NOTE: As I am not able to find many Pro-Life articles at the
moment, it will be Pro-Life Article of the Month, not Fortnight. Once I can get
more, I will change it back to twice a month.
NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.
PAGE
TITLE:
http://www.lifenews.com/
ARTICLE
TITLE:
Doctor Who Did 1,200 Abortions Tells Congress to Ban Them
DATE: Thursday 23 May 2013
AUTHOR: Steven Ertelt
AUTHOR
INFORMATION:
As the founder and Editor of LifeNews.com, Steven Ertelt has provided the
pro-life community with news via the Internet since 1993. He also serves on the
President of Colorado Citizens for
Life, a statewide pro-life group. He is the past president of Right to Life
of Wyoming and previously served as the executive director of Montana Right to Life and the public affairs
director for Indiana Right to Life. Mr.
Ertelt is also a former president of Students for Life of America and a
member of the board of directors of the National
Right to Life Committee. A former radio announcer who has been interviewed
on dozens of radio and television programs, Mr. Ertelt holds a bachelor’s
degree in Politics from Hendrix College.
Dr.
Anthony Levatino is a pro-life physician from New Mexico but, before having a
change of heart on the issue of abortion he was an OBGYN who also performed
abortions.
Levatino
did as many as 1,200 abortions — some of them after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Then, after his daughter died in a tragic automobile accident, he re-evaluated
his position on abortion and stopped doing abortions.
Today,
Dr. Levatino told members of a Congressional committee that they should support
a
bill sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks that would ban abortions nationwide aft 20
weeks of pregnancy.
 |
|
Dr. Anthony Levatino
|
Levatino’s
full testimony before the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice
appears below:
Chairman
Franks and distinguished members of the subcommittee, my name is Anthony
Levatino. I am a board-certified obstetrician gynecologist. I received my
medical degree from Albany Medical College in Albany, NY in 1976 and completed
my OB-GYN residency training at Albany Medical Center in 1980.
In
my 33-year career, I have been privileged to practice obstetrics and gynecology
in both private and university settings. From June 1993 until September 2000, I
was associate professor of OB-GYN at the Albany Medical College serving at
different times as both medical student director and residency program
director. I have also dedicated many years to private practice and currently
operate a solo gynecology practice in Las Cruces, NM. I appreciate your kind
invitation to address issues related to the District of Columbia Pain-Capable
Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R.1797).
During
my residency training and during my first five years of private practice, I
performed both first and second trimester abortions. Duringmy residency in the
late 1970s,second trimester abortions were typically performed using saline
infusion or, occasionally, prostaglandin instillation techniques. These
procedures were difficult, expensive and necessitated that patients go through
labor to abort their pre-born children. By 1980, at the time I entered private
practice first in Florida and then in upstate New York, those of us in the
abortion industry were looking for a more efficient method of second trimester
abortion.
The
Suction D&E procedure offered clear advantages over older installation
methods. The procedure was much quicker and never ran the risk of a live birth.
Understand that my partner and I were not running an abortion clinic. We
practiced general obstetrics and gynecology but abortion was definitely part of
that practice. Relatively few gynecologists in upstate NY would perform such a
procedure and we saw an opportunity to expand our abortion practice.
I
performed first trimester suction D&C abortions in my office up to 10 weeks
from last menstrual period and later procedures in an outpatient hospital
setting. From 1981 through February 1985, I performed approximately 1200
abortions. Over 100 of them were second trimester Suction D&E procedures up
to 24 weeks gestation.
Imagine
if you can that you are a pro-choice obstetrician/gynecologist like I once was.
Your patient today is 24 weeks pregnant. At twenty-four weeks from last
menstrual period, her uterus is two finger-breadths above the umbilicus.
If
you could see her baby, which is quite easy on an ultrasound, she would be as
long as your hand plus a half from the top of her head to the bottom of her
rump not counting the legs. Your patient has been feeling her baby kick for the
last 2 months or more but now she is asleep on an operating room table and you
are there to help her with her problem pregnancy.
The
first task is remove the laminaria that had earlier been placed in the cervix
to dilate it sufficiently to allow the procedure you are about to perform. With
that accomplished, direct your attention to the surgical instruments arranged
on a small table to your right. The first instrument you reach for is a
14-French suction catheter. It is clear plastic and about nine inches long. It
has a bore through the center approximately ¾ of an inch in diameter.Picture
yourself introducing this catheter through the cervix and instructing the
circulating nurse to turn on the suction machine which is connected through
clear plastic tubing to the catheter. What you will see is a pale yellow fluid that
looks a lot like urine coming through the catheter into a glass bottle on the
suction machine. This is the amniotic fluid that surrounded the baby to protect
her.
With
suction complete, look for your Sopher clamp. This instrument is about thirteen
inches long and made of stainless steel. At the end are located jaws about 2 ½
inches long and about ¾ of an inch wide with rows of sharp ridges or teeth.
This instrument is for grasping and crushing tissue. When it gets hold of
something, it does not let go. A second trimester D&E abortion is a blind
procedure. The baby can be in any orientation or position inside the uterus.
Picture yourself reaching in with the Sopher clamp and grasping anything you
can.
At
twenty-four weeks gestation, the uterus is thin and soft so be careful not to
perforate or puncture the walls. Once you have grasped something inside,
squeeze on the clamp to set the jaws and pull hard–really hard. You feel
something let go and out pops a fully formed leg about six inches long.
Reach in again and grasp whatever you can. Set the jaw and pull really hard
once again and out pops an arm about the same length. Reach in again and again
with that clamp and tear out the spine, intestines, heart and lungs.
The
toughest part of a D&E abortion is extracting the baby’s head. The head of
a baby that age is about the size of a large plum and is now free floating
inside the uterine cavity. You can be pretty sure you have hold of it if the
Sopher clamp is spread about as far as your fingers will allow. You will know
you have it right when you crush d own on the clamp and see white gelatinous
material coming through the cervix. That was the baby’s brains. You can then
extract the skull pieces. Many times a little face will come out and stare back
at you.
Congratulations!
You have just successfully performed a second trimester Suction D&E
abortion. You just affirmed her right to choose.
If
you refuse to believe that this procedure inflicts severe pain on that unborn
child, please think again.
Before
I close, I want to make a comment on the necessity and usefulness of utilizing
second and third trimester abortion to save women’s lives. I often hear the
argument that we must keep abortion legal in order to save women’s lives in
cases of life threatening conditions that can and do arise in pregnancy.
Albany
Medical Center where I worked for over seven years is a tertiary referral
center that accepts patients with life threatening conditions related to or
caused by pregnancy. I personally treated hundreds of women with such
conditions in my tenure there. There are several conditions that can arise or
worsen typically during the late second or third trimester of pregnancy that
require immediate care. In many of those cases, ending or “terminating” the
pregnancy, if you prefer, can be life saving. But is abortion a viable
treatment option in this setting? I maintain that it usually, if not always, is
not.
Before
a Suction D&E procedure can be performed, the cervix must first be
sufficiently dilated. In my practice, this was accomplished with serial
placement of laminaria. Laminaria is a type of sterilized seaweed that absorbs
water over several hours and swells to several times its original diameter.
Multiple placements of several laminaria at a time are absolutely required
prior to attempting a suction D&E.
In
the mid second trimester, this requires approximately 36 hours to accomplish.
When utilizing the D&X abortion procedure, popularly known as Partial-Birth
Abortion, this process requires three days as explained by Dr. Martin Haskell
in his 1992 paper that first described this type of abortion.
In
cases where a mother’s life is seriously threatened by her pregnancy, a doctor
more often than not doesn’t have 36 hours, much less 72 hours, to resolve the
problem. Let me illustrate with a real -life case that I managed while at the
Albany Medical Center. A patient arrived one night at 28 weeks gestation with
severe pre-eclampsia or toxemia.
Her
blood pressure on admission was 220/160. As you are probably aware, a normal
blood pressure is approximately 120/80. This patient’s pregnancy was a threat
to her life and the life of her unborn child. She could very well be minutes or
hours away from a major stroke. This case was managed successfully by rapidly
stabilizing the patient’s blood pressure and “terminating” her pregnancy by
Cesarean section. She and her baby did well. This is a typical case in the
world of high-risk obstetrics. In most such cases, any attempt to perform an
abortion “to save the mother’s life” would entail undue and dangerous delay in
providing appropriate, truly life-saving care.
During
my time at Albany Medical Center I managed hundreds of such cases by
“terminating”pregnancies to save mother’s lives. In all those hundreds of
cases, the number of unborn children that I had to deliberately kill was zero.
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