In 2015, undercover journalist David Daleiden attended a National Abortion Federation Conference and recorded several talks by abortion doctors. He posted the videos to YouTube.
A judge, who himself had ties to Planned Parenthood, forced Daleiden to take the videos down.
However, before the NAF conference videos were taken down from YouTube, I, your friendly neighborhood atheist LGBT pro-lifer, transcribed them. So, I have all that material still available on ClinicQuotes.
Now seems as good a time as any to write about it. Whether you saw the NAF videos when they were first released or not, I thought I’d revisit one of them in this article.
The panel “Second Trimester Providers Self Care” featured several speakers, one of whom was abortionist Lisa Harris.
Harris specializes in late-term abortions by Dilation and Evacuation, or D&E.
A former abortionist explains this procedure below:
In a D&E abortion, the abortionist first dilates the cervix, which is the opening of the womb, with sticks called laminaria overnight or over several days, depending on how far along the pregnancy is.
On the day of the actual procedure, the abortionist reaches in with forceps and extracts the baby piece by piece, pulling off arms and legs, then extracting the torso, and then, in the final step, crushing and removing the baby’s head.
Here is a diagram illustrating the procedure:
Abortions of this type are generally done between fourteen and twenty-four weeks, or later. To get an idea of the baby’s development, here is an ultrasound of a preborn child at twenty weeks (five months).
At the start of her talk, Harris mentions being pregnant with her “unborn fetus” who became her “subsequent daughter.” Harris is, incidentally, the only person I’ve ever heard refer to her own, wanted preborn child as a “fetus.”
Harris describes having lunch with another abortionist who had recently given birth to a child and asking her what it was like to commit abortions while pregnant.
She doesn’t say much about the woman’s response but does say of the conversation: “[O]ut of us spilled all of these stories and experiences about doing the work that we did. Its sacredness, and its great rewards, and also, its burden.”
Harris discussed doing abortions while pregnant in her 2008 article “Second Trimester Abortion Provision: Breaking the Silence and Changing the Discourse” in Reproductive Health Matters.
Harris was just over eighteen weeks pregnant and was committing an abortion on a woman pregnant with a baby of the same age.
While reviewing the chart, she says, she realized she “was more interested than usual in seeing the fetal parts when I was done, since they would so closely resemble those of my own fetus.”
She describes starting the abortion procedure:
I used electrical suction to remove the amniotic fluid, picked up my forceps and began to remove the fetus in parts, as I always did. I felt lucky that this one was already in the breech position—it would make grasping small parts (legs and arms) a little easier.
Then she began to dismember the baby:
With my first pass of the forceps, I grasped an extremity and began to pull it down. I could see a small foot hanging from the teeth of my forceps. With a quick tug, I separated the leg.
Precisely at that moment, I felt a kick—a fluttery “thump, thump” in my own uterus. It was one of the first times I felt fetal movement. There was a leg and foot in my forceps, and a “thump, thump” in my abdomen.
Harris described how this affected her:
Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain — even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely.
A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.
Despite all her training, her pro-abortion convictions, and her skill at dehumanizing preborn human beings, Harris had an emotional reaction. Sadly, this experience didn’t lead to a change of heart.
Her experience was sixteen years ago, and she is still doing abortions at the same (and later) gestational ages.
In her speech at the NAF conference, Lisa Harris discussed how abortionists are reluctant to tell people what they do for a living. She said:
[P]eople knowing what we do comes with risks… It comes with the risk of being judged. It comes with the risk of creating rifts and ruptures in our relationships and, of course, it carries the risk of harassment and violence.
Harris admits that “[W]e probably feel [the threat of violence] out of proportion to what it might be…”
Harris also discusses abortion stigma, saying, “[W]e feel stigmatized. Meaning, we feel marked in a negative way by our work. Marginalized, discriminated against.”
She gives an example of this “stigma” and “discrimination”:
[W]hen I park my car in the parking lot of the hospital every day, I have to go by that bumper sticker that says, ‘Choose Life.’ You know, or ‘Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.’
Ah! I’m so mad, because why? I’m just going to work. Why do I have to deal with this?
So simply seeing a pro-life message is stigma, according to Harris. Even a pro-life statement as innocuous as “Choose Life,” which only encourages pregnant people to decide I against abortion, is out of bounds.
And Harris, who has pulled the arms and legs off fully formed babies, knows perfectly well that abortion stops a beating heart. She apparently doesn’t want to be reminded of that fact, however.
Harris goes on to talk more about stigma:
I feel [stigma] in organizations, hospitals, right, when my hospital might not want to deal with having its own abortion clinic, uh, in the hospital.
Other people may feel it in their churches or synagogues. We experience stigma in our communities or in our family and our friends.
You know how willing are we to talk about our most recent case, at, say, Thanksgiving dinner when people are asking us how work is going or how we’re doing?
Harris admits that stigma and fear of judgment aren’t the only reasons she and other abortionists don’t talk about their work. One reason for keeping quiet, she says, is “to protect the pro-choice movement.”
Because often, the reality of abortion doesn’t match the sanitized, rosy picture pro-choice activists like to paint.
Harris elaborates:
Our stories don’t really have a place in a lot of pro-choice discourse and rhetoric, right?
The heads that get stuck that we can’t get out.
The hemorrhages that we manage.
The patients having their eighth abortion. The patients that really fit any of the stereotypes that anti-abortion people like to talk about.
[T]hose are all parts of our experience, but there’s no real good place for us to share those. Not only do we have self-censorship … we also have this burden of censorship because we care about this movement, and we don’t want to be danger to it.
Keeping silent about the realities of the abortion industry protects abortion. Telling the truth puts abortion rights at risk.
Because, as Harris and other abortionists well know, if the public were aware of what actually goes on behind the closed doors of abortion clinics, there would be more of a public outcry against abortion.
The pro-abortion movement must hide unsavory details about abortion practice from the public in order to maintain support for abortion. Because the truth, the whole truth, is overwhelmingly in pro-lifers’ favor. Therefore, abortionists must censor themselves.
Harris goes on to talk about how other members of the medical profession look down on abortion providers:
[W]e are marginalized within medicine. We feel looked down upon technically or morally, by our peers in medicine.
We dread complications, not just because of what it means for patients, but because of what we imagine people will say about us to our patients or to each other when those patients present to the emergency department, we dread morbidity and mortality presentations where we feel that our complications will be judged more harshly than a similar complication … outside abortion.
I have written about this kind of stigma in the medical community before.
Not everything Harris had to say about being an abortionist was negative.
She says that another reason abortionists don’t talk about their work is that “people will always see us as abortion providers and nothing else.”
She says:
Even if it’s a positive view. There’s only so many cocktail parties you want to go to or soccer games you want to go to, where everyone’s like “I’m so happy about what you do, you’re such a hero!” [laughter] You know? It’s lovely to hear, but you don’t need that all the time.
So, there are indeed pro-choice people who think abortion doctors are heroes. Not all of the attention they get is negative.
Perhaps this hero worship, this positive reinforcement, is one reason they stay in the abortion industry. I can’t speak to their motives—maybe some feel they are helping women. As I’ve written about before, however, abortion is also very lucrative for abortionists.
For whatever reason, abortionists like Harris tolerate the stigma they feel, the lack of respect from other doctors, the gruesome reality of what they see daily, the cognitive dissonance of nurturing their own children while killing other peoples’, and the negative reactions of others, and continue to do abortions.
LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.
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