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What REALLY Happens During an Abortion

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What REALLY happens during an abortion: One surgeon finally tells the truth
By DEBORAH DAVIES – Daily Mail UK Last updated 12th October 2007

The blonde teenager, waiting to go into the operating theatre, is 16 years old and nearly 16 weeks pregnant. She’ll be one of up to 60 women having an abortion that day at the Marie Stopes clinic in south London.

She realised she was pregnant about eight weeks earlier, but couldn’t pluck up the courage to tell her mother. The weeks ticked by. She agonised over what to do: she had plans to go to college; her boyfriend said he’d stand by her whatever she decided.

She had considered having an abortion in secret, but eventually her mum guessed and made the appointment for her.

The abortion she’s about to have would be illegal in many European countries, where the time limit is 12 weeks, unless the foetus is severely disabled or the mother’s life is at risk.

But in Britain, abortions performed for those critical health reasons accounted for only 2 per cent of the 200,000 abortions carried out last year.

The overwhelming majority were carried out on the legal grounds that two doctors agreed that continuing the pregnancy would damage the mother’s physical or mental well-being.

Small wonder, then, that some say the law is interpreted to allow abortion on demand. Very few doctors will refuse a woman who believes she can’t cope with the pregnancy or an unwanted child. And she can make that decision right up to 24 weeks of pregnancy.

These facts are worth restating because 40 years ago this month abortion became legal in Britain. The heat has never gone out of the debate, but the issue has usually simmered on the political back-burner. That’s all set to change in the next few weeks.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=487377&in_page_id=1879&in_page_id=1879

Comments

  1. Dr. Mengele Would Have Been Proud

    http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/03/01/dr-mengele-would-have-been-proud/

    Savulescu also defended the article by pointing out that “infanticide is practiced in the Netherlands” and that these arguments have already been advanced by well known “bioethicists” such as Peter Singer and Michael Tooley. “The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics …is to present well reasoned arguments based on widely accepted premises…the authors proceed logicallyfrom arguments which many people accept.” Of course, in Nazi Germany the premise that Jews were a mortal threat to the Aryan people was also a “widely accepted” premise and genocide was practiced in Nazi Occupied Europe and Russia.

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  2. Here is a more detailed description:

    (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-487377/What-REALLY-happens-abortion-One-surgeon-finally-tells-truth.html)

    If she’d asked the surgeon, scrubbing up in the operating theatre, he would have given her his standard, brief answer: “The terminology I’d use would be that the foetus is removed and that the foetus dies as a result of that process,” says Dr John Spencer, who is the senior clinical director for Marie Stopes and one of only a handful of doctors in the country who perform abortions right up to the legal limit of 24 weeks.

    “Women hardly ever ask for any more details.”

    But in the Dispatches programme, Dr Spencer will break a huge medical taboo and spell out exactly what happens. Though we do not show the aborted foetus, what viewers will see and hear may very well shock them, but it is a vital contribution to the whole debate.

    In the first 12 weeks or so of pregnancy, doctors can use a simple suction procedure. After that, the surgery becomes more complicated.

    Dr Spencer opens a fresh pack of shiny instruments. He’s an extremely calm, softly spoken man, which somehow makes his words all the more devastating. “The foetus can’t come out in one go. We haven’t dilated sufficiently for that. The foetal parts are soft enough to break apart as they are being removed…”

    In other words, he has to dismember the foetus inside the uterus and pull it out, bit by bit. He uses an ultrasound scan to guide him. Even then, some body parts are too large to come out intact.

    To illustrate what happens, Dr Spencer grips his thumb between the surgical forceps and squeezes gently. “Those parts are the skull and then the spine and pelvis, and in fact they are crushed…”

    The operation on the 16-year-old is over in 12 minutes. The bowl with what they call “the products of conception” is quickly wheeled out of the theatre, covered in yellow plastic.

    There are much more graphic description on the internet if you take the time to look.

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  3. When I was younger, I often wondered why people would want to restrict women’s access to abortions: I saw this as a fundamental breach of a basic women’s right. Furthermore, I saw teenage mothers who didn’t abort their children as selfish and irresponsible, due to their lack of means to look after their child.

    Last year, my best friend got pregnant. She was beside herself, and didn’t know what she’d do. Eventually, she got the guts to tell her parents, who ended up being very supportive throughout the whole ideal, and convinced her not to abort the child, but find a responsible couple to adopt it out to. What they learned was that there are PLENTY of couples out there who would love to adopt, and they ended up adopting the child out to some family friends who were struggling to have children of their own.

    Now, even considering an abortion seems like a stupid move. It would have damaged the mental health of my friend (burdening her with a pain for the rest of her life), denied this couple the chance to raise a child, and most importantly, denied this child the happy and long life it now has the opportunity to have.

    I strongly recommend to any women out there going through an unplanned pregnancy to consider adoption over an abortion. Life is a very, very precious thing.

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