“If she can’t calm down, I can’t do the abortion,” an abortion doctor frustratingly declared in the presence of Holly O’Donnell, an ex-procurement technician who used to obtain tissue from aborted fetuses. In Episode 3 of “Human Capital,” the expose on Planned Parenthood by the Center for Medical Progress, O’Donnell describes her observation of, and participation in, what happened after.
The patient eventually did calm down; the abortion eventually did happen; and O’Donnell eventually did do her job. O’Donnell was soon to see the intact, later-term baby who was killed as a result of the abortion the child’s mom calmed down for (although when, precisely, the fetus died is in question, since O’Donnell said a colleague tapped the baby’s heart with an instrument and it started beating). In order to procure a brain, O’Donnell cut through the middle of the child’s face.
It was a boy.
To think that this precious child could have been saved if—if his mom hadn’t “calmed down.” Incidentally, that’s what saved the life of another little boy, the son of Dana.
When Dana was pregnant with her fifth child, overwhelmed by the pressures of raising a family, she and her husband opted for abortion. She went to the clinic for a medical abortion: RU486. She ingested the first pill in the presence of a doctor, and took the second pill home to consume the following day. The first pill would kill her baby; the second pill would expel her baby.
Dana already had reservations about the abortion when she went to the clinic. Those concerns only deepened as time went on. She wrote, “I was already regretting my actions. I was thinking, ‘What if that would have been the son I wanted.’ I cried with my husband, and I cried myself to sleep.”
By the next day, Dana, like the first woman mentioned, couldn’t calm down. In fact, she was crying hysterically. But she had an advantage over the other woman: She was not in a clinic with time pressures, waiting rooms, and organs to harvest; moreover, she herself was in control of administering the abortion.
So Dana went online and searched “Abortion pill regret” and discovered a miracle: It is possible to reverse the effects of RU486. The first pill in RU486, mifepristone, kills a pre-born child by blocking the effects of progesterone, a hormone a woman’s body produces that is necessary to grow a healthy baby. So the Culture of Life Services in San Diego, California, was able to connect Dana to a physician who immediately began administering progesterone to her body, to counteract what the first pill was doing.
It was a success: Dana maintained her pregnancy and in April of this year, to the great joy of his parents, a baby boy was born.
In struggling to “calm down,” both women showed that they intuitively knew how it goes against a woman’s nature to kill her child. And in a bittersweet way, both women’s stories teach us how vital it is to never, ever give up.