Infanticide Not

Here is the first of Live Action's new undercover videos. It has a lot of damning information in it:



First of all, you have to give credit to the counselor for admitting that a 23 week fetus is six months and "fully grown." She's not giving any false information there.

But from there on in, we're dealing with Clueless Claudia.

She tells the patient that a 23 week abortion is done by suction and that "then they put it in a solution and send it to a lab to measure everything and make sure that everything came out of you." At 23 weeks there's no question. Two arms, two legs, a skull, a spine. This woman is describing a first trimester abortion, not a 23 week abortion. They might send a 23-week fetus to the lab, but not to make sure the abortion was complete.

Now, she says that "they start falling apart." That sounds like a two-day D&E with an injection to kill the fetus on the first day. But the fetus doesn't "fall apart." It does have to be dismembered.

Clueless Claudia then says that if the fetus comes out in one piece, it's "very small." Which means it's not 23 weeks. Though a 23 week fetus certainly can come out in one piece.

The patient asks if the baby is "twitching, or something like that," and the counselor says "the solution will make it stop."

At first this sounds like an admission of infanticide. But given how clueless Claudia seems to be about everything else, I think she's just saying something to get the patient away from the idea of a live birth. Especially when she says that "the whole purpose of the solution" is to make an intact fetus stop twitching. They put all the fetuses in the jars of solution, even when they come out in pieces, so obviously that's not the point of the solution. It's most likely a preservative.

The counselor is evidently a bit freaked out by the patient's weird questions and starts talking about how the fetus has to be clean and fresh when it gets to the lab. All she knows is that the fetus goes in a jar to the lab and that this has something to do with disposal and something to do with making sure there's no retained tissue.

Now Clueless Claudia says that the seaweed "kills the heartbeat." This sounds like the clinic does a digoxin injection, which is in keeping with the assertion that the fetus "starts falling apart". The digoxin kills the fetus and that allows the fetus to start ... sort of decomposing so it comes apart easier. The digoxin injection will be given at the time they put the laminaria in, but the laminaria aren't what kills the fetus.

Now we get to more damning stuff: The counselor tells the patient that if the fetus comes out at home, "Flush it!"

First of all, you can't flush a 23 week fetus. It'll stop up your toilet. That's probably an instruction for suction or early D&E patients -- if it's really an instruction at all. Then the counselor says they've never had "a situation like that." Which means that the "flush it!" was probably just Clueless Claudia being flippant about an idea that really disturbed her. She then tells the patient to put the fetus in a bag or something to bring and be checked at the clinic. So she was just spitballing. The clinic clearly does not have a protocol for patients who go into labor and/or expel a fetus or fetal tissue at home. They SHOULD have one in place. This counselor should be able to give clear instructions for that, or tell the patient that she'll get aftercare instructions for that unlikely scenario. (Though given how clueless Claudia is, they might actually have a protocol but this counselor doesn't know what it is.)

Now the counselor tells the patient not to go to the hospital because "the hospital won't take you. They won't touch you, either, because we started it. So whoever starts it has to finish it."

Now, she's probably right that the hospital would refer her back if it turned out to not be an emergency situation, but it's not true that a hospital would refuse an abortion patient care. The "Don'tgo to a hospital; they won't treat you / know how to treat you" instruction is pretty standard, and pretty troubling.

Then after Clueless Claudia tells the patient that the hospital won't touch her, she tells the patient "they might tell you to push it out." She says that King's County Hospital "tells patients to push out the pregnancy." So clearly the hospital will indeed treat the patient but will not extract the fetus if the patient is capable of pushing it out. Which also tells us that evidently a lot of their patients end up at King's County Hospital. So which is it? The hospital "won't touch you" or the hospital "will tell you to push it out"?

Then the patient asks, "When it's alive?" But Clueless Claudia had already told the patient that the seaweed stops the heartbeat. Even if it comes out alive? "Yeah. And then I don't know what they do with it."

Huh?

What I can conclude from this half of the video is that Clueless Claudia doesn't know a lot of what goes on in the back and will just say whatever it takes to get the patient to relax and shut up.

Then we switch to a different counselor. She describes the use of forceps, which sounds much more like a second trimester abortion, so at this point she's less clueless than Claudia.

This woman says that if it comes out alive he has to resuscitate the baby and send it to the hospital. Much different form what Clueless Claudia was saying. This counselor is adamant that if the baby was born alive they'd send it to the hospital and the baby would then be the hospital's problem. She makes it very clear that this is the reason "termination is done inside."

Yeah, the casual nature of the abortions so close to (and sometimes at) viability is disturbing, but what we have in this video isn't evidence that they do infanticide. It's that they're letting Clueless Claudia counsel patients when she has no idea what she's talking about. The second counselor said things that contradicted Clueless Claudia, and I get the feeling she had much more of an idea what she was talking about.

And what's up with King's County Hospital and this clinic's patients?