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NRL News
“The
Blood of My Daughter Is on Your Hands” Mother Tells Abortionist Eileen Smith never expected her life to turn out this way. Always “quietly pro-life,” she never expected to find herself standing shoulder to shoulder with vocally active pro-lifers, exposing the raw nerve of her family’s deepest heartbreak to total strangers from across the country and around the world. But then, she never expected to lose one of her own grandchildren to abortion. And she certainly never expected that her beloved daughter, 22-year-old Laura Hope Smith, would die September 13, 2007, on an abortionist’s table. “I was always ‘quietly pro-life,’” said Mrs. Smith, who did not know Laura was pregnant until after her daughter’s death. She taught her children that abortion was wrong, but at the same time, “I thought abortion was here to stay—that change couldn’t happen,” she said. Pro-lifers who actively worked to change the laws were, she believed, “spitting into the wind,” she told NRL News. “Now, my passion is to speak out against abortion.” When abortion claimed the lives of both her unborn grandchild and her daughter, Mrs. Smith said, she and her husband Tom experienced a “baptism of fire” into the pro-life movement. She vowed that she would tell Laura’s story in the hope that at least one woman would choose life after hearing it. “That happened in the first week,” Mrs. Smith said, noting that several days after Laura’s death she learned of a young girl who was being encouraged to have an abortion who chose life after hearing Laura’s story. Since then, she has heard about several other young women who have turned away from abortion after hearing about Laura’s death—a number that is sure to grow as she spends more and more time speaking to groups around the country about Laura. But pregnant women aren’t the only ones Mrs. Smith has tried to reach with a message of life. Ten days after Laura’s death, in an effort to better understand what had happened to her daughter, Mrs. Smith met with the abortionist himself. The abortionist, Rapin Osathanondh, told her that Laura had had a “D & E” (dilation and evacuation) abortion, and he showed her a list of the drugs Laura had taken and the waiver she had signed. Then, Mrs. Smith told NRL News, “I asked the Lord what I should say to him.” She then repeated the words she recalled saying to the abortionist: “The blood of my daughter is on your hands. The blood of my grandchild is on your hands. The blood of every life you have ever taken is on your hands. And you will stand one day before the eternal Judge of life and answer for every life you have taken.” According to Mrs. Smith, Osathanondh responded with “dead silence.” Mrs. Smith then urged him, “on the life of my daughter,” to consider stopping performing abortions. He said he would consider it. Mrs. Smith said she left the meeting hoping that the abortionist would immediately stop performing abortions, but he did not. He surrendered his medical license February 20 under the shadow of a Massachusetts Medical Board investigation into Laura Smith’s death. He is currently facing a civil wrongful death suit brought by Mrs. Smith and a possible criminal indictment for manslaughter being pursued by Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe, according to the Cape Cod Times. Mrs. Smith’s encounter with Osathanondh made her all the more dedicated to sharing Laura’s story with others. One of the most difficult things for the Smiths to understand is why Laura chose to undergo an abortion in the first place, because she had always been pro-life, her mother said. Mrs. Smith told NRL News that as a teenager, Laura came home crying when she heard of classmates contemplating abortion. Laura spent the summer before her death living with her parents at their New Jersey home—and she had been present when a family acquaintance had talked about having an abortion. Laura heard Mrs. Smith urge the young woman not to go through with it—a conversation which, in retrospect, Mrs. Smith says she hoped would have helped Laura discuss her own pregnancy with her mother. Now, all the family can do is piece together what happened. According to the Cape Cod Times, Laura Smith was 13 weeks pregnant when she went to an abortion facility in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on September 13 accompanied by a friend, Karen Trott, for the first of two appointments that day. She received an initial treatment, then left. The two women returned to the abortionist’s office at about 4 p.m., at which time the abortion was to be completed. “And then all of a sudden (an assistant) comes out and says she’s not breathing,” Trott told the Times. “And I was like, what do you mean she’s not breathing?” According to the Times, rescue workers came to the facility and performed CPR but were unable to revive an “unnamed patient.” (Fire officials were not able to reveal the name of the patient because of privacy regulations, the Times reported.) The patient—Laura Smith—was then transported to Cape Code Hospital, the Times reported. Trott rushed to the hospital also and asked to see her friend but was not permitted to do so, the Times reported. According to the newspaper, when she asked about her friend’s condition, she was told, “It doesn’t look good.” Trott—hysterical by this time, according to the Times—then called Eileen and Tom Smith at their home in New Jersey. Later they would learn that Laura had already died on the abortionist’s table before even being transported to the hospital. Asked about how difficult it must be to speak about Laura now, Mrs. Smith said it would be more painful to remain silent about the death of her daughter, originally from Honduras, whom the Smiths began to care for as a foster child when she was five, and later adopted. “I don’t feel brave or courageous,” she said. “I can’t not talk about Laura. God has put this in my heart.” Over the years, she said, she has read many books on the Holocaust, and often she would wonder why more people hadn’t acted to prevent the slaughter of innocent people. “Surely, I thought, if I had been there, I would have done something,” she said. But through her recent experiences, she realized that “I was one of the silent ones” on today’s holocaust—the slaughter of the unborn. Mrs. Smith has vowed to be silent no more. “Every time I speak out,” she said, “I feel like I have put a nail in the coffin of the abortion industry.” |