Monday, June 02, 2014

What Sarah Silverman refers to as "goo" -- alive and responding to touch

I couldn't find an embed code, but you can click to see a short video of a 12-week baby that appears to have been miscarried. The child is still alive and responsive to touch when the video begins, but clearly dies of extreme prematurity by the end of the video.

It's very sad to see -- especially how the baby is treated like a curiosity rather than a baby, poked at rather than comforted -- but people need to understand that these are living children who respond to touch, not "goo."


According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which collects the most complete and accurate abortion data in the country, 11% of abortions take place at or after 13 weeks. That means 11% of abortions are done on babies older and  more responsive to touch than this baby. Let me also point out that this baby is oxygen starved and dying, not robustly healthy as a 12-week baby would be in the womb when the dismemberment of an abortion is begun.

There are over a million abortions in the US per year. That means that more than 110,000 babies even more developed and responsive than this baby are killed via methods such as dismemberment or lethal injection directly into the heart or brain.

Diagram of 14-week suction abortion. First the fully-formed fetus is intact in the uterus as the doctor prepares do begin. Next, suction is applied to dismember the fetus and pull it through a narrow tube slightly larger in diameter than the fetal leg. Next, the placenta is suctioned out. Finally the empty uterus contracts.
Medical illustration of a 14-week abortion being performed.
Watch again how the baby pushed the finger away when its hand was touched, even after it had been so long without oxygen. Remember again that the baby in the video is no longer getting oxygen through the placenta and therefore is less responsive than a healthy unborn child still in the womb and still getting plenty of oxygen would be. Now let's imagine that same baby pulled apart alive and unanesthetized using powerful suction.

Let's look at how even older babies are aborted -- say, 16 or 18 or more weeks. Under oath, Carhart indicated that he tried to grab the baby and get it positioned to where he can suck out the brain without taking the baby apart first. But sometimes, he indicates, the baby sticks a limb out through the cervix, and it's just easier to pull that part off and go from there:

Sopher forceps used for abortion.
Sopher forceps, with serrated grasping blades, used to
dismember unborn babies 12 weeks and older
during over 110,000 abortions in the US alone annually.
Carhart: My normal course would be to dismember that extremity and then go back and try to take the fetus out either foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first.

Question: How do you go about dismembering that extremity?

Carhart: Just traction and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get a hold of which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the os, using the internal os as your counter-traction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be. Sometimes you will get one leg and you can’t get the other leg out.

Question: In that situation, are you, when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?

Carhart: Yes.

Medical illustration of D&E abortion at 23 weeks. Forceps are used to grasp and remove fetal limbs. The fetus is dismembered. Question: Do you consider an arm, for example, to be a substantial portion of the fetus?

Carhart: In the way I read it, I think if I lost my arm, that would be a substantial loss to me. I think I would have to interpret it that way.

Question: And then what happens next after you remove the arm? You then try to remove the rest of the fetus?

Carhart: Then I would go back and attempt to either bring the feet down or bring the skull down, or even sometimes you bring the other arm down and remove that also and then get the feet down.

Question: At what point is the fetus...does the fetus die during that process?

Carhart: I don’t really know. I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.
This is what happens, day after day, over 110,000 times a year in the United States alone.

It's an ugly truth, but it's one we, as a nation, need to own up to.

UPDATE: I found a downloadable copy:

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