Abortion Counselors

Here is a photo of a six to seven week embryo published by "The Bulletin" of Bell Museum of Pathology of the University of Minnesota Medical School. At six to seven weeks the unborn baby has a beating heart, a working brain, and developing fingers. Yet the drawing from the NAF showed only a blob.

A photo of a nine week old fetus.

And here is a picture of a 12 week old.

One common point of contention in the abortion debate is the subject of informed consent. Members of the Pro-Life faction have introduced legislation to make sure that a woman is well-informed before her abortion. Pro-Choice activists claim the laws are not needed and are demeaning towards women, or even a thinly veiled attempt to make abortion more difficult for women to attain. One comment from a Pro-Choice publication is below. "The Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act went into effect on March 20, 1994. For the past six years, health centers that provide abortion services and the lawyers representing them have been fighting the provisions of the law. What does the law provide? Women seeking an abortion must be told by a physician at least 24 hours prior to the procedure the nature of the procedure and the probable gestational age of the fetus. Women must also be told that materials are available describing fetal development and listing for agencies that offer alternatives to abortion. . . What we must do now is make sure that our Representatives know how strongly we feel about the law. Call them, write to them! Let them know how burdensome these regulations are. Vote for pro-choice candidates...."

"It is when I am holding a plastic uterus in one hand, a suction tube in the other, moving them together in imitation of the scrubbing to come, that woman ask the most secret question. I am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about 'the tissue' and 'the contents' when the woman suddenly catches my eye and says 'How big is the baby now?' These words suggest a quiet need for definition of the boundaries being drawn. It isn't so odd, after all, that she feels relief when I describe the growing buds bulbous shape, its miniature nature. Again, I gauge, and sometimes lie a little, weaseling around its infantile features until its clinging power slackens."

Here are some more quotes from former and current abortion providers and related professionals on this issue.

"Counselors are just to give the appearance of help. . . [They] think of themselves as company for the women."

"I have never yet counseled anybody to have the baby. I'm also doing women's counseling on campus at Albany State, and there I am expected to present alternatives. Whereas at the abortion clinic you aren't really expected to."

"Vital signs should be observed regularly, and a Doppler [for listening to the fetal heartbeat] inaudible to the patient should be used at intervals to determine the presence or absence of fetal heart tones.. This [informed consent] is a controversial area, but most professionals in the field feel that it is not advisable for patients to view the products of conception, to be told the sex of the fetus, or to be informed of a multiple pregnancy."

"Sonography in connection with induced abortion may have psychological hazards. Seeing a blown-up, moving image of the embryo she is carrying can be distressing to a woman who is about to undergo an abortion, Dr. Sally Faith Dorfman noted. She stressed that the screen should be turned away from the patient."

"I was trained by a professional marketing director in how to sell abortions over the telephone. He took every one of our receptionists, nurses, and anyone else who would deal with people over the phone through an extensive training period. The object was, when the girl called, to hook the sale so that she wouldn't get an abortion somewhere else, or adopt out her baby, or change her mind. We were doing it for the money."

"They [the women] are never allowed to look at the ultrasound because we knew that if they so much as heard the heart beat, they wouldn't want to have an abortion."

"Every woman has these same two questions: First, "Is it a baby?" "No" the counselor assures her. "It is a product of conception (or a blood clot, or a piece of tissue). . .How many women would have an abortion, if they told them the truth?"

"If a woman we were counseling expressed doubts about having an abortion, we would say whatever was necessary to persuade her to abort immediately."

"When discussing the sonogram, you are supposed to tell the client that it is a measurement as far as the pregnancy is concerned, but not a measure of the fetal head or anything like that."

"Sometimes we lied. A girl might ask what her baby was like at a certain point in the pregnancy: Was it a baby yet? Even as early as 12 weeks a baby is totally formed, he has fingerprints, turns his head, fans his toes, feels pain. But we would say 'It's not a baby yet. It's just tissue, like a clot.'"

"When I first started working there [at the clinic], I had to sit and listen to women answering the phone for at least a month before they would allow me to answer the phone. We had to know exactly what we were doing when we were talking to these women. We had to find out very quickly what their problem was, play on that and get them in the clinic for an abortion. We were very good salespeople."

"In fact many women will come to me considering abortion, and I have been personally told that I am to turn the monitor away from her view so that seeing her baby jump around on the screen does not influence her choice."

"There was a public health center in a town not far from Denver and they sent a lot of girls to us. They told us they did all the counseling. We weren't allowed to counsel them or even ask them about birth control. We couldn't even tell them what could happen during the abortion. Nothing. If we tried to discuss alternatives, we would get in trouble with the doctor because then the health center would threaten to send their business elsewhere. All we did was find out how far along they were, tell them when they were going to be finished, get their money, do the abortion, and send them home."

After having recommended some 500 abortions in the 1970s (back in the days of the hospital committees), the Canadian physician Eloise Jones once remarked, ``Almost all the women applying for therapeutic abortion repeated the words, `Oh it's not a baby, there's nothing formed, it's only a blob of tissue,' or `It's mostly placenta -- nothing much to it,' or `I certainly don't have any feelings for it.' Those words imply ignorance, and constitute wishful thinking, the desire to escape reality.''

After an unsuccessful attempt to interview a doctor on the staff, Leonard Stern asked ". . . is there anyone who can talk about abortion counseling?" There was a long pause. She didn't understand.

"Don't you have people who explain to clients what their options are?''
"Women are considered intelligent enough to make the decisions themselves,'' she snapped.

"Sometimes, they [the partners of those having abortions] would say 'Have you ever seen the abortion afterward?' and I would say, 'Yes, I have.' Then they would say, 'Well, what does it look like?' And I would say, 'Well, it depends on the stage of the pregnancy.' Does it have little feet and a heartbeat?' And I would say, 'Yes, at the early stages it does. But you have to have a magnifying glass to see it. And that's beside the point. The point is that this is a developing embryo that is going to become a child, a teenager, an adult. Is this what this woman wants? Is this what this woman is ready for?....' I would kind of put it back on them: Yeah, it is a developing human being, but why isn't she carrying it to term? And then they would start to talk about that."

"Abortion is a hard enough thing for any woman to decide without the torture of seeing the baby on an ultrasound screen."

"I have seen hundreds of patients in my office who have had abortions and were just lied to by the abortion counselor. Namely 'This is less painful than having a tooth removed. It is not a baby.' Afterwards, the woman sees Life magazine and breaks down and goes into a major depression."

"Peggy's (the patient's) mind is off on a different track. "Is it true that at six weeks it has a heartbeat?" Carye (the counselor) says nobody is sure exactly when the heart begins beating, and tries to deflect that concern. "This pregnancy and you are the same thing," she adds, explaining to Peggy that prior to twenty-four weeks the fetus cannot survive outside her womb."

In this second passage, Tiffany was a young woman in her fourteenth week of pregnancy who does not seem inclined to abort. The counselor is speaking in this passage:

"I'm not here to change your mind. I'm not here to force your opinion. But I'm sitting here seeing this beautiful young woman with her whole life ahead of her, and you have so many other things you can do right now. Why don't you go ahead with your dreams and have kids later?" Tiffany had no answer so Anneke continued, "We're always here for you."....Before ending the session Anneke left Tiffany with some figures that she recently had learned from Carye: One in ten high school girls who become pregnant finish high school, and one in ten thousand girls who have babies during high school finish college. And a third statistic: Over 80 percent of the men in this country don't pay their child support. "The statistics are stacked against you," Anneke said." Anneke did, reluctantly, agree to an abortion, and had one even though her boyfriend, who had proposed, went to the clinic in attempt to persuade her not to. He was thrown out by abortion clinic staff, who called police, although the author of the book, who was a witness to these events, makes no indication that any violence or threat of violence was present.

In "Pro Life Answers to Pro Choice Arguments" by Randy Alcorn, quotes a former abortion clinic counselor:

"I was totally uninformed of available alternatives to abortion. I never recommended adoption or keeping the child. Furthermore, I was completely unaware of the medical facts, including the development of the fetus. I received no training in factual matters- my job was just to keep women happy and make sure they went along with an abortion."

"Many women could not afford to have babies, so we would use examples- like the price of babies' shoes, the price of clothing, how much it cost to raise a baby. If they weren't finished with their education, the hindrence it would have on their education, how would they find a baby sitter, who was going to take care of that baby for them? We would find their weakness and work on them...All they were told about the procedure itself was that they would experience slight cramping similiar to menstrual cramps, and that was it. They were not told about the development of the baby. They were not told about the pain the baby would be experiencing or the physical effects or the emotional effects it would have on them. They had no idea who was going to be there to help them when they fell apart afterwards...Some of the women were a little apprehensive about it. We were told that in explaining to them we could never use the word "babies." It was always tissues, tissues of cells, or clusters of cells or products of conception."

In "Meet the Abortion Providers" Kathy Sparks discusses the clinic whe worked in:

"In my opinion, the most important part of this particular abortion clinic was the counseling. I was able to sit with one particular worker who had eight years of college; she was so very good. She could sit down with these girls during counseling and she could cry with them at the drop of a pin. She would immediately start drawing them out, asking them all kinds of good questions. She would find out what their pressure point was. What was driving them to want to abort that child, and whatever that pressure point was, she would magnify it. If it was the fact that her parents were going to 'kill' her, and she didn't know how she was going to be to tell her parents; then the counselor would proceed by tellling her, you don't have to do this; that's why abortion is here, we want to help you; this is the answer to your problems. Oftentimes, if it was money, she would tell them how much baby items cost...the counseling at this particular abortion clinic was so effective that 99 out of every 100 women would go ahead and abort. So that's very effective counseling."

Carol Everett, former owner of 2 abortion clinics and director of 4, in "Meet the Abortion Providers"

"How many of you have seen a number, unsolicited, that you think you could call that said, "Problem Pregnancy," "Abortion Information" or "Pregnant?" in your area where you think you could call for abortion information? Let's talk about those kids when they find out that they are pregnant. They may not want an abortion: they may want information. But when they call that number that's paid for by abortion money, what kind of information do you think they're going to get? Let's remember, they sell abortions. They don't sell keeping the baby. They don't sell giving the baby up for adoption. They don't sell delivering up the baby in any form. They only sell abortions.......This counselor is paid to be this girl's friend. She is paid to be the authority for the girl. She is supposed to seduce her into a friendship of sorts to sell her the abortion. Every problem this girl has: I don't want to tell my parents. You don't have to tell your parents. They don't have to know. You're old enough to come in and have it without them knowing. And then the money, and they ask them to go get their money and pay the people back in a year....They tell the counselors, and I told the counselors, not to rock the boat; not to answer any questions that they didn't ask."

From the article Rhetoric from Both Sides Muddles Decision Process by Holly Auer:

The information provided [by abortion providers] is often unreliable or exaggerated. Consider this text from a "frequently asked questions" Web site - "Making Your Decision" - published by Early Options, a Brooklyn physician's office:
"It might help you to know that if you are in the early stages of pregnancy, you are not yet carrying a fetus or baby. In fact, if it has been less than 7 weeks since your last period, your pregnancy consists of nothing visible to the eye except a tiny, empty sac in your uterus. By 8 to 9 weeks, your pregnancy is the size of a pea."

"In my facilities, I always gave option counseling. Of course you make the abortion the most appealing. I told them about adoption and about foster care and about [when there was welfare] assistance. The typical way it would go is, "Well, you know you can place your baby out for adoption." But then, in the second breath you would say, "That's an option available to you, but you also have to realize that there's going to be a baby of yours out here somewhere in the world you will never see again. At least with abortion you know what's happening. You can go on with your life...The longer I was in it, the less I cared, so I really didn't really care what my conscience said. My conscience was totally numb anyway. But what it did do was public relations-wise. You were able, when a reporter or TV crew came, to pull out a packet of information for the patients to read and they received it. So what can anybody say? Publicly it looked good -- in reality it was another tool that was used to force a woman into abortion. It's typical -- I would give them an option and then shoot it down. The only option you didn't shoot down, obviously, was abortion."

Here are some more quotes from former and current abortion providers and related professionals on this issue.

12 week ultrasound

Picture of "cluster of cells" at 13 weeks from K.L.Moore's Embrylogy textbook.