Audrey Stout answers several questions for The Abortion Museum and this is the raw footage of our interview. This footage will assist us in creating a series of museum exhibits on the truth/history surrounding abortion.
Summary
This is Jacob Barr, and I just wrapped up an insightful chat with Audrey Stout, a seasoned nurse and sonographer with deep ties to the pro-life movement. Audrey shared her extensive background in healthcare and her passionate involvement with pregnancy centers since 1987. Her journey was significantly influenced by friends who’ve had abortions and the profound belief that life begins at conception, a belief supported by both science and her faith. Audrey’s expertise in sonography, honed through years of teaching and consulting, sheds light on the critical role of ultrasound in pregnancy centers, emphasizing the mother’s right to understand her pregnancy fully.
We dove into the biological start of human life, the medical terminology used to describe the developing child, and the significant developmental milestones from conception to birth. Audrey clarified the differences between natural, spontaneous, and missed abortions, highlighting that these terms relate to miscarriages rather than elective abortions. We also discussed the nuanced definitions of therapeutic and elective abortions, exploring the ethical and medical considerations that distinguish them.
Audrey debunked myths around the banning of miscarriage management post-Roe v. Wade reversal, reassuring that treatment for non-viable pregnancies remains legal and accessible. She also touched upon the complexity of determining when an abortion becomes necessary for the mother’s health, with ectopic pregnancies serving as a prime example where intervention is vital.
The conversation expanded into the risks and realities of both surgical and medical abortions, the lack of comprehensive patient information, and the societal reluctance to discuss abortion procedures candidly. Audrey stressed the importance of informed consent and the profound, often underappreciated, impact of abortion on women’s physical and mental health.
Reflecting on her decades of experience, Audrey shared heartening stories of lives changed and saved through ultrasound technology and compassionate counseling. These narratives underscore the profound impact of offering support and information to women facing unplanned pregnancies.
In summary, our talk was a deep dive into the complexities surrounding abortion, the power of informed choice, and the transformative impact of ultrasound technology in pregnancy centers. Audrey Stout’s expertise and compassion highlighted the importance of understanding, support, and advocacy in the pro-life movement.
#ProLife, #Sonography, #Ultrasound, #InformedChoice, #PregnancySupport, #AbortionAlternatives, #HumanLife, #HealthcareEthics
Transcript
The transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.
Welcome to the Pro-Life Team podcast. My name is Jacob Barr and in this episode we are sharing raw interview footage of Audrey Stout that was collected in part to create a museum exhibit on the medical history of abortion for the Abortion Museum. Tell us a little about who you are, your experience, your expertise, any relevant connections you have to the health care world and abortion, just as like an intro to who you are.
Okay, yeah, well my name is Audrey Stout. I’m a registered nurse and I’m also a registered sonographer with a credential OBGYN sonography. I’ve been a nurse many years as well as been involved with pregnancy centers since 1987. I’ve been an advocate for life and known many friends that have had abortions and that just moved my heart to want to be involved with this and especially after understanding scripture that God created us from the life in the womb. And my friends that had abortions, this was the deep, dark shame of their lives, so I got involved with that. Eventually was on a board of a pregnancy center in Marietta, Georgia, worked as an advocate there, led post-abortion groups. In the late 90s when our pregnancy center there in Marietta decided to go medical, I went back into nursing. We have three adopted children and I’d left nursing and been involved with my center. So I went back into nursing, began to learn ultrasound, and then took a year off to become a registered sonographer to be able to teach ultrasound. At that time I joined the team of NIFLA, National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, who had really developed and pioneered the whole use of ultrasound in the pregnancy centers around the country. Seeing that this ultrasound, a mother woman seeing her child can make all the difference.
Plus that woman has a right to know what’s going on with their pregnancy before she makes that life choice. So I became a registered sonographer at that time and began to work with NIFLA. I’ve been with them 23 years teaching ultrasound, writing, speaking for them. I’ve been to probably about 180 pregnancy centers over that those 23 years, and to Ukraine, to Guatemala, to Ireland, teaching ultrasound to physicians and medical personnel there and presently. I just do a lot of trainings and speaking on behalf of NIFLA, writing, a lot of question answers, consulting from NIFLA. Awesome. Thank you for sharing your story.
So question number one, when does new human life begin? Please explain. Well, I believe it begins at conception. I mean, biologically, when the father’s sperm meets the mother’s egg, and there’s that joining there, a new life, a new unique life has begun at that point. And it needs time, nourishment, and to grow, to be born into a baby. So yeah, life begins in conception. I think scripture teaches that as well. Perfect. Question number two, what words do medical professionals typically use to describe whatever it is that’s inside the pregnant mother, i.e.
what exactly that gets aborted? Well, medically, we talk early on, once that egg and sperm has united, then it starts to grow within 24 hours. It multiplies, divides, keeps on growing, growing to a 16-cell stage, 100-cell stage, implants in the uterus. And so that is beginning of that pregnancy in the uterus and growing there. But we tend to call it early on an embryo.
That’s just that very early stages of human life. And then after about 8, 10 weeks, it’s called a fetus. And fetus actually means young one or offspring. Sometimes people have trouble with that thinking that’s dehumanizing it, but it does mean young one. A fetus is a human, and it has to do with that offspring, and it is a baby.
So what is aborted? It really is a baby. It’s an early human being. Perfect. Question number three, please share about some of the development milestones as that tiny human grows from a single cell all the way to a fully formed baby at birth. For example, when is there a detectable heartbeat, fingernails, brainwaves, pain sensations, dreaming? Okay. Well, some of that I can answer. And I’m a sonographer, so a lot of what I know about has to do with development and what we can see on ultrasound. Actually, the baby’s heart usually begins beating around 21 or 22 days from conception. We actually date pregnancy from last menstrual period because conception isn’t always known.
But the heart begins beating then. Within just a few weeks after that, we could actually see that little baby on ultrasound. We can actually measure it down until it’s about two millimeters at about what we would call the fifth, five weeks, six days. We can pick up a heartbeat on this little person that is this big, and it just continues to grow about a millimeter a day. If it kept growing at that rate as early on, it would actually be the size of an elephant at birth. What we see as we grow, the baby has a very curved little body at first, and then by about the eighth week, it looks very human.
And arm, leg buds are there. The heart has been beating. You can see eyes. And what we start to see at eight weeks is the baby’s body just begins to make this kind of movement, like a little bean at about eight weeks. Then eight weeks, four days, we actually see what I would think looks like a punching movement of its upper limbs. And then by nine weeks, we actually see that baby’s upper and lower limbs moving all over the place. And it’s this little person at nine, becomes about an inch at nine weeks, and it looks like it’s ready to be born, but it’s this little minuscule person. And really, all its organs are in place by the end of the tenth week.
Now, they’re not mature. They need to grow, but they just keep developing from the tenth week on, where we do call it the fetus. Yeah. Wow. That was really good. Thank you for sharing that.
So this is question number four. Some people may not realize that in the medical world, the word abortion has a wider scope of meaning than what we see in political debates on this topic. Would you clarify what is a natural abortion, spontaneous abortion, and missed abortion? Yeah. Well, a natural abortion would essentially be somewhat like a miscarriage. The baby has died, and it has passed. You ask about a missed abortion. The missed abortion means that the baby has died, but it has not passed.
That’s what we’d call a missed abortion. And then the next one you ask… Spontaneous. Spontaneous. That would be the same thing. It dies, and it’s miscarried for some some unreason we may or may not know. That’s called a spontaneous abortion.
None of those are planned. Oh, that looks weird, doesn’t it? I need to pull that down and pull this up. Is that better? Okay. Okay. One more time, please. Just that last question. Yeah, I think the whole question is pretty short. So yeah, would you clarify what is a natural abortion, spontaneous abortion, and a missed abortion? Okay. Actually, that natural abortion, spontaneous abortion, pretty much the same kind of thing in medical terms.
We would use that spontaneous as opposed to an induced or planned. So that means the baby has died, and it has passed. A missed abortion means that the baby has died, but it has not passed. You would actually still see it inside the uterus, but there’s no heartbeat. It’s not alive, and it eventually is going to pass, or they might do a procedure to remove it if they’re concerned about infection or bleeding or those kind of things. Perfect. Makes sense.
This is question number five. What is a therapeutic abortion, and what is an elective abortion? Okay. The word therapeutic abortion can be meaning a lot of things. It really means it’s one that’s supposed to be a treatment for health or protection for health or that kind of thing. So it could be all kinds of things, a therapeutic abortion. It could be mental stress, could be a therapeutic abortion. So it’s a little tricky terms there. And so then an elective abortion is a choice to abort. It’s something that the person wants or is choosing to do that is not medically indicated, is the way I would put that. That makes sense.
Question number six. To the best of your knowledge, are there any states that have legally banned miscarriage, stillbirth, or therapeutic abortion? Well, no. There haven’t been, and there’s a lot of miscommunication about the whole idea that states with the reversal of Roe v. Wade that now women who have a baby that has died, this would be that missed abortion, she can’t get treatment for that and so forth.
But that is not the case. If a woman has a baby that has died, then they can treat for that. That makes sense.
There is some disagreement. See, this is question number seven. There is some disagreement about where to draw the line between elective versus therapeutic abortion. How dangerous does a pregnancy have to be before an abortion would qualify as therapeutic?
And please share some examples. Well, a therapeutic abortion really could be in the mind of whoever’s offering that abortion. It could be mental stress that you could say, well, the woman needs to abort because this is too stressful for her. All kinds of things like that. But I think in truth, I think when a woman’s life is at risk, like some women have chosen, even when they find that they have invasive cancer to continue their pregnancy, even that that could cost them their lives. I think they’re at that place, there could be a room for that choice to protect her life. She’s going to lose her life if the baby continues, that kind of thing. So I’m not sure I’m answering that, making this very clear.
Maybe we should try and re-answer that with like a topic maybe. Or maybe that would be, would that not be therapeutic? That would be something else? A topic. Oh, yeah, that wouldn’t, I don’t know if you’d call that a therapeutic abortion.
So that’s an interesting question. So I can sure talk about a topic if you want to talk about that pregnancy cannot continue because, is that? That’s the only one that I know of where abortion is required for the life of the mother. My understanding is that that’s the most, yeah. If, okay, yeah, yeah, we can talk about it a little bit because that, if the mother does not have, it’s, and again, we don’t actually call that an abortion. We would call that, I guess you’d call that treating that ectopic pregnancy because the pregnancy cannot continue. It will grow, it will rupture her, rupture 95, 97 percent of ectopics are in the tube and it will rupture the tube.
The baby can’t live. There’s only a rare few cases where the baby can live with an ectopic pregnancy and that’s one that it’s in the abdominal cavity.
Am I talking, am I being recorded? Yeah. Oh, okay. I didn’t know if I was, you and I were just talking back and forth and deciding how to address that or not. I’m sorry. No, no, that was good. So I guess the question is, would ectopic be a therapeutic or no? Is that? You, I, we don’t generally use, you treat an ectopic pregnancy to preserve the life of the mother. So you don’t think of that, we don’t generally think of that as an abortion. Oh, yeah, yeah.
And be, in that sense, might be more for like stress? Well, well, they, they might use therapeutic, they might choose a therapeutic abortion because say a woman is an alcoholic. I’ve seen this where she was a, she was a severe alcoholic and she had ascites, her abdomen was filling up with fluid because of, because of her alcoholism. And so that she would, they’re very likely that woman would have died if she had continued that pregnancy and the baby probably wouldn’t have lived. That might be a good one as an example then, perhaps. Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah. Well, let me ask you a question again. Okay. We’ll go with a fresh answer. Okay. Feel free to use whichever one you, yeah, you think would be good. Okay. So there’s some disagreement about where to draw the line between elective and versus therapeutic abortion.
How dangerous does a pregnancy have to be before an abortion would qualify as therapeutic? Please share some examples. Well, anytime a pregnancy is not in the uterus where it is supposed to be, we would call that an ectopic pregnancy. And those in general would be putting that woman’s life at risk because 95 to 97% of those are in the fallopian tubes, which are about the inner, inner thickness of a human hair. And a pregnancy begins to grow, they’re developing blood supply. And so usually by about seven weeks they can rupture and that can cause massive bleeding because wherever that pregnancy is, there’s a blood supply to support it. And so that massive bleeding could end that woman’s life within half an hour if the bleeding isn’t stopped. And the pregnancy itself could not continue because the baby cannot survive that. The only, the only time I’ve known really that you would tend to think is if that pregnancy is in the woman’s abdomen, it’s called an abdominal pregnancy, which is extremely rare, that sometimes those babies can continue to birth and be born. And, and on occasion, that can be at risk even to the moms in that case.
That makes, thank you. So question number eight. Some suggest that when women experience pregnancy complications, abortion typically isn’t as safe as just inducing early delivery. Perhaps offering palliative care if the child is too premature. What do you think? Is this true or partly true, mostly false or entirely false? Occasionally there are times because of the mother’s health that they may need to induce her to deliver that pregnancy for her, for the sake of her health, like eclampsia, those kinds of things. She wouldn’t be going to seizure or could possibly die. So they might induce pregnant and delivery for that purpose. And the, and the intent in that situation is not to take the life of the child, but to preserve the life of the mother. And hopefully that baby can live, but it can’t always in that case to protect her life.
And occasionally they might do that same kind of thing with, with a mom with cancer to bring, you know, to deliver her early. Those, those are kind of some of those situations that might occur.
That makes sense. What are some of the health risks involved in pregnancy and childbirth? Well, there, health risks with pregnancy and childbirth. Some of the health risks that would be involved with pregnancy and childbirth could be bleeding, those kind of things that can happen, though hemorrhaging is always a possibility, though it’s, it’s not that common. It could, but if that doesn’t stop, that could be of a great risk to that mother. High blood pressure could be a risk that needs to be controlled. Most of the conditions that they can be treated medically. And, and so if a woman’s under prenatal care, they can treat her blood pressure and different things like that. So to protect her and her baby from harm. Makes sense. What are some of the health benefits involved in pregnancy and childbirth?
Well, in terms of what, what would be the benefits? Well, if my mom actually, women who have pregnancies have a lower risk of breast cancer. That, that’s protect, that is protective to them.
That’s, that’s one benefit. I mean, I think there’s tons of benefits to being a mother because that’s what God has created women to be in, in when they’re married. And so there’s a lot of benefits. I mean, there’s the physical benefits, there’s the emotional benefits, the spiritual benefits of being a parent. So I think God has created this whole process to benefit the mom, the family, the baby, because it’s, it’s the way he’s created us to be. Good. Makes sense.
Question number 11. Abortion is often discussed and debated in society, but rarely discuss, but people rarely discuss what’s actually involved in abortion procedures. Why might people tend to avoid discussing the details of abortion procedures when it’s such an important issue in culture today? I think people tend to not want to talk about abortion procedures because it’s really taking the life of a baby, taking the life of an unborn child.
Who wants to think about that? Because once you know that, it creates responsibility on somebody’s part for having done that. And so that’s, and surgical abortions are a very brutal procedure, ending that baby’s life, you know, can be taken at limb from limb in doing that.
And it’s ugly. So we, people don’t want to know that, about that. And yet, I have worked with women who’ve had abortions over the years, and the statements they made in regret was, if only I had known, they could have made another choice.
Thank you for sharing. Okay, question number 12. Would you sketch out, what time are we on the?
We’re on 21. 21, okay good. What would you sketch out for us, the different types of surgical and medical abortion? Well, interestingly enough, at this point, about more than half of the abortions are taking place, and this has just occurred over the last couple of years, are what are called medical abortions. We, as people who believe in the sanctity of life, do not like, and in the medical profession, don’t like to call those medical abortion, because medicine is meant to preserve, protect, and treat for life purposes. We try to call it a chemical abortion. It’s using chemicals to take the life of that unborn baby. There’s usually, there’s two different pills involved with it. The abortion pills are what they’re called. One is, the first one is mifepristone, which is a progesterone blocker that is, blocks progesterone, which is necessary for the pregnancy to continue and to grow, and then within 72 hours should be, was supposed to be followed by another drug called misoprostol, which causes uterine contractions. This is more than half of what’s happening now to end the life of the unborn, and it can be done very early.
Surgical abortions were the main way that women had abortions in the past. They’re still done, but not near as much. The chemical abortions can be done up to 70 days, so after that, it needs to be a surgical abortion in general, and that’s considered a dilation and curatage, where they go and scrape the uterus and remove the baby, and with a vacuum procedure, removing it and dismembering it with that, and that can be done up to easily about, well, they do it up to about 13 weeks plus, and after that, they use some other procedures that are much more invasive.
Thank you for sharing that. Question number 13. What are some of the health risks involved in abortion? Well, there’s numerous health risks if you think holistically about a person. In healthcare, we talk about holistically about a woman, anybody, and it’s their mental health, their physical health, their spiritual health, so some of the risk of abortion, again, can be bleeding and retain products of conception. It means they did not complete that abortion, and there’s parts of the baby left inside which can create a significant infection. The cervix can actually be damaged with a surgical abortion, forcing it open with instruments, and that puts women at a much higher risk for preterm birth, which is a very serious condition, babies being born way before they’re supposed to because the mother’s cervix has been damaged that holds that pregnancy inside, so that’s one more risk of abortion, and of course, there’s the spiritual, mental effects of regret and grief and shame, and women just feeling the hurt of taking the life of their child.
Did I answer the full questions? Yeah, that was good. You don’t have to list off all the health risks. The idea was just to list off some. Okay, thanks. It wasn’t meant to be all of them. Thanks. Yeah. What are some of the health benefits involved in abortion? You know, I’d have a hard time thinking of any health benefits to abortion because it’s taking an unborn person’s life. A person creating the image of God has taken that life, ending that life intentionally when we’re talking about abortion in the large scheme of things that we’re speaking of, so I can’t think of any health benefits of that.
That makes sense. Question number 15. How much does a typical abortion cost, and then the same question would be is, how much does a typical pregnancy cost? I don’t know the answers to those. Oh, okay. That’s fine.
We’ll skip that one. Yeah. I mean, the numbers change all the time, and it depends on the type of abortion. It goes up by the weeks if it’s a surgical, and the abortion pills, you can get them online.
They could cost $95. They could cost several hundred dollars. So, you know, I’m not sure I can answer it. That’s fine. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Question number 16. From a medical perspective, what are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about abortion? Misconceptions from a medical perspective about abortion? Oh, it’s from your medical perspective, but the question is when it comes to people that are not medical, what misconceptions do people have from your perspective?
I think there’s the perspective that abortion is going to make things better for this woman. Numerous friends of mine, that abortion was the only child they ever conceived, and one of them had an infection and never had another child, wanted a child, never had another child as a result of that.
Most people don’t know that. They also wouldn’t know that abortion does increase the risk of breast cancer. People wouldn’t also know that abortion can greatly increase the risk, dose-related by the number of abortions, of preterm birth, which is a real serious thing that is increasing because babies that are born early have to stay in the hospitals a long time. They have to have all these treatments. There’s all kinds of complications.
And they don’t all make it. So these are all things that can result from a woman having had abortion. The other thing I think that is not often known is that a high percent of relationships where there is an abortion end. Some women will think they’re having an abortion to preserve that relationship, but in general that is not the case. It used to be about 80% of relationships where there was an abortion did not survive. I’m wondering if I should ask you a follow-up question to say, should I ask you more about the breast cancer piece, or maybe the fact that you just mentioned it as a risk is enough?
You know, it’s very controversial. Some even pro-life people do not look at the risk, but I get information from a breast surgeon, and I follow her, Dr. Angela Infranchi, who’s a breast surgeon and believes that is a very strong risk. So I probably shouldn’t comment too much on it. There’s probably people that could say it better than I could. In our experience, 96% of the clinics we work with will have it on their website, and about 4% won’t. Yeah, so you even see that that’s the case, yeah. But yeah, and that’s our most controversial content we’ve ever had, is 4% won’t have it.
That’s interesting, yeah. I guess I hear from the ones that don’t want to even talk about it. They say it’s not proven.
Well, that’s only 4%. Okay, okay. It’s only 4% of our Adobe IOPT.com’s client base. Thank you for telling me that.
Yeah, let’s see. Let’s see.
Question number 17. It’s been said that most every woman who has had an abortion, who has an abortion, didn’t really want an abortion. They just felt like there was no other option for them. In your experience, does that ring true or not? Most women, they don’t want abortions. That question about that is a little bit challenging. I would say for the most, most women do not want abortions. And I’ve heard the statistics that maybe about at least 60% feel like they were coerced into an abortion. But generally, for the most, it’s probably the father of the baby, and beyond that, their parents who may kick them out of the house or those kind of things, or just pressure them into it for other reasons. I’ve run across a few women here and there that would just boldly say, I don’t want children. I want to get rid of this thing.
But that’s not so common, that women would want abortions. I don’t know anybody happy about abortions, except we’re moving to this age where people want to celebrate an abortion. So this is a strange time we live in. I think that only God can really open up women’s eyes to the fact that they’ve taken the life of their unborn, but it’s about me now. So whatever makes me feel better, promotes my career, those kind of things, I guess some of those women, they won’t want it very much for themselves. I’m not saying this very well.
No, no, that was good. That was good.
That makes sense. Number 18, abortion providers have made a strong push to expand access to the abortion pill. Many suggest it’s safer than surgical abortion. What is the abortion pill, and is it safer than surgical abortion? Well, that’s a hard question to answer about is the abortion pill safer, because I don’t think we’re ever going to know the numbers of who are using the abortion pill anymore. They can get it through the mail, by a phone call, not as many through clinics as they used to, and so forth.
So I don’t think we’ll know the numbers for that. But is it safer? When the FDA approved the abortion pill, they had guidelines around it to protect it.
They’re called RIMS, and to reduce the risk. But those RIMS have been taken away primarily. You might have to start that one over, because the person outside talked, and then the doors were slamming. Okay. Sorry. Yeah, I got distracted. Yeah, the audio was like… So tell me, what is the abortion pill, and is it safer than the surgical abortion? I think your end goal of saying it’s hard to measure that it’s safer, that’s a good angle. But I’m not sure from the beginning that we had that.
What is the abortion pill? Okay. The abortion pill is actually two pills. The first one is mifepristone, which a woman would take, and then that is a progesterone blocker. Progesterone is absolutely necessary for the pregnancy to continue.
It’s a hormone. And mifepristone blocks that so that it doesn’t continue to support the pregnancy. And then after that, usually within 24 to 72 hours, a woman would take a second drug called misoprostol, which causes uterine contractions to contract, and the baby would be expelled from her body. That was approved by the FDA some years ago, and at that point, there were some guidelines around it, some protections for it, but those have all been removed as well.
And so now, how do we know how safe it is? Now the only thing reported of complications from the abortion pill are death. So if there are any other complications, they’re not reported to the FDA, so we don’t even know what they are. There are some other things that we find from other countries, but sometimes it doesn’t work. Other times, women can hemorrhage a lot.
They can get infections. And on occasion, there has been death. But we don’t get any of those kind of statistics, again, because the FDA quit collecting them after they removed a lot of the rims. And then the second part would be, is it safer than surgical abortion? Well, people like to think it is, but one recent study I was reading about that came out in 2021 by some physicians are saying that it’s not necessarily safer than a surgical abortion. You would think surgery is riskier than taking pills, but pills can have terrible effects on women as well.
Let’s see, question number 19. Actually, would you like to speak about how, when someone takes the abortion pill, how it has the same signs of an atopic, and if they don’t have an ultrasound, if they’re not getting that medical care? Is that something you’d like to talk about or no? Well, it has the same signs as a miscarriage. A miscarriage, but I meant a miscarriage.
Or I guess I don’t even know. Let me think of how to phrase what we’re going to ask. I think that makes the abortion pill more dangerous than surgery because they may have thought they had an abortion, but really they may be experiencing the symptoms of a miscarriage or an atopic or something. Yeah, well, with the abortion pills, now women don’t have to have an ultrasound.
They can get these by phone. They’re taking themselves at home, and the idea is that they would pass that pregnancy at home, but there are cases where women are having significant bleeding, and they can get an infection, so they don’t know that. And the sad part is they could have an ectopic pregnancy, and the abortion pills are not going to stop that. That ectopic pregnancy could continue because they’ve never had an ultrasound to determine where the pregnancy is. They don’t know where it is. They just have a positive pregnancy test. So, that has had some very serious consequences for women with ruptured ectopics, and there was a reported death with this.
Yeah, that makes sense. Let’s see, so that was this one. Number 19 is, elective abortion choice is often promoted as health care for women specifically. In your view, is elective abortion health care? Please explain. I do not believe that elective abortion is health care. I don’t see how you could call it health care to take the life of an innocent person. I don’t think it’s safe for women to stop this process that has begun in their body with pregnancy, abnormally, unnaturally. And so, no, I don’t call that health care. I’m a health care professional, and that is, in my opinion, absolutely not health care. I think it’s done more harm to women through the years than about anything that we could come up with having my friends who’ve had abortion and worked with them and women in supportive post-abortion studies.
I don’t call that health care. Thank you, Frank.
Yeah, that makes sense. It almost makes me wonder if the Hippocratic Oath may come back, because it went away with Roe versus Wade, and now that we have Dobbs, in some states we can have the Hippocratic Oath come back as a standard. Yeah, well, it’s not a law, though.
It’s like a commitment. Yeah, used to. Even when physicians graduated from medical school, they took the Hippocratic Oath that said they would not cause the death of a child. Yeah. Yeah. Number 20, in your experience, when women seek an abortion, how well informed are they about what’s involved in the abortion procedure and what effects it may have on them overall? I think that women are poorly informed about the effects and the possible complications, what an abortion is like, and I’m not sure they always want to know if they’re being forced to do this or even want to do it because they’re taking the life of an unborn child.
So I think that is the huge value of pregnancy centers. We seek to inform women about abortion, about their pregnancies. I think that’s one of the huge values of ultrasound.
They do know. We show them on the screen their unborn baby. We show their baby’s heartbeat. We tell them how far along they are. We try to explain to them the risk and the complications of abortion and try to support them in carrying their pregnancies. So I think that’s a huge and amazing thing that we can do in the pro-life movement through the pregnancy centers around the country, is give women the information they need to make a choice. We can’t make that choice for them, and we pray they will choose life, but for most, where it’s legal or where they can find an abortion, at least they’ve been informed and they know, and we have done the best we could to give them that information. I think that’s our responsibility, to give them accurate information about their pregnancies and support them in choosing life. That’s good. So my last question is, is there anything you would like to add or talk about that I didn’t ask you about? Or whatever you would like to talk about beyond what you’ve talked about so far, this is an open-ended opportunity to share something. Hmm. Are we being recorded at this moment?
While I’m thinking? Oh, okay. Well, if I were not tired from this summit, I probably would have a few things. I consider it a joy and privilege to serve the women and their unborn babies and I’ve been able to do that. Since 1987 and with ultrasound since 1998 and believe that many, many lives have been saved as a result of that and it’s just a privilege to have some small part in preserving those lives and those women who have found their babies through ultrasound, met their babies through ultrasound, and couldn’t imagine not carrying their babies after meeting them and learning about them. That’s just a privilege to be involved with them and I’m thankful for it. I’ve got one more bonus question.
Do we have time? Oh yeah, 13.
So since we’re ahead of schedule, please share a story where you’ve seen God’s fingerprints in this experience and work. Oh my gosh, I’ve seen so many so I’ll try to focus down on…
Yeah, maybe think of one. Okay. I can think of one.
I can think of an event that happened many, many years ago when I was in Marietta, Georgia, our pregnancy center in the very early years of doing ultrasounds where at that time I did wear all kinds of hats in that organization. One day I was just answering the phone and a young woman called us wanting to know if she could get an abortion because our pregnancy center had been listed by mistake in the yellow pages under abortion providers. And we wouldn’t have done that because that would have seemed deceptive, but the yellow pages made that mistake.
They even gave us our money back. And so for that year we got a lot of phone calls of women seeking abortions. And this young woman called and asked, could she come in for an abortion? And I needed to explain to her, I said, well, we don’t do abortions here and are you sure you’re pregnant? And is there any way we can help you? And I said, are you sure you want that abortion? And immediately she began to cry. And she didn’t want that abortion, but she felt like she had to do that. So within the hour she came into our pregnancy center. I did do that abortion. Excuse me. I did.
She came into our pregnancy center and I did perform that ultrasound on her. And she said to me, she said, you know, if I hadn’t come in here, I would have aborted this baby. And she was thrilled to be carrying that baby. I said, how are you, are you planning to carry? And she said, oh yes, big time. And her life and heart was changed just by a phone call, an accidental phone call that was due to an error in the yellow pages. Awesome. That’s really cool. Yeah. I mean, there’s so many of them, but right now my mind is not.
No, that was good. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you guys. Thank you.
Well, God bless you for what you’re doing.