Some of the most powerful testimony about the personal anguish abortion can cause has come from people who support abortion rights. One especially memorable account appears in the late Magda Denes’s In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital. Denes, a clinical psychoanalyst (and one of the originators of Gestalt therapy), arranged to spend time observing procedures at the same hospital where she had had an abortion several years before. Her book came out in 1976.
In one chapter, after recording the discomfort she had felt while watching an abortion, Denes describes visiting the room where the remains of aborted fetuses are stored. At first, she recalls the unexpected pleasure of putting on surgical gloves and discovering that her “hands feel completely protected without any noticeable loss of agility.” But pleasure quickly fades as she proceeds to inspect a “garbage-can-filled graveyard,” using forceps to lift dead little human beings out of “paper buckets—the type in which one buys fried chicken from take-out stores.”
Here she is at journey’s end: “Finally, I lift a very large fetus whose position is such that, rather than its stiff face, I first see its swollen testicles and abnormally large stiff penis. I look at the label. Mother’s name: Catherine Atkins; doctor’s name: Saul Marcus; sex of item: male; time of gestation: twenty-four weeks. I remember Catherine. She is seventeen, a very pretty blond girl. Not very bright. This is Master Atkins—to be burned tomorrow—who died like a hero to save his mother’s life. Might he have become someday the only one to truly love her? The only one to mourn her death? ‘Nurse, nurse,’ I shout, taking off my fancy gloves. ‘Cover them up.’ ”
Magda Denes had the intellectual decency to call abortion “murder—of a very special and necessary sort.” We don’t hear talk of murder these days; even most pro-lifers eschew that hard word. Now the word “killing” also is being excised from the abortion lexicon, as proponents, including Barack Obama, propagandize the public with arguments that we cannot know for sure when life begins. Covering up the babies isn’t enough. Language has to be covered up, too. And common sense. But the price of this covering up is delusion. And as we have begun to see,
a nation that can delude itself about killing, about murder, can delude itself about anything—the threat of terrorism, the stability of financial markets, the suitability of its new president.
