This Former Abortionist is Now a Pro-Life Leader and Saves Babies
Dr. Kathi Aultman, a retired board-certified OB-GYN who once did abortions, including dismemberment procedures, and underwent one herself, has become a prominent pro-life advocate.
Now she testified before lawmakers and contributing to research aimed at protecting unborn children.
Aultman, now an associate scholar with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, shares her testimony at events like the March for Life rally, where she highlights the harms of abortion and inspires women to choose life.
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The daughter of a Methodist minister, Aultman developed a fascination with biology early on, studying science in college before attending medical school in Florida.
In the mid-1970s, amid the legalization of abortion under Roe v. Wade, she became pregnant and chose abortion.
“And it’s the same old story,” Aultman told CNA. “I thought that … if I kept the baby, I wouldn’t be able to be a doctor. I was afraid we’d end up with a divorce, because we were getting married because we had to. I was afraid of what my family and friends would think. So I decided to have an abortion.”
During medical school, she had no qualms about abortion training, unlike some classmates who opted out. She learned first-trimester abortions and sought special training for later-term and dismemberment abortions.
After licensing, she moonlighted at an abortion clinic during residency.
“I was fascinated,” she said. “I thought they were so interesting. I love[d] sending fetal parts down to pathology so I could look at the slides and see what the embryonic tissue looked like. I did not see them as people.”
All the abortions she did were elective.
Even after becoming a Christian, she remained “very pro-choice.”
But changes began after giving birth to her own child, which made her realize abortions involved two lives and she could not “kill babies just because they weren’t wanted.”
A striking incident involved a patient who said, “I just want to kill it.”
Aultman recalled: “And it just struck me, you know, how could she be so hostile and angry towards this little baby. It hadn’t done anything wrong. That really affected me.”
She quit doing abortions but continued referrals and briefly worked at a Planned Parenthood facility that did not do them at the time.
Observing the turmoil of post-abortive women versus the joy of those who chose life led her to question her views: “Slowly, this was beginning to make me wonder if everything that I believed was really true,” Aultman said.
The pivotal moment came while reading about the Holocaust. Her father had been with the unit that liberated the first concentration camp in World War II.
The comparison hit her: “That was the point when I understood that abortion was wrong, and I became pro-life,” she said.
“I could kill babies for the same reason that the Nazis could kill their victims — because we didn’t see them as human beings. Suddenly, I realized I was a mass murderer, and I stopped completely.”
She found forgiveness in Christ.
“We have a forgiving God, and he’s forgiven me, and I know it. But I still carry the burden, because not only did I kill other people’s babies, I had an abortion, so I killed my own child. … Women cannot remain unscathed after killing their child.”
Today, Aultman marches annually, including at the March for Life 2026, to show “there are pro-life doctors. Abortion is not health care, and we want people to understand that it harms women and kills babies. We’re the ones who see all the complications from abortions, both psychological and physical.”
She warns of lasting scars: “Right now, women are told, ‘That’s the easy solution.’ ‘If the timing isn’t right, just have an abortion; you can try again later.’ But you never lose those scars.”
Aultman debunks the myth that abortion is necessary for success.
“I felt like I was one of those women who believed that women had to have abortion in order to succeed,” she told the news outlet. “That was a lie. It wasn’t true. I still could have been a professional, I still could have done what I did, as many other women had done that I trained with.”
“You don’t have to have an abortion in order to be a professional and to be able to succeed. … I can’t tell you how many professional women I know who had their babies first or during their career. You can have both.”
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