12 weeks 20 weeks 20 weeks Body:

Month One

Mommy,
I am only 4 inches long but I have all my organs. I love the sound of your voice. The sound of your heart beat is my favorite lullaby.

Month Two

Mommy,

today I learned how to suck my thumb. If you could see me you could definitely tell that I am a baby. I'm not big enough to survive outside my home though. It is so nice and warm in here.

Month Three

You know what Mommy,

I'm a boy!! I hope that makes you happy. I always want you to be happy. I don't like it when you cry. You sound so sad. It makes me sad too and I cry with you even though you can't hear me.

Month Four

Mommy,

my hair is starting to grow. It is very short and fine but I will have a lot of it. I spend a lot of my time exercising. I can turn my head and curl my fingers and toes and stretch my arms and legs. I am becoming quite good at it too.

Month Five

You went to the doctor today. Mommy,

he lied to you. He said that I'm not a baby. I am a baby Mommy, your baby. I think and feel. Mommy, what's abortion?

Month Six

I can hear that doctor again. I don't like him. He seems cold and heartless. Something is intruding my home. The doctor called it a needle. Mommy what is it? It burns! Please make him stop! I can't get away from it! Mommy! HELP me!

Month Seven

Mommy,

I am okay. I am in Jesus's arms. He is holding me. He told me about abortion. Why didn't you want me Mommy?

Every Abortion Is Just . . .

One more heart that was stopped.
Two more eyes that will never see.
Two more hands that will never touch.
Two more legs that will never run.
One more mouth that will never speak. Aborted foot of a 20 month old baby.

"One in three American women will have an abortion by age 45. Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures provided in the United States and Canada today." This quote came from a pro-choice website. We are proud of this statistic? And wait a minute, abortion is one of the safest medical procedures provided in the United States? For whom, I might ask? The mother, maybe............and that is a big maybe. Certainly NOT for the baby!

This is an article that I wrote last spring just so that you have the time frame right on it. This is the last in my original series, but have no fear, Little POH always has more to share. The well of information on this has not run dry. Thank you for you input.

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A teenage blogger, Hopeless Romantic, and I have been carrying on an intermittent conversation over the past two months.

She has graciously read my posts on everything from religion to abortion and has asked intelligent questions.

I have tried to respond with as much information, as clearly stated, as possible. She has made it clear that she is not interested in my "religious" arguments against abortion as she is an avowed athiest, but she said she would be interested in any documented things I could find having to do with pain that a baby might feel during an abortion.

Most of the pictures that I have posted, live fetuses in the womb, and the aborted fetuses came from websites I visited where most of my other research was done. If one feels that my pictures were too graphic let me assure you that there is waaaay worse out there. If you have the stomach for it there are videos detailing actual abortions.

It was almost too much for me to bear and I am pretty unemotional at this point. To see the little hands and feet, the head, the body, all coming out in pieces, straight from the vagina ....well, I just can't describe what it did to me......and I thought I had seen everything. I was pretty messed up that day.

It must take a pretty hard heart to view those pictures and not feel some pang of conscience, let alone to be the doctor or nurse that can actually handle doing the procedure. If you want to see the pictures, videos, etc. type Abortion Pictures into your search engine. You will come up with more pain than you can deal with. If you have a weak stomach I don't suggest it....yet, don't tell me that you think that abortion is 'okay' if you are unwilling to do that.

The answer to your question about fetal pain, Hopelessly Romantic, is that by 8 weeks, at a point in development that most women don't even know they are pregnant, the baby's neuro-anatomic structures are present. The sensory nerves to feel the pain and send messages to the thalamus, a part of the base of the brain, and the motor nerves that send a message to that area are all present by the age of two months. It is the rare woman who has had any indication up to this point that she is pregnant. The only ones I have ever known that did were my daughters and others like them who were purposely trying to get pregnant and bought pregnancy kits for testing from the drugstore.

Morning sickness does not usually occur until the two to three month mark and fetal development is not strong enough to feel the baby's kick until the fourth month. Yet, the facts are that the baby can feel pain way before this. The pain impulse goes to the thalamus. It sends a signal down the motor nerves to pull away from the hurt. This causes changes in heart rate and fetal movement and proves that intrauterine manipulations are painful to the fetus.

This pain can and has been measured by researchers. The heartbeat can be detected in as little as 18 days. That is only 2 1/2 weeks. Response from the lips can be seen by the end of the 7th week. At 11 weeks, the face and all parts of the upper and lower extremities are sensitive to touch noise, light, and heat. At ll weeks the baby has fingerprints, squints, kicks and sucks his thumb. The baby weighs approximately 1 oz. and at 2 1/2- 3 inches long can fit comfortably in the palm of one's hand. By 13 1/2 to 14 weeks, the entire body surface, except for the back and the top of the head, are sensitive to pain."

The pain a fetus feels has been carefully studied and documented. In a letter sent to President Reagan in 1984 by Sir William Lily it is stated: "Real time ultrasonography, fetoscopy, study of the fetal EKG (electrocardiogram) and fetal EEG (electroencephalogram) have demonstrated the remarkable responsiveness of the human fetus to pain, touch, and sound. That the fetus responds to changes in light intensity within the womb, to heat, to cold, and to taste (by altering the chemical nature of the fluid swallowed by the fetus) has been exquisitely documented in the pioneering work of the late Sir William Lily — the father of fetology."

We state categorically that no finding of modern fetology invalidates the remarkable conclusion drawn after a lifetime of research by the late Professor Arnold Gesell of Yale University. In The Embryology of Behavior: The Beginnings of the Human Mind (1945, Harper Bros.), Dr. Gesell wrote, "and so by the close of the first trimester the fetus is a sentient, moving being. We need not speculate as to the nature of his psychic attributes, but we may assert that the organization of his psychosomatic self is well under way."

There is a videotape of a 12-week suction abortion that is available to be purchased called The Silent Scream. It is narrated by Dr. B. Nathanson, who is himself a former abortionist.

It shows the baby making desperate attempts to avoid the suction instrument over and over, while the heartbeat speeds up. When the instrument the doctor is using succeeds in grabbing hold of the baby, its body is dismembered, and the baby’s mouth is wide open in screaming pain. How can the pain of an unborn baby be denied?

"One of the most uncomfortable ledges that the unborn can encounter is his mother’s backbone. If he happens to be lying so that his own backbone is across hers [when the mother lies on her back], the unborn will wiggle around until he can get away from this highly disagreeable position." M. Liley & B. Day, Modern Motherhood, Random House, 1969, p. 42 It has been generally discussed that if the cerebral cortex, which enables one to think, has not been fully developed that there must be no pain in the early stages of pregnancy.

However, researchers have found that the cortex isn’t needed to feel pain. Only the thalamus is needed and this is functioning at 8 weeks. Apparently even complete removal of the cortex does not eliminate the sensation of pain. "Indeed there seems to be little evidence that pain information reaches the sensory cortex." Patton et al., Intro. to Basic Neurology, W. B. Saunders Co. 1976, p. 178 This issue was discussed at a 1996 debate in the U.S. Congress over a law to ban partial birth abortions.

Pro-abortionists made the claim that the anesthetics used would have already killed the baby. Officials for the U.S. Society for Obstetric Anesthesia & Perinatology denied this explaining that the normal amount of anesthesia used did not harm the baby. D. Gianelli, Anesthesiologists Question Claims in Abortion Debate, Am. Med. News, Jan. 1, ’96 There were stories all over the news about this at that time. "The fetus within this time frame of gestation, 20 weeks and beyond, is fully capable of experiencing pain. Without doubt a partial birth abortion is a dreadfully painful experience for any infant." R. White, Dir. Neurosurgery & Brain Research, Case Western Univ. Also, "Far from being less able to feel pain, such premature newborns may be MORE sensitive to pain"...that babies under 30 weeks have a "newly established pain system that is raw and unmodified at this tender age."

P. Ranalli, Neuro. Dept., Univ. of Toronto Data in the British Medical Journal, Lancet, shows irrefutable evidence of fetal pain. It has been proven that the umbilical cord has no pain receptors as does the rest of the fetus. Accordingly, they tested fetal hormone stress response comparing puncturing of the abdomen and of the cord. It was observed "the fetus reacts to intrahepatic (liver) needling with vigorous body and breathing movements, but not to cord needling. The levels of these hormones did not vary with fetal age." M. Fisk, et al., Fetal Plasma Cortisol and B-endorphin Response to Intrauterine Needling, Lancet, Vol. 344, July 9, 1994, Pg. 77

Another excellent British study commented on this: "It cannot be comfortable for the fetus to have a scalp electrode implanted on his skin, to have blood taken from the scalp or to suffer the skull compression that may occur even with spontaneous delivery. It is hardly surprising that infants delivered by difficult forceps extraction act as if they have a severe headache." Valman & Pearson, "What the Fetus Feels," British Med. Jour., Jan. 26, 1980

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I would like to iterate here that, as opposed to much that I preach on my blog, these are facts and figures and have nothing to do with God's opinion on the issue. If you choose to ignore these facts for your own 'opinion', that is okay with me, but as I've stated many times on my blog, I do not abide people's unstudied opinions that amount to a bunch of nothing. It's all so much hot air to me.

One of the points I previously made on another post was that people will listen to man's evidence before they believe God's. ....yet then when you give them the medical evidence they just shut their eyes again.

Why is this? It's my opinion that it's because we have so little faith in our Creator, that we need to see and touch everything in order to believe it. I hope these men's research will convince you but if it doesn't then it is because you are too stubborn to open your closed mind.

If you aren't convinced by God AND man, I have nothing left to say.

I would also like to make it known that I do NOT judge women who have had abortions. God uses me as the conveyor of the information and the sweeper upper of people's ill choices. I have spent my life caring for mothers and babies.

Yes, I have a strong opinion and I do not keep it to myself....yet I also have great love and concern for the mothers who find themselves in this situation. I said it before and I will put it out here again....

If there is a young pregnant woman out there who is willing to give nine months of her life to do the right thing and has nowhere to turn, please contact me. Please. I will help you find help. I make no promises that I will personally raise your child since I am the age of a grandmother.....although God is continuing to use me with the toddler set as I have a 2 year old foster child at present. What I do promise is that I will help you find the resources that you need. I personally know people who want to adopt...and they would adopt yours. They do not care about color or race. This is NOT the end of the world for you.

Don't let it be the end of the world for your baby. Yes, I come down hard on the side of abstinance before marriage, yet I have known young girls in my life who not only were promiscuous but have even bordered on prostitution. I have loved them with the love of the Lord and they appreciate me for that. I have learned to love the sinner without loving the sin.

These quotes came from a website called ProLife Web Ring. Subtitled "46 Million babies butchered in USA and 100's of Millions Worldwide"

So much for the altruistic reasons for abortion:

"I was trained by a professional marketing director in how to sell abortions over the telephone. He took every one of our receptionists, nurses, and anyone else who would deal with people over the phone through an extensive training period. The object was, when the girl called, to hook the sale so that she wouldn't get an abortion somewhere else, or adopt out her baby, or change her mind. We were doing it for the money." --Nina Whitten, chief secretary at a Dallas abortion clinic under Dr. Curtis Boyd

"They [the women] are never allowed to look at the ultrasound because we knew that if they so much as heard the heart beat, they wouldn't want to have an abortion."-Dr. Randall 'Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet" by David Kuperlain and Mark Masters in Oct "New Dimensions" magazine

"If a woman we were counseling expressed doubts about having an abortion, we would say whatever was necessary to persuade her to abort immediately." --Judy W., former office manager of the second largest abortion clinic in El Paso, Texas

"Sometimes we lied. A girl might ask what her baby was like at a certain point in the pregnancy: Was it a baby yet? Even as early as 12 weeks a baby is totally formed, he has fingerprints, turns his head, fans his toes, feels pain. But we would say 'It's not a baby yet. It's just tissue, like a clot." --Kathy Sparks told in "The Conversion of Kathy Sparks" by Gloria Williamson, Christian Herald Jan 1986 p 28

"I have seen hundreds of patients in my office who have had abortions and were just lied to by the abortion counselor. Namely 'This is less painful than having a tooth removed. It is not a baby.' Afterwards, the woman sees Life magazine and breaks down and goes into a major depression." --Psychologist Vincent Rue quoted in "Abortion Inc" David Kupelian and Jo Ann Gasper, New Dimensions, October 1991 p 16

"Now, the baby I aborted was eleven weeks old, and can you imagine what this did to me when I saw this baby with the hands and face, sucking his thumb? And they told me it was a cluster of cells!" --Carole K. State Director of Women Exploited By Abortion. From Women Exploited, which is a sampling of the stories f WEBA (Women Exploited by Abortion) chapter members.

"The counselor at our clinic would cry with the girls at the drop of a hat. She would find their weakness and work on it. The women were never given any alternatives. They were told how much trouble it is to have a baby." --former abortion worker Debra Harry, quoted in the film "Meet the Abortion Providers" 1989

Why is there so much fuss about abortion? Isn't what is removed only a mass of tissue?

"But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside." --Sallie Tisdale "We Do Abortions Here"

"I can remember...the resident doctor sitting down, putting the tube in, and removing the contents. I saw the bloody material coming down the plastic tube, and it went into a big jar. My job afterwards was to go and undo the jar, and to see what was inside.

"I didn't have any views on abortion; I was in a training program, and this was a brand new experience. I was going to get to see a new procedure and learn. I opened the jar and took the little piece of stockingnette stocking and opened the little bag. The resident doctor said 'Now put it on the blue towel and check it out. We want to see if we got it all.' I thought, 'that'll be exciting-hands on experience looking at tissue.' I opened the sock up and put it on the towel, and there were parts of a person in there."

"I had taken anatomy, I was a medical student. I knew what I was looking at. There was a little scapula and an arm, I saw some ribs and a chest, and a little tiny head. I saw a piece of a a leg, and a tiny hand and an arm, and you know, it was like somebody put a hot poker into me. I had a conscience, and it hurt. Well, I checked it out and there were two arms and two legs and one head and so forth, and I turned and said "I guess you got it all.' That was a very hard experience to go through emotionally." --Former abortionist

"I remember an experience as a resident on a hysterotomy. I remember seeing the baby move underneath the sack of membranes, as the cesarean incision was made, before the doctor broke the water."

The thought came to me, "My God, that's a person" Then he broke the water. And when he broke the water, it was like I had a pain in my heart, just like when I saw that first suction abortion. And t hen he delivered the baby,. and I couldn't touch it.. I wasn't much of an assistant. I just stood there, and the reality of what was doing on finally began to seep into my calloused brain and heart.

"They took that little baby that was making little sounds and moving and kicking, and set it on that table in a cold, stainless steel bowl. Every time I would look over while we were repairing the incision in uterus and finishing the Caesarean, I would see that little person moving in that bowl. And it kicked and moved less and less, of course, as time went on. I can remember going over and looking at the baby when we were done with the surgery and the baby was still alive. You could see the chest was moving and the heart was beating, and the baby would try to take a little breath, and it really hurt inside, and it began to educate me as to what abortion really was." quoted in "Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet"

..the emotional turmoil that the procedure inevitably wreaks on the physicians and staff...There is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator...the sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current." -- Abortionist quoted in "Meeting of American Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians" OB GYN News P 196

"Clinic workers may say they support a woman's right to choose, but they will also say that they do not want to see tiny hands and tiny feet....there is a great difference between the intellectual support of a woman's right to choose and the actual participation in the carnage of abortion. Because seeing body parts bothers the workers." --Judith Fetrow, former clinic worker from San Francisco quoted in "Meet the Abortion Providers III" from a taped conference in Chicago 4/3/93

"I found much distress in the clinic, but it involved not only the women. I saw the pain of the babies who were born burned from the saline solution used for late-term abortions. I saw the bits of feet, bits of hands, the mangled heads and bodies of the little people. I saw pain and felt pain." --One time clinic worker Paula Sutcliffe in "Precious in My Sight" "Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices" Gail Garnier-Sweet, editor

From the film "Meet the Abortion Providers"
"My heart got callous to against the fact that I was a murderer, but that baby lying in a cold bowl educated me as to what abortion really was." -- former abortionist Dr. David Brewer

"I want the general public to know what the doctors know- that this is a person, this is a baby. That this is not some kind of blob of tissue." --Dr. Anthony Levantino

"I have taken the lives of innocent babies, and I have ripped them from their mother's wombs with a powerful suction machine" --McArthur Hill, M.D.

"From May to November 1988, I worked for an abortionist. He specializes in third trimester killings. I witnessed evidence of the brutal, cold blooded murder of over 600 viable, healthy babies at seven, eight and nine months gestation. A very, very few of these babies, less than 2%, were handicapped...I thought I was pro-choice and I was glad to be working in an abortion clinic. I thought I was helping provide a noble service to women in crisis....I was instructed to falsify the age of the babies in medical records. I was required to lie to the mothers over the phone, as they scheduled their appointments, and to tell them that they were not 'too far along' Then I had to note, in the records that Dr. Tiller's needle had successfully pierced the walls of the baby's heart, injecting the poison what brought death...one day, Dr. Tiller came up the stairs from the basement, where the mothers were in labor. He was carrying a large cardboard box, and ducked into the employees only area of the office so that he wouldn't have to walk through the waiting room. He passed behind my desk as I sat working on the computer, and he turned the corner to go around a short hall. He called out for me to come and help him. the box was so big and heavy in his arms that he couldn't get the key into the lock. So I unlocked the door for him, and , pushing the door open, I saw very clearly the gleaming metal of the crematorium- a full sized crematorium, just like the one's used in funeral homes. I went back to my computer. I could hear Dr. Tiller firing up the gas oven. A few minutes later I could smell burning human flesh. Mine was the agony of a participant, however reluctant, in the act of prenatal infanticide." --Luhra Tivis, now a member of Operation Rescue, on her experience in the abortion business Quoted in Celebrate Life Sept/Oct 1994 "Where is the Real Violence?"

"Abortions are very draining, exhausting, heart-rending. There are a lot of tears. Some patients turn on you...I do them because I take the attitude that women who are going to terminate babies deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry babies...I've done a couple thousand, and its been a significant financial boon...the only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman as my patient and block out the baby." --abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves

From "Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic" by Wendy Simonds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996

Quotes from clinic employees:

"You're going from dealing with people to dealing with what most people here at the Center consider a real hurdle, to do sterile room, because you have to deal with the actual abortion tissue. And for some people, that's really hard. They can be abstractly in favor of abortion rights, but they sure don't want to see what an eighteen-week abortion looks like."

"It's just- I mean it looks like a baby. It looks like a baby. And especially if you get one that comes out, that's not piecemeal. And you know, I saw this one, and it had its fingers in its mouth...it makes me really sad that that had to happen, you know, but it doesn't change my mind. It's just hard. And it makes me just sort of stop and feel sad about it, the whole necessity of it. And also....it's very warm when it comes into the sterile room because it's been in the mother's stomach. It feels like flesh, you know..."

"It's going to be weird now because you're going to see the sono. You're going to see the heart beating- little hearts, you know- and then, all of a sudden, you're going to put his cardiac medicine in it to make it stop- to kill it. So you're going to see the exact moment when you kill the fetus. I won't kill it, the doctor will kill it...and, I mean, it might be more humane...[if] the fetuses do feel something, why not kill it, you know, fast, [rather] than rip its leg off?"

"The time is fulfilled, and the
kingdom of God is at hand:
repent ye, and believe the
gospel." - - Mark 1:15