By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
A Newsweek reporter who saw an abortion for the first time while assigned to do a story on Nebraska abortionist LeRoy Carhart admitted that the experience left her disturbed.
Although she wrote a glowing article about one of the few abortionists in the U.S. who is willing to do late-term abortions, to her credit, reporter Sarah Kliff wrote a side piece in which she described the uneasy feelings she got while witnessing actual abortions taking place.
While watching the procedures through a glass window in the operating room, she described the death of several babies. “Carhart used a suction tube to empty the contents of the uterus,” she wrote. “It took no longer than three minutes. The suction machine made a slight rumbling sound, a pinkish fluid flowed through the tube, and, faster than I’d expected, it was over.”
It was not physically difficult to watch the procedure, she said, but emotionally, it was a different story.
“But there was a discomfort I hadn’t expected, my emotional reaction to watching abortions. It happened when I watched a married couple, in their mid-30s, the husband squeezing his wife’s hand, stroking her forehead.”
It was also difficult to watch the abortion being performed on another woman, a single mother with a 10-year-old daughter who had started crying when Kliff interviewed her in the waiting room. Obviously conflicted about what she was doing, she told the reporter, “I think it’s OK, but it’s hard to see everyone doing it, there’s so many. I’m not mad at them at all. It’s just like, wow, there are so many people. There are seven or eight babies out there [in the waiting room].”
“To be sure, each and every patient had come to the conclusion, on their own, that this was where they needed to be. And I met a few patients who saw nothing complicated about that decision, who never second-guessed their choice. But they were not the majority,” Kliff wrote.
When she returned home after the assignment,“friends and colleagues wanted to know if I had ‘done it.’ When I said I had, their reactions surprised me. Friends who supported legal abortion bristled slightly when I told them where I’d been and what I’d watched. Acquaintances at a party looked a bit regretful to have asked about my most recent assignment.”
She goes on to say that the majority of Americans support Roe v. Wade‘s protection of abortion, “about 68 percent as of May,” but neglects to add the latest national polls which show support for Roe to be in steady decline. Even among those who support the decision to legalize abortion, the overwhelming majority say the procedure should be limited.
“But my experience (among an admittedly small, largely pro-choice sample set) found a general discomfort when confronted with abortion as a physical reality, not a political idea,” Kliff writes.
She concludes: “Abortion involves weighty choices that, depending on how you view it, involve a life, or the potential for life. And my reaction, complicated and conflicted as it was, may have been a reflection of our national ambivalence about a private medical procedure at the center of a very public debate.”
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