A HORRIBLE PRICE TO PAY

By Dave Andrusko

You will find on this page a reprint of a shocking but extremely insightful column by Fr. Frank Pavone. Fr. Pavone thoughtfully examines the psychic costs exacted of abortion clinic personnel who traffic in the deaths of unborn babies.

What Fr. Pavone first does is to offer excerpts from the testimony given at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. When compared with what abortion clinic personnel have quietly told researchers, we see a clear parallel to what was experienced by at least some of the enlisted men who were part of the " Einsatzgruppen."

Formed by two of Hitler's closet henchmen, the Einsatzgruppen were "mobile killing units" that operated in German-occupied territories during the Second World War. According to Yale F. Edeiken, the Einsatzgruppen murdered over a million men, women, and children.

Neither Fr. Pavone nor I are saying abortion clinic personnel are Nazis. What is at issue is how directly participating in the deaths of innocent people can peel away even the strongest defense mechanisms, leaving individuals exposed to the horror of the acts they are committing.

We don't write much about the emotional toil exacted of abortion clinic personnel. For one thing, there's not a lot out there to base it on. The Abortion Establishment treats this grisly reality strictly on a need-to-know basis only.

Why the hush-hush? Probably because if it became common knowledge that those most intimately involved in abortion are wracked with guilt and tortured by vivid nightmares, what conclusion might ordinary people reach?

One particularly gruesome-but-accurate description appeared in the book Articles of Faith, a monumental account of the abortion controversy written by former Washington Post reporter Cynthia Gorney. One of the principal actors in Gorney's drama is Judith Widdicombe, a pro-abortion leader in Missouri in the 1980s, and the founder of St. Louis's first abortion clinic, which was also the first in the state to do second-trimester abortions.

In Articles of Faith, Gorney writes in euphemism-free prose about the time Widdicombe brought her chief abortionist to Washington, D.C., to learn how to perform a new second-trimester abortion technique known as "D&E."

Gorney writes that as the student-abortionist observed the more seasoned abortionist's technique and listened to his matter-of- fact explanation of what he was doing, "a small arm with a hand on it dropped into the surgical pan. A hand."

He "felt momentarily short of air, as though someone had punched him hard in the stomach. . . . What was wrong with him? Why was he suddenly thinking about Nazi Germany?"

The truth was that while for over six years "he had observed his share of bloodied parts," never before had his work "required him to consider so plainly the mechanics of dismemberment."

The inability of the brain to lay down new memories is known as anterograde amnesia. Such is a fate much to be desired by many abortion clinic personnel, one suspects, but attained by few.