"Crock-Pot" Carhart Video is a Shocker to Me

Roughly 30 years of research into abortion practice has left me pretty unfazable. I've seen so much appalling stuff that after a while it stopped being appalling. I feel disgusted and angry that it keeps going on, but three decades of receptionists and janitors administering anesthesia, dogs in the procedure room, disemboweled patients loaded into taxicabs, fetuses run through a kitchen meat grinder, et cetera ad nauseum, sort of numbs you. I thought that I was numbed to the point of being past ever being shocked by anything any abortionist could possibly say or do.

When the whole Kermit Gosnell thing hit the net, the only thing that was at all shocking to me was that law enforcement was taking the whole thing so seriously and not just shrugging it off as "same shit, different day" the way quackery and infanticide typically are when they happen in the context of abortion. For me, the Gosnell prosecution has retained its novelty. I marvel afresh every day that the illustrious Dr. Kermit Gosnell is actually being treated like a criminal for being just slightly seedier than other seedy abortionists.

So I didn't expect anything out of the latest Live Action videos to shock or amaze me. Disgust, yes. Shock, no. Never in a million years.

I was wrong.

"It's like putting meat in a Crock-Pot, okay?"

I already knew how late D&Es are done. Martin Haskell had described the procedure well in his 1992 presentation on D&X (later dubbed "partial birth abortion") to the National Abortion Federation in Dallas, as he put his new and improved abortion method into context:

Two techniques of late second trimester D&E's have been described at previous NAF meetings. The first relies on sterile urea intra-amniotic infusion to cause fetal demise and lysis (or softening) of fetal tissues prior to surgery.

The second technique is to rupture the membranes 24 hours prior to surgery and cut the umbilical cord. Fetal death and ensuing autolysis soften the tissues. ....

In summary, approaches to late second trimester D&Es rely upon some means to induce early fetal demise to soften the fetal tissues making dismemberment easier.

In a nutshell, the abortionist kills the baby on Day One so that it's easier to dismember on Day 2. I had likened this process to putting the baby in a crock pot overnight.

The idea that an abortionist would do such a thing is hardly shocking to me. If you're willing to twist the limbs off a living baby, letting it "cook" overnight in the mother's body heat is a bit of a gross-out bur hardly shocking, especially not when you consider how casually abortionists send patients home with rotting fetal parts inside their bodies. What left me with my jaw on the floor was to hear Carhart himself describe it the same way I would. Okay, he didn't specify a chicken, but my dubbing of the method "crock-pot baby abortion" is creepily vindicated. Where it goes beyond creepy and into the realm of shocking is that Carhart would cavalierly describe the process to a patient this way.

Being so jovial was a bit of a shock, too. Describing his "tool kit" as containing "a pickaxe and a drill bit" is something I'd expect to hear among the staff, not being said to a patient. It was also shocking to hear him refer to the person he was planning to kill not as "the fetus" or "the pregnancy" -- which is typical even when abortionists talk among themselves -- but as "the baby."

Christin Gilbert

The next shock was that he mentioned Christin Gilbert. Abortionists don't tend to bring up patient deaths on their own in any context, much less when meeting with another patient. (Perhaps the woman had mentioned it earlier?) But Carhart slipped me back into my comfort zone when he said that Christin wasn't his patient. Denial of responsibility is par for the course, so one would expect him to blame Christin's death on a dead man. Was Christin Gilbert actually LeRoy Carhart's patient? He was the one performing CPR on her when the medics responded to the 911 call, so that would make her his patient. Though the medics didn't realize that she was Carhart's patient at the time because his attempts at resuscitation were so amateurish that they mistook him for a bystander.

Jennifer McKenna-Morbelli

We stayed in familiar territory when he denied responsibility for Jennifer McKenna-Morbelli's death. Ditto for his blithe reassurances that he and his staff would be there if the patient called at night from the hotel. Carhart and his staff sure weren't there for Jennifer. But that fact is disgusting, not shocking. Abortionists have been known to shove hemorrhaging women out the door to die, or to abandon moribund patients in the hands of receptionists. Failing to respond to an emergency phone call? That's as surprising as finding out that some frat boy came back from Spring Break with an STD.

I wasn't surprised when Carhart reassured the patient that he saw plenty of other patients as far advanced in pregnancy as she was. It's when he added "Or more-- or more" that surprised me a little. But I guess he wanted to impress upon her that an elective abortion at 26 weeks was no big deal.

It's interesting how he describes -- using the simple present tense, which indicates that this is just routine -- the procedure for dealing with delivering the dead baby at the hotel. Why is it okay to use a hotel room as part of your medical practice? Do these hotel managers know that when they rent rooms to Carhart's patients that there's a possibility that she'll go into labor and deliver her dead (or perhaps not dead) baby in one of their rooms? Carhart changes to speaking as if this has only happened once, to one patient, but they'd hardly give every patient a preparation kit for a flukey thing that only ever happened once.

Now we enter the area where I get seriously creeped out, and when it comes to abortion related things, after more than a quarter of a century it's really hard to creep me out.

Carhart makes an abrupt switch from talking about physically collecting the dead baby should it be expelled in the hotel room to telling the patient, "this baby is a part of you forever," and adds "... if you expect it to go away in a week, that's the wrong approach to it, OK?"

What he says next is dogma among some abortion rights supporters, so I don't know why it shocks me to hear him say it, but it does.

I think you'll be affected for the positive. .... I think you can make very difficult, hard decisions that help shape the life -- the rest of your future and make you work harder for the things, you know, that are important. And I think out of respect and love and honor for this baby that you've lost, you will find yourself being a better person.

And again he goes into something that's dogma for many abortion rights supporters but that for some reason the fact that he says it in this context just floors me:

Postpartum depression is really very common, but post abortion depression? I can honestly tell you that I haven't seen one -- one person that way...

Now he shocks me again for a different reason: "We had a 16-year-old girl that was pregnant, and 26 or 7 weeks, that we had -- we did that -- the termination for her. And she tried to kill herself, and she got to the hospital and recovered."

I can't even imagine why he would start talking about this to a patient. It's like when he brought up Christin Gilbert's death. it's inexplicable.

Having broached the topic, though, he explains away the suicide attempt by saying, "she tried to kill herself, not because of the termination, but because of the baby that she had before this. It was already a year old, and she wished she had not had that baby..."

What? I'm too stunned to even try to make sense of that.

And for some reason I'm shocked again at what he says next: "I've not had anybody leave there feeling worse than they came."

I guess it escaped him that one of his  patients killed herself because she couldn't cope with the abortion.

Dr. LeRoy Carhart

This whole cringe-worthy theme of how good his abortions make women feel.... He gives me the impression he's not lying to this woman, but rather that he is lying to himself, building inside his own head a land of happy abortions. Carhart seems so convinced that his work is a godsend that it's almost surprising that he doesn't recommend getting pregnant deliberately in order to have a 26-week elective abortion for the inherent and incomparable enrichment of the experience.

Just when I'd thought Carhart had tapped out his full supply of creeptasticness, suddenly he shocked me again by bringing up Jennifer McKenna-Morbelli. He made up for it, though, when he reassures the patient (himself?) by saying that Jennifer died "of complications of the pregnancy, but not from the abortion."

Well done, Live Action. You got something that actually shocked somebody who had thought herself to be unshockable.

UPDATE: Operation Rescue has done a fantastic job pulling together information on our buddy Leroy "Meat in the Crock Pot" Carhart. Read it and weep.