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(Excerpted from Touchstone Magazine, September, 2003, by Rachel M. MacNair)
(As published in HLA Action News, Winter 2004)
"I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses," reported Sallie Tisdale of her time as a nurse in an abortion facility.
What is the emotional impact on abortion providers? Those who perform or assist in surgical abortions have written and said enough to show that it is no ordinary medical procedure. Some, like Tisdale, suffer nightmares. Others suffer many of the other symptoms associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), once called "shell shock" and "battle fatigue." The practice of medicine, of healing, should not give you nightmares, should not leave you shell-shocked.
Few studies have been done of the doctors, nurses, counselors, and other staff in abortion facilities. Only two scientific studies that look at a large number of such providers have been done by researchers who did not work in the abortion field. One (by M. Such-Baer) appeared in Social Casework in 1974, and the other (by K.M. Roe) in Social Science and Medicine in 1989.
Both studies were done by people in favor of legal abortion, yet they both note the high prevalence of symptoms that fit the condition now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The study published in 1974 noted that "obsessional thinking about abortion, depression, fatigue, anger, lowered self-esteem, and identity conflicts were prominent."
The other study listed similar symptoms: "Ébehavior including withdrawal from colleagues, resistance to going to work, lack of energy, impatience with clients, and an overall sense of uneasiness. Nightmares, images that could not be shaken, and preoccupation were commonly reported. Also commonly noted was the deep and lonely privacy within which practitioners had grappled with their ambivalence."
American Medical News, published by the American Medical Association, reported that the discussions at a workshop of the National Abortion Federation "illuminate a rarely heard side of the abortion debate: the conflicting feelings that plague many providersÉThe notion that the nurses, doctors, counselors and others who work in the abortion field have qualms about the work they do is a well-kept secret." Among the stories:
A nurse who had worked in an abortion clinic for less than a year said her most troubling moments came not in the procedure room, but afterwards. "Many times women who had just had abortions would lie in the recovery room and cry, 'I've just killed my baby. I've just killed my baby.' I don't know what to say to these women," the nurse told the group. "Part of me thinks, 'Maybe they're right.'"
A doctor in New Mexico admitted that he was sometimes surprised by the anger a late-term abortion can arouse in him. On the one hand, the physician said, he is angry at the woman. "But paradoxically, I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria (the top of the baby's head), for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure which destroys a fetus, kills a baby."
The largest published study involved interviews with 130 abortion workers in San Francisco between January 1984 and March 1985. "Particularly striking was the fact that discomfort with abortion clients or procedures was reported by practitioners who strongly supported abortion rights and expressed strong commitment to their work," they noted. "This preliminary finding suggested that even those who support a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy may be struggling with an important tension between their formal beliefs and the situated experience of their abortion work."
In response, researchers decided to "interview only practitioners who identified themselves as pro-choice and were committed to continuing their abortion work for at least six months."
Seventy-five percent of those brought up the theme of abortion as a destructive act, as destroying a living thing. As for murder: "This theme was unexpected among pro-choice practitioners, yet 18 percent of the respondents talked about involvement in abortion in this way at some point in the interview."
Even Tisdale, who still believed in abortion, admitted the ambiguity of performing them. Abortion, she said, "is the narrowest edge between kindness and cruelty. Done as well as it can be, it is still violence-merciful violence, like putting a suffering animal to deathÉit is sweet brutality we practice here, a stark and loving dispassion."
The stress seems to grow as the unborn child develops. "As the pregnancy advances, the idea of abortion becomes more and more repugnant to a lot of people, medical personal included," an abortion doctor named Don Sloan noted in a book that vigorously asserts the need for legal abortion.
Late-term abortions pose "an unusual dilemma," said Warren Hern, an abortion specialist in a paper given to the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians. The doctors and nurses who do it have "strong personal reservations about participating in an operation which they view as destructive and violent." He explained their reactions this way:
"Some part of our cultural and perhaps even biological heritage recoils at a destructive operation on a form that is similar to our own, even while we may know that the act has a positive effect for a living personÉ.We have reached a point in this particular technology where there is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator. It is before our eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric currentÉ.The more we seem to solve the problem, the more intractable it becomes."
But it is the practitioners' dreams that may tell us most. Many of those who stopped doing abortions because they became convinced that abortion was wrong reported dreaming about abortion. American Medical News reported this from the National Abortion Federation workshop: "They (those who perform or help perform abortions) wonder if the fetus feels pain. They talk about the soul and where it goes. And about their dreams, in which aborted fetuses stare at them with ancient eyes and perfectly shaped hands and feet asking, 'Why did you do this to me?'"
A paper presented to the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians describes the dreams of two people who had dreamed "of vomiting fetuses along with a sense of horror." "In general, it appears that the more direct the physical and visual involvement the more stress experienced. This is evident both in conscious stress and in unconscious manifestations such as dreams.
Former abortion doctor McArthur Hill has told of how he would try to save premature babies and then find that the babies he'd aborted were bigger than the premature ones he had saved. "It was at this point that I began to have nightmares"
Dr. Hill did, eventually, wake up to the reality of what he was doing. If it is true that the practitioners' nightmares and other symptoms result from their work, as the evidence suggests, there will be many other practitioners who will be driven by their dreams to listen to the voice of conscience and stop killing or helping to kill the unborn.
(Rachel M. MacNair, PhD, is the director of the Institute for Integrated Social Analysis in Kansas City, the research arm of Consistent Life, and the author of Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing. This article is an abridged version of chapter six of that book.)
Quotes from Abortion proponents:
"I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing," said Faye Wattleton, in 1997, former president of Planned Parenthood.
"It is a form of killing. You're ending a life," Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, told the New York Times. "In the vast majority of cases, the procedure (partial birth abortion) is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along."
(From the article: Infants are Being Killed, National Right to Life News, November, 2003)