant myself that I began to really examine my feelings about the moral aspects of abortion. It had taken over a year for me to become pregnant with my daughter. The first time I saw the tiny little flicker of her heartbeat on an ultrasound screen I fell completely in love with her. I finally had to come to terms with the fact that the only thing that made my daughter any different than all those tiny babies I had terminated was the fact that I wanted her. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes and I was at last able to see what I had not allowed myself to see in all those years of doing terminations.

Dr. Moore now conducts training sessions for volunteers at a local crisis pregnancy center about the medical and emotional complications of abortions.