It's a baby
Dr. O, MD, took a brief pause to open up her lecture to questions from the audience. A young woman asked about the stages of fetal development. "It's first an embryo, and then somewhere in the 8 to 10 week range... it becomes a fetus," Dr. O explained, "and in medicine, not until it's born, does it becomes a baby. If you're a woman having a baby you want to have, it's a baby from the minute you know it's still an embryo."
When does the heartbeat begin? Dr. O replied that somewhere between three and four weeks from when the woman becomes pregnant, there will be "cardiac activity on the ultrasound...before you can even see the embryo, you will see this little flicker".
What about the graphic images used in protests? A student described a photograph she had seen of a fetus that looked like a baby, resting on a quarter. "Is that a fabricated thing?" she asked. "No," Dr. O answered definitively, "at the end of the first trimester you have an alien looking human [fetus]..." At approximately 10 weeks old it would be the size of a quarter. "Yes, it does look like that, it looks like a human."
Dr. O prides herself in telling the truth to her patients, "I will not lie about what I see...if I have a patient who's 13 weeks [pregnant] and they say 'it's just a collection of cells, right?' No, not actually, it's not at this point, and I'll talk to them about what it actually is...but I will not lie."
On average she tries to schedule "12 [abortions] in the morning and 12 in the afternoon, but that accounts for a no-show rate and if they all show up, we have to shoot ourselves at the end of the day". I wondered if other lines of medical care, say dentistry, or ophthalmology, must figure in similar "no-show rates".
Born alive
Referring back to Dr. O's comments about fetuses being born alive, I asked if this was something she had experienced in her own practice: "I go to 18 weeks, so no, I don't see that...the injection is one of the reasons for that...and 'born alive' and 'able to live' are two entirely different things." There can be, she explained "fetuses who are breathing when the come out in there early 20's weeks and if you resuscitate them they can live. And your definition of live and mine might be different...So can it happen? Yes, we certainly try to not have it happen, for everybody's sake"
Her confidence was chilling. I was reminded of Fr. Frank Pavone's words, that it's not the children who are most harmed by abortion. It is not even the mothers. It is the abortionists. Abortion doctors are not beyond the reach of God's grace, but unlike the women who seek their services, they cannot claim ignorance.
Through a perverse form of exposure therapy, they have immunized themselves against the call of their conscience. They are beyond the pale of natural enlightenment, being "darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts." (Eph. 4:18) Everyday they behold the full horror of their craft, witnessing firsthand that the object of their destruction "looks like a human".
