PART 2: What they don’t want you to know about abortion

“Dangertalk”

Most journalists, because they are in favor of abortion, don’t want us to think negatively about abortion. And so they avoid the details of the procedure beyond a prescribed set of safe topics and euphemisms that play well with the public because they hide the truth from the public. They refuse to talk about the truth of abortion and what it actually involves. This is a terrible dereliction of their duty. 

In PART 1 I discussed a little-known detail of abortions. Read it here.

We witnessed this in the Kermit Gosnell case, where a Philadelphia abortion doctor was sentenced to life in prison for brutally killing babies delivered live during late-term abortions. He also killed two women through medical negligence. First, journalists didn't even show up to court. Even more interesting is that when they eventually were shamed into covering the case, they did not report on many of the inconvenient facts that were revealed in the evidence. Here’s just one example. 

Dr. Feisullin, an OBGYN and expert witness who had performed thousands of abortions, was asked what would happen if a baby was born alive during an abortion. We wrote about the evidence in our book Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer (buy it here):

The solution, to prevent this, Feisullin explained, is to inject the fetus with potassium chloride or Digoxin, which kills the baby in the womb. Feisullin explained to the jury how those injections are supposed to work. “One of the highly trained sonographers in our high risk prenatal department . . . does it. He has an assistant who scans the pregnancy, scans the uterus [with an ultrasound], and then injects the potassium chloride into the baby’s heart. And they watch until the heart stops beating. It’s almost immediately.”

She explained that, although it had never happened to her, there is no law against a live birth during an abortion. “The potassium chloride and the Digoxin are really just used so that you don’t have a live birth, not that you can’t proceed with a procedure without it,” the doctor continued. “The heart doesn’t have to stop beating before you do it [the abortion].”

And if the baby was born alive, as it often was in Gosnell’s clinic? Feisullin was clear about what would happen at her hospital, which strictly adhered to the law. “It depends on the gestational age,” she said. “But just, you know, as a human being, you would want to comfort, at least comfort care.” Comfort what? The doctor couldn’t quite bring herself to use a pronoun. “You know, if it’s in a hospital, you could offer—potentially offer, like over twenty-three weeks, to resuscitate it, but, you know, really just keep it warm you know. It will eventually pass.”

It was clear that the jury was listening intently to understand exactly what the doctor was saying. And it was clear that Feisullin was getting increasingly uncomfortable saying it. If a baby were born alive during an abortion she performed, she would allow the baby to die. Even in a hospital, where resuscitation is possible, and premature babies live and often thrive in a nearby neonatal intensive care unit. Eventually, the doctor told the jury, the baby would die from neglect. 

THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA’S MOST PROLIFIC SERIAL KILLER, McElhinney, McAleer, pg. 215

Journalists were in the court that day. They heard this, and not one of them reported on this appalling revelation. They did not report that in a hospital or abortion clinic it was perfectly legal to neglect to death a living baby. This means the baby will dies of starvation and dehydration. And it’s called comfort care. It’s not clear whose comfort they are taking about here.

This conspiracy of silence extends beyond journalists to abortion practitioners. They have a word for it that they use among themselves. They warn each other about “dangertalk” That's right: Telling the truth about abortion is called “dangertalk. It’s the information they don’t want the public to know, because they know that if the truth got out there would be wider opposition to the practice.

A good place to find the truth about abortion is in academic papers when practitioners are talking to apparently sympathetic researchers, and the researchers accurately report what is said. Below is a paper about the reality and “need” for dangertalk.

I’ve started digging around academic papers that deal with abortion and found a treasure trove of details that the media would never report. It’s very obvious why the predominantly pro-abortion media world wants this information buried. I found one academic paper entitled “It Makes It More Real’: Examining Ambiguous Fetal Meanings in Abortion Care” published in the journal Social Science & Medicine in 2021 and written by Andrea Becker and Lena Hann. The authors talk to abortion providers, revealing some of the things they won’t ever say publicly. 

Frances, who “works as a patient advocate in an abortion clinic.” describes what it was like for her to see the results of an abortion - the end result of what she had been advocating for.

“I remember being a little shocked, like, ‘Oh my god, if an antichoice person saw that, that’s the thing that freaks people out. This is a tiny little human and it has all of its limbs’... You always see the pictures that antichoice people protest with mangled fetuses and stuff. I had never really connected that to our work, so I was like, ‘wow, this actually is, at that point, a little fetus.’ 

It’s important to note that Frances is pro abortion, she believes in what she’s doing. But even she was shocked seeing a “tiny little human and it has all of its limbs.”

After an abortion in a surgical setting, clinicians have to examine the remains to make sure all of the baby parts have been removed. Some people questioned my claim in part one that abortion workers have to sieve through the contents of an abortion to make sure the entire baby got out. But this is very typical for surgical abortion, the paper confirmed:

“70% of annual abortions in the U.S. were performed in-clinic, where a provider would inspect the tissue in order to assure the abortion is complete (Jones & Jerman 2017; NAF 2020). This means abortion care providers see hundreds of thousands of fetal tissues as part of their work each year.”

I asked in my last article, what must it do to a person who does that job year in year out? The culture of silence that stops abortion workers from sharing any negative thoughts lest they be used by the pro-life movement to end abortions is “dangertalk,” and it cannot be heard.

Frances can never publicly talk about seeing aborted babies with all their limbs because this strays into the zone of “dangertalk.” This cannot happen. The authors explain:

Martin and colleagues (2017) similarly argue that many types of provider stories are regularly silenced to “protect themselves and the prochoice movement” (p. 75), including discussions about seeing and reacting to fetal parts. These silenced stories, called “dangertalk,” complicate abortion providers’ participation in, and support from, the broader prochoice movement. When prochoice advocates focus on the “clump of cells” narrative, they ignore and silence providers’ lived experiences seeing fetal remains for abortions at many gestations. Acknowledging that abortion results in sometimes identifiable fetal or embryonic remains is a prevailing tension between providers and the prochoice movement. Despite the erasure of the fetus in many public prochoice narratives, providers see fetuses every day in their work and are able to process complex and sometimes conflicting ideas about the fetus while remaining resolved and committed to abortion care 

[…]

Abortion provider and scholar Lisa Harris (2008, 2019) describes acknowledging that abortion ends potential life, especially once a fetus starts to resemble a small baby. This is both dangertalk and one of the ‘things we cannot say’ in abortion care (Ludlow 2008a; Martin et al. 2017). 

The dishonest and euphemistic language of the abortion industry also creates complications for women having pill-induced abortions at home. Having been told constantly that the baby is a “clump of cells,” it comes as a huge shock when they see a fetus with recognizable arms and legs. Many women are shocked and traumatized by what they see.

Frances says “You can’t just pretend it’s a ball of tissue at every point. That’s what it is at the beginning, and you’re also talking about fetuses. And for women who are doing medical abortions and you’re saying, ‘oh you’re going to be passing tissues’ and they get home and pass a fetus, they’re going to be like, ‘...You didn’t prepare me for this at all.’ You can’t just skirt around the idea of fetuses so much that you pretend they don’t exist and that women aren’t going to be dealing with that.”

The authors of the academic paper note that abortion providers have “complicated feelings” about showing babies aborted late-term. But again, they cannot talk about those feelings publicly : 

“For instance, Wiebe and Adams (2009) found that providers articulated a preference for showing early gestation tissues and have more complicated feelings toward showing more developed pregnancies, particularly those that involve fetuses with identifiable parts. This reflects broader abortion care literature where providers experience both positive and negative emotions about fetal recognizability (Hann & Becker 2020; Harris 2008; Ludlow 2008a; Roe 1989; Simonds 1996).” 

Lindsey, an “abortion doula” interviewed for the paper, said that viewing earlier abortions is easier than viewing later ones.

“When I saw, however, a 13-week product of conception that gave me pause. Spiritually, it breaks my heart sometimes to see a 12 or 13- week products of conception.”

But because they have to do it so often, clinic workers get desensitized and dishonest, euphemistic language is intentionally employed to help them dehumanize the baby.  

“Rosa, a medical specialist for 14 years, says “. I remember my first 2nd trimester procedure, it took me a couple days to process. I had to go home and think about that, because it’s, um, I don't know if I can think about a word. I think it’s definitely something you need to process. That doesn’t mean I feel that way now.”

Everyone who works in the abortion industry knows that the “clump of cells” phrase is nonsense. Here’s Maggie, who trains nursing students,

“I walk through the technical process of a surgical abortion, and I never shy away from saying, ‘and depending on the gestational age, there may be little arms and legs...’ As an abortion-providing community, we need to not be afraid to talk about that reality. Certainly fetuses have arms and legs and heads and spines and internal organs and that doesn’t make abortion any less a positive, moral, and social good... Certainly pregnant people know what’s growing inside their uterus; we as people who work in abortion care know it, so I don’t think there’s any reason to be afraid to talk about it. This whole thing about the ‘clump of cells’...I don’t think that does anybody any good.”

Let me explain what Maggie almost says here: It doesn't do a billion dollar industry whose only product is death any good to make possible customers pause and realize that every abortion ends the life of a human being.

That’s dangertalk, and they don’t want that.