Christine Henneberg defended being a mother who aborts other women’s unborn babies this week in a heart-wrenching column for the New York Times.
The California abortionist tried to justify her life-destroying work with new motherhood, but she also was honest about the gruesome reality of what she does. Three times in her column, she mentioned how she struggles with doing second-trimester abortions because the babies’ dead bodies remind her of her young daughter.
She began:
Recently a colleague asked me if I’d had trouble working while I was pregnant.
“Actually I was fine,” I said. “I know a lot of people have a hard time, but it wasn’t an issue for me.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Good for you. I was a mess.”
We weren’t just talking about nausea and swollen feet and low back pain. She and I are abortion doctors. We routinely perform procedures well into our patients’ second trimester, when the fetus is well-formed and easily recognizable as humanlike, even “life”-like. Baby-like.
Later, she admitted that was not exactly true. She was a mess. She described being worried about infertility and later miscarriage after she did become pregnant with her daughter.
“I’m worried about, you know, the reason,” she told her husband after three months of not getting pregnant. “Like some kind of bad karma: the abortion doctor who can’t get pregnant.”
A few weeks later, however, she did. When she saw her unborn baby’s heartbeat flicker on the ultrasound for the first time, “then the fear really began.”
Henneberg’s next admission was particularly disturbing:
There was one time when I almost fell apart: I was in my second trimester, performing a 17-week procedure on a patient. The fetus, which is normally extracted in parts, came through the cervix intact. I dropped it in the metal dish and I saw it move, or thought I did. It was all I could do not to run from the procedure room crying.
That was the only time.
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But that is not quite true either. She said it still is not easy for her to look at a “fetus in the dish, the perfect curl of its fingers and toes. Sometimes it reminds me of my daughter — how could it not?”
“How do I continue to do this work?” Henneberg asked, but her answer did not make any sense. She said she sees “a connection” between aborting unborn babies and her work as a mother.
“It’s not a tension or a contradiction to be reconciled. It’s a symbiosis, a harmony,” she wrote.
She concluded:
As a doctor, I can draw a distinction, a boundary, between a fetus and a baby. When I became a mother, I learned that there are no boundaries, really. The moment you become a mother, the moment another heartbeat flickers inside of you, all boundaries fall away.
Nevertheless, as mothers, we must all make choices. And we must live with the choices that aren’t ours to make.
Henneberg’s column reads like a person who is fight to deny a horrifying reality that she does not want to be true. It appears to be her wrestling to justify her work, to deny that what she is doing is horrific. She is making a living killing other women’s children – babies who already have fingers and toes and heartbeats, babies who hiccup and suck their thumbs, unique, living human beings at their most vulnerable moment of life.
Henneberg is right that some choices are not ours to make. Some choices are wrong, and abortion – killing an unborn baby – is one of them. Perhaps someday she will finally realize the truth, as other abortionists have, and quit. Hope and healing is available to people who want to leave the abortion industry. Abby Johnson’s ministry And Then There Were None has helped hundreds of abortion workers quit their jobs, find employment and heal from the horrors of abortion.
