8 Things “After Tiller” Left Out, Responding to PBS’s “Humanizing” of Late-Term Abortion

Opinion   |   Kelsey Hazzard   |   Sep 3, 2014   |   9:40AM   |   Washington, DC

Social media is erupting this week in the latest abortion-related controversy: PBS’s decision to air “After Tiller” on Labor Day.

“After Tiller” is a documentary that examines the motivations and difficulties of four late-term abortionists—LeRoy Carhart, Warren Hern, Susan Robinson, and Shelley Sella—and some of their patients, in an attempt to contextualize late-term abortion and humanize the doctors.

pbs2There is not much to add that hasn’t already been said on other pro-life websites, blogs, and Twitter (#AfterTiller), but here’s a list of simple facts that further ‘contextualize’ the procedure and those who perform it.

  1. In the film, we are told that third-trimester abortions are less than one percent of all abortions. What we are not told is that one percent = approximately 10,000 babies in the U.S. per year.
  2. Most of the pregnant patients featured in the film were carrying babies with severe abnormalities or disabilities, but in reality, Tiller himself admitted that this situation constituted only about eight percent of his abortions. So that means every year these doctors abort about 9,200 healthy, viable, developed babies with no health complications whatsoever.1
  3. At least four women have died from legal second- and third-trimester abortions in the past two years.
  4. Carhart has been responsible for eight medical emergencies (that we know of) since March 2012, including the death of Jennifer Morbelli last year.
  5. Carhart has described babies in the womb dying as being “like meat in a Crock-pot.”
  6. Former Tiller employee Tina David said of Sella: “[The] baby came out, and it was moving. I don’t know if it was alive or if it was nerves, I have no clue. But Dr. Sella looked up right away at me and took a utensil and stabbed it, right here, and twisted. And then it didn’t move anymore.”
  7. Former Tiller employee Luhra Tivis has said that she was trained to answer the phone like a salesperson marketing a product, selling abortion to the caller. Tivis also described seeing Tiller carrying a heavy cardboard box full of dead babies into his crematorium and smelling the flesh as it burned.
  8. Robinson was shocked when she realized a baby she’d thought to be 32 weeks from the ultrasound was actually closer to 37 weeks when he or she was aborted.
Hard to humanize all that.

[1] Please note that I am not arguing that abortion is more justifiable for babies with disabilities than without. The film features some women who had received diagnoses that their baby would die would die in utero or shortly after birth, or that their child would be in pain for his or her entire life, leading viewers to believe that such extreme circumstances constitute the majority of late-term abortions, when that is not true.

LifeNews Note: Kelsey Hazzard is the head of Secular Pro-Life.