Daniel's Killer "Savior"

The LA Times featured this story on the abortions of viable children yesterday. It lets you into the thought process of women who have had third-trimester abortions and it isn't pretty.

Since her abortion, Plazio has suffered such severe panic attacks that she can't drive even as far as the high school to watch her daughter cheerlead. She has gained 60 pounds as she battles depression. The abortion she sought to preserve her mental health has left her deeply shaken; doctors say she suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Her mental health, she is convinced, would be even worse had she tried to raise a profoundly disabled son — or had she given him up for adoption.

Plazio aborted her son, whom she named Matthew, in the third trimester because he was diagnosed with Down's Syndrome. Her mental health is so profoundly disturbed by the reality that she is responsible for the death of her son that she believes it would have been worse if he was born or had she placed him in the arms of a loving family.

One patient who had an abortion at 25 weeks in November said she could not bear to imagine surgeons cutting open her daughter's tiny chest to rebuild her heart. The thought of her Emma spending months of her childhood in the hospital overwhelmed the woman, a 30-year-old technology educator from Virginia who asked to be identified by her middle name, Paige.

"Part of me just wanted to let her die," Paige said. "Is that horrible?"

You can't imagine your infant child receiving life-saving surgery but you allow the unborn child that you've named to killed while in your womb?? Did you imagine what George Tiller was doing to Emma's body? Did you imagine that she could have possibly endured pain when Tiller injected digoxin into her heart?

Another woman, Marie Becker, who aborted third-trimester unborn child, Daniel, because a doctor informed her that he would die shortly after birth. She believes abortion is wrong in most cases and "finds it reprehensible that Tiller aborts healthy fetuses in the first and second trimester (and even, sometimes, in the third trimester when the mother is very young, or a victim of rape)" yet then goes on to describe the man that killed her Daniel as Daniel's "savior."

Living everyday knowing that you decided to end the life of a viable child who you held after they were killed would be impossible for a rational person to live with. The worst is when they try to rationalize it by claiming that having their child killed is what their child would have wanted or needed or that it was done out of love. Tiller's clinic helps these women avoid reality by describing abortions as the "premature delivery of a stillborn."

HT: STR blog