Achieving Peace in the Abortion War, Chapter 2

I've invited all my readers to join me in reading and discussing Rachel McNair's excellent Achieving Peace in the Abortion War. Yesterday we read Chapter 1, The Well-Kept Secret. Today, let's look at Chapter 2, On The Front Line. Here are some excerpts:

Some scholars have proposed that women who undergo abortion have a variant of PTSD which they call Post Abortion Syndrome. .... Over 300 studies with varying outcomes have been done on this matter, and it is subject to intense debate. However, incredibly little study has been done of the doctors, nurses, counselors, and other staff in abortion clinics and hospitals. Such studies exist, but they are very few and hard to find. In fact, if it is narrowed down to scientific studies done by researchers who don't work in the abortion field and that look at a large number of people, there are really only two.

One feature of those two studies is that they were done by people with a bias in favor of abortion availability. Yet in contrast to the studies of post-aborted women, they both note the high prevalence of symptoms that fit under posttraumatic stress disorder.

....

Dr. Hern, an abortion specialist, gave a paper to the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians in 1978 in which he had studied his own staff. "We have produced an unusual dilemma. A procedure is rapidly becoming recognized as the procedure of choice in late abortion, but those capable of performing or assisting with the procedure are having strong personal reservations about participating in an operation which they view as destructive and violent.... We have reached a point in this particular technology where there is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator. It is before one's eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current."

....

The American Medical News reported this from the National Abortion Federation workshop: "They wonder if the fetus feels pain. They talk about the soul and where it goes. And about their dreams, in which aborted fetuses stare at them with ancient eyes and perfectly shaped hands and feet asking, 'Why? Why did you do this to me?'"

....

"We don't have conversations," said Joy Davis, a former employee of Dr. Tucker. "Sometimes, the employees faint. Sometimes they throw up. Sometimes, they have to leave the room. It's just problems that we deal with, but it's not talked about."