Justin Trudeau targets crisis pregnancy centres

(and Killers for Kamala)

My column for this week was first published at The European Conservative.

Killers for Kamala

A revealing moment unfolded at a Kamala Harris rally in Houston last week. Backed by a massive “Vote for Reproductive Freedom” slogan, ten abortionists were brought out on stage to discuss their ‘medical expertise.’ As the white-coated feticide specialists clustered around the podium, there were cries in the crowd. The abortionist speaking looked alarmed. “I think somebody needs medical assistance over here,” he said, looking around for somebody to help. The others on the stage also looked around—but didn’t move. The ‘healthcare’ they practice involves killing, not healing.

Indeed, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states that the term “abortionist” itself is “derogatory” and advises using phrases like “physicians who provide abortion” instead. This is something like an admission. As Secular Pro-Life pointed out, nobody finds it “derogatory” to use terms like neurologist, cardiologist, or oncologist. So why is abortionist loaded with stigma? Because even now, despite the best efforts of progressives, the term ‘abortion’ still invokes a visceral response. That’s why the Kamala Harris abortion tour focuses on “reproductive freedom.” 

This “freedom,” of course, is the freedom to dismember, decapitate, and disembowel a human being developing in the womb. Many abortionists are honest about this. Dr. Warren Hern, one of America’s longest-practicing late-term abortionists, noted in his 1990 book Abortion Practice that destroying the bodies of babies in the womb can be practically difficult. “[T]he sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electrical current,” he observed. In a long, glowing profile published in The Atlantic last year, Hern admitted that his work has occasionally given him pause:

(O)nce or twice, during a procedure at 15 or 16 weeks, he used forceps to remove a fetus with a still-beating heart. The heart thumped for only a few seconds before stopping. But for a long while after, a vision of that fetus would wake Hern from sleep. He could see it in his mind; the inches-long body and its heart, beating, beating, beating.

The same profile observed that sometimes, “the fetus will be whole, intact. Other times, Hern must remove it in parts. If the patients ask, a nurse will wrap the fetus in a blanket to hold or present a set of handprints or footprints for the patient to take home.” Why? Because even amid the carnage, consciences flicker with the recognition of our mutual humanity. In a 2021 essay in the Boston Review titled “Why I Provide Abortions,” Christine Henneberg described something similar. She related an anecdote of performing an abortion with the assistance of a pregnant staffer, Jenny: 

Later that afternoon, Jenny assists me during a fifteen-week procedure. The fetus on the ultrasound screen looks just like Jenny’s, in every recognizable, perfectly formed detail: fingers, toes, beating heart. But this image is very different because of the context in which I am viewing it.

The woman is lying on the table, awake but sedated by medications. I dilate her cervix and place a small plastic tube inside her uterus. I watch the ultrasound screen. I flip a switch; a humming noise fills the room. At this instant, the fetus seems to jump as though startled; then it squirms in the tight, already shrinking space of the uterus. It continues to move in this very human, baby-like way until the last instant, when it is overpowered by the force of the vacuum and sucked through a plastic tube, whisked out of the uterus and into a glass jar in in a rush of blood. Gone.

Abortionists say one thing when they are on the stage at political rallies—the babies they dispose of are absent from their sloganeering— while privately they frequently admit to spasms of horror. The late New York abortionist William Rashbaum was troubled by a recurring dream of a fetus trying to hold onto the walls of a uterus by its tiny fingernails. Another abortionist described nightmares in which aborted fetuses stared at him with ancient eyes and perfectly shaped hands and feet, asking: “Why? Why did you do this to me?” A third clinic worker recounted a persistent dream in which she was stuffing a baby into a vase while the child stared at her with a pleading expression.

Do abortionists heal, or kill? The Harris-Walz campaign wants us to hear from the abortionists directly, and so we shall. When abortionist Leroy Carhart described “crushing” the skulls of babies in an interview with the BBC, the stunned journalist asked him why he used the term “baby.” Carhart was blunt. “I think that it is a baby, and I use [that word] with patients.” The interviewer stuttered: “And you don’t have a problem … with … killing a baby?” His response: “I have no problem if it’s in the mother’s uterus.” 

Dr. Curtis Boyd, one of America’s most prolific practitioners of this butchery, was equally frank. He, too, received a glowing profile last year, this one in Ms. Magazine. What the profile didn’t mention is that Boyd has been frank about his work. “Am I killing? Yes, I am. I know that.” But most Americans and indeed, most Westerners, do not know that. Kamala Harris is running for president on a platform of skull-crushing—Carhart’s words, not mine—and killing—again, Boyd’s words, not mine. These “healthcare practitioners” Harris brings out on stage at her rallies are not healers. Nobody has nightmares about appendectomies or heart surgeries. They have nightmares about desperate babies with ancient eyes asking “Why?”—and having no answer. 

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Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau’s government has announced new legislation—this time, to target crisis pregnancy centres:

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