Abortion activists glibly claim that abortion is “health care” and that abortion made them “happy.” People working in the abortion industry and witnessing freezers full of the bodies of aborted babies don’t have the luxury of being so flippant. In this jarring disconnect between the dishonest anti-Life rhetoric about women’s empowerment and the grim reality of abortion, we can see the full extent of the “pink-washing” that tries to make abortion anything other than the killing of an innocent human being.
Look no further than the recent op-ed in the New York Times by abortionist Christine Henneberg. In a convoluted essay, Henneberg admits that she recognizes that she is taking human Life, writing:
As a doctor, I can draw a distinction, a boundary, between a fetus and a baby. When I became a mother, I learned that there are no boundaries, really. The moment you become a mother, the moment another heartbeat flickers inside of you, all boundaries fall away.
Henneberg’s struggle as an abortionist and a mother is not unique. When she told a colleague that she was “fine” continuing to dismember preborn babies while carrying her own preborn child in her womb, the colleague responded, “Wow. Good for you. I was a mess.”
Abortionists, unlike activists, have to confront the child killed in the violent and deadly procedure. As Henneberg says of abortions, which she commits into the fifth and sixth month of pregnancy, “the fetus is well-formed and easily recognizable as humanlike, even ‘life’-like. Baby-like.” To anyone not indoctrinated by the anti-Life worldview this is obvious, because the preborn baby is a baby.
Henneberg knows this scientifically and personally. In a ghoulish detail, she recalls having her first ultrasound in the abortion mill where she took the lives of preborn babies much larger and more developed than her own. In that moment, she writes, “I saw the tiny embryo inside me, its first flicker of a heartbeat. Then the fear really began.”
Horrifically, while dismembering other people’s babies, Henneberg lived in constant fear that she would miscarry her daughter. The strain of this cognitive dissonance is obvious. In a telling scene, Henneberg writes:
There was one time when I almost fell apart: I was in my second trimester, performing a 17-week procedure on a patient. The fetus, which is normally extracted in parts, came through the cervix intact. I dropped it in the metal dish and I saw it move, or thought I did. It was all I could do not to run from the procedure room crying.
In her view, this monstrous moment of killing a vulnerable and defenseless child the same age as her own is not the worst moment Henneberg has experienced. That comes after her daughter is born when a Pro-Life protester catches a glimpse of her one-year-old daughter’s stroller in her trunk and asks how she can kill babies in the morning and go home and put her own child in a stroller at night. This straightforward question moves Henneberg to tears.
And yet, she continues what she calls “the work” of ending the lives of other mothers’ babies. She even claims “there is a connection between my work as an abortion doctor and my work as a mother,” adding that there is a “symbiosis” between nurturing her daughter while killing other people’s sons and daughters.
She admits she still struggles with the cognitive dissonance, noting, “the fetus in the dish, the perfect curl of its fingers and toes. Sometimes it reminds me of my daughter — how could it not?” In the perverse way that only abortion activists can contrive, Henneberg claims that abortion is a manifestation of motherhood and “the love of each one of us for our children.”
Abortion is not an act of love; abortion is violence and the death of an innocent and defenseless human being. Recently, vocally anti-Life Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg claimed, “[A] woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy is not a ‘mother.’” People working in the abortion industry don’t believe this obfuscation. The bodies do not lie: abortion kills a child, and that child has a mother.