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- Newsgroups: alt.pagan
- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!rock!taco!eceyv.ncsu.edu!dsh
- From: dsh@eceyv.ncsu.edu ( )
- Subject: Description of the Fetal Remains from an Abortion
- Message-ID: <1992Nov19.001423.21994@ncsu.edu>
- Sender: news@ncsu.edu (USENET News System)
- Organization: North Carolina State University
- Distribution: na
- Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 00:14:23 GMT
- Lines: 34
-
- "It was easy to shrug off an aborted pregnancy as nothing more than
- a sack of blood and globs of tissue--as many pro-choice activists
- did--if one never saw fetal remains, or products of conception (POC),
- as they were known in medical circles. But the nurses, medical
- assistants, and doctors who worked inside procedure rooms knew
- that while an eight-week POC was indeed a sack of blood and
- globs of tissue, an eleven-week POC harbored tiny arms and legs
- and feet with toes. At twelve weeks, those tiny hands had tiny
- nails. Although the fetal head was too small at that stage to
- withstand the evacuation machine's suction, pieces of face--a nose
- and a mouth, or a black eye (all fetal eyes are black in the
- first trimester) the size of a pea--were sometimes found in
- the aftermath.
-
- Later abortions spawned even more gruesome fetal remains. Between
- the twelfth and the sixteenth week, early in the second trimester,
- the fetus almost doubled in length as its body caught up to its
- large head, and it filled out to the point where it looked like
- a human baby for the first time. Since the fetal skull was
- still soft, the head did not come out whole during the evacuation,
- but the legs and arms and rib cage made it through intact. The
- hand of a second trimester fetus, as a Preterm doctor described
- it, seemed big enough to shake.
-
- Most of Preterm's abortion staff didn't volunteer to work ``seconds''.
- Late first trimester POCs were hard enough. The counselor/medical
- assistants (CMAs) met regularly to discuss their feelings about
- their work, and often the discussion focused on the POC. Inside
- a procedure room, facing the contents of the uterus, there was
- no denying what abortion was."
-
- Sue Hertz, _Caught in the Crossfire: A Year on Abortion's Front Line_,
- Prentice Hall Press, 1991, pg. 104.
-
-