Fighting for Life    With Facts   

   A woman "wants an abortion like an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg," says a former abortion supporter who became an officer in Feminists for Life.

   What changed?

   She read an article in Esquire by a surgeon, also pro abortion, who asked an abortionist friend if he could accompany him when he did one. 

   The surgeon described a woman on the table, 19 weeks pregnant. The doctor took a syringe and injected it into her belly, leaving the hub standing upright. 

   Then the hub of the needle jerked. It wobbled, tugged, like a fishing line being nibbled by a sunfish. 
 

   The surgeon realized that nothing 

can argue "against the truth of what I saw. 

No matter what the being in the womb doesn't have, it does have a will to live. The desperate fighting gradually slowed down, and stopped." 

   "Of course," the woman says, "unborn babies are persons. They are composed 100 percent of human cells. They are not watermelons or light bulbs. As soon as the sperm dissolves in the egg ... even that first cell represents a unique human being," with new DNA. 

   She thinks the pro-life movement has improved over the years. It frustrated her when pro-lifers only talked about the baby. She wants them to talk about the baby and about "compassion for how hard life is for a woman." 

   "We were falling into this trap of, 'It's the woman against the baby, and only one can win.' We should always say, 'Love them both.'" 

Author and speaker Frederica Mathewes-Green

with Marvin Olasky, WORLD magazine

The surgeon was Dr. Richard Selzer
1976