In a rare interview Pro-Life activist and former-abortionist Dr. Kathi Aultman recently shared what led her to recognize the horrific truth about abortion. In an appearance on Jonathon Van Maren’s podcast, Aultman shared how she was led into moonlighting as an abortionist at a late-term abortion mill in Florida early in her career as an obstetrician and gynecologist.
Aultman shared that during her residency she had reservations about committing abortions during her rotation in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). She realized, as many Pro-Lifers have pointed out, that doctors work tirelessly to give babies in the NICU every chance at Life while at the same time, babies at the same gestational age who have not yet been born can legally be violently killed in elective abortion. Despite this uneasiness, Aultman rationalized abortion and continue to learn how to commit gruesome and inhumane dismemberment abortions, going on to commit hundreds more.
For Aultman, having an abortion at a young age led her to attempt to justify abortion. She was taken in by the rhetoric of “choice” and “freedom” and convinced herself that she was helping mothers by killing their preborn babies. Becoming pregnant years later did not cause her to question her deadly work as an abortionist, and, remarkably, she continued to commit barbaric late-term abortions throughout her pregnancy. Other abortionists have found dismembering living babies while pregnant challenging.
Once she had given birth, however, Aultman found that she could no longer end the lives of preborn children. Aultman told Van Maren, “I think I must have made the fetal-baby connection when my baby was born, because when I went back to the clinic, I ran into these three patients, and when I look at my responses now, I must’ve been thinking more of that fetus as a baby.”
The three mothers Aultman encountered had different reactions to the abortion, but each one opened Aultman’s eyes to the reality of abortion. The first patient was undergoing her fourth elective abortion, the second said “I just want to kill it,” referring to the baby, and the third had four other children and was undergoing an abortion for financial reasons. Aultman says the third mother “cried the whole time she was there.”
Aultman struggled to commit the abortions, and she explained to Van Maren, “So at that point, I must have already known somehow that I was killing.” She continued, “I think God brought to my mind that it was the apathy and hostility of the first two patients contrasted with the misery of the third patient who knew what it was to have a child. That contrast was what changed my mind and I personally just couldn’t stomach doing abortions anymore.”
When Aultman told the abortion mill manager that she did not want to commit abortions anymore, she was told, “you don’t have that right. She has the right to do that and you need to do the abortion.” Upon hearing this, Aultman thought, “that’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one doing the killing.” She stopped committing abortions, but remained anti-Life, thinking that abortion was “necessary” and a “woman’s right.” Although she was unwilling to be the “the one doing the killing,” she continued to think that someone else should be.
What ultimately changed Aultman’s mind and made her the Pro-Life champion she is today, testifying before Congress and speaking across the nation about the horrors of abortion, was reading an article comparing abortion to the Holocaust.
“My father was with the unit that liberated the first concentration camp in World War II,” Aultman said. “And so I grew up with those stories and pictures. And when I became a doctor, I couldn’t understand how the German doctors could do what they did, until I read that article.”
She realized, “Yeah, they could do it just like I could kill babies because we didn’t consider them human. They didn’t consider the Jews and the other people they mistreated and killed as humans. And I didn’t consider fetuses as human.”
The realization stunned her. She says, “And that was the first time that I saw myself as a mass murderer. And it was right about then the Ted Bundy case was in the news. And then I thought, ‘oh my gosh. You know, I’ve killed a lot more people than Ted Bundy.’ But it wasn’t illegal.”
Other life experiences continued to shape Aultman’s Pro-Life position, and today she works to undue the harm she caused committing between 500 and 1,000 abortions. Her story shows how articulating the truth about abortion can open people’s eyes and change minds and hearts.