A secular pro-life activist reports:

I recently stumbled across the testimony of Dr. Grant Clark. Dr. Clark performed abortions many years ago in California. In an interview with Oregon Right to Life, he described the two cases that convinced him to stop doing abortions.

One was a case where a woman remained pregnant after he had aborted her child and, several months later, gave birth to a healthy baby. (The woman had a rare condition in which she actually had two uteruses). She adopted the child out and sued the doctor for emotional distress and child-rearing costs (even though she didn’t keep the baby). Her greed and selfishness made him rethink his commitment to performing abortions.

The second case happened when he started doing late-term abortions. From the interview:

There were 2 cases that were significant in my life, and one of them was the beginning of acceptance of 2nd trimester abortions, which were accomplished by putting a needle into the uterus, draining off some fluid, to make sure that you were in the uterus, not the bladder or somewhere else with your needle, and injecting into the uterus a very strong salt solution, which would cause a: the baby to die, and contractions to begin, very shortly after the salt solution was in there, and the mother would then abort the baby.

Interviewer: She’d deliver a dead baby.

Doctor Clark: Deliver a dead baby. But in one case, she did not deliver a dead baby. It was a live baby that she delivered.

Interviewer: Do they not have their skin burned?

Doctor Clark: The skin was burned, it was hard to look at, and hard to realize that I killed a near-term baby. The dates that the mother had given me were wrong, and we had no real way of checking it at that time. Ultrasound and stuff has come in since then, so we can date a baby’s age fairly well, but not, not back then. And the baby was born alive and lived for an hour.

Interviewer: Was it a girl or a boy?

Doctor Clark: I don’t remember, and I didn’t want to remember.… But at that point I said, “No more 3rd or 2nd trimester abortions…”

[Lila: In India, a more obviously socialist country than the US,  2nd and 3rd trimester abortions are illegal.  The reason is that Indian socialism was always modified for the good by India’s strong religious  and cultural traditions, whereas in the US, religious opinion has been neutered by the control of the media by secular bigots.]

Interviewer: was the mother aware the baby was born alive?

Doctor Clark: Yes, she was, and it was just a bad scene all the way around. I mean what was I supposed to do, smother it? Strangle it?… It was just, what do I do, so I took the coward’s way out and did nothing, and the baby died. As it probably would have anyway.”