Clinic Worker Troubled by Pre-Abortion Ultrasounds
Clinic Worker Troubled by Pre-Abortion Ultrasounds
When she sees a foot, she says, "I feel a gut punch"
British abortion worker Juno Carey wrote a book this year in which she confessed that her abortion facility gave the abortion pill to women too late in their pregnancies and that she hid the ultrasound screen from people considering abortion.
There are other shocking revelations in the book, which I will cover in future articles.
What Troubles an Abortion Worker
One thing Carey wrote about was the emotional impact of seeing babies about to be aborted on ultrasound screens. Carey’s abortion facility committed abortions up to twenty-four weeks, so these babies were often very developed.
Carey writes:
In the early days at the clinic when I was scanning patients at twenty weeks, I would often see a penis or a whole foot and feel a gut punch.1
She elaborates on why she thinks this upset her:
We are socially conditioned to view younger and younger fetuses as babies, simply because scientific developments mean we have more information at increasingly early stages of pregnancy.
Scanning technology allows us to see very detailed images of a fetus, while private companies promise blood tests that they claim can indicate the sex as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.2
Knowing the sex of the baby that is about to be killed humanizes the child for Carey, as does seeing recognizable body parts.
Pro-Abortion Opposition to Ultrasound
Indeed, ultrasounds, which reveal the hidden world of preborn babies in real-time, can have a powerful impact on people’s views, both about a specific pregnancy and about abortion in general.
This is why pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood fight tooth and nail against legislation that would require abortion workers to show ultrasounds to people considering abortion.
In fact, so-called “pro-choice” groups even oppose laws that only require abortion providers to ask patients if they want to see an ultrasound.
For example, VA HB546/HOUSE BILL NO. 546 in Virginia stated:
At least 24 hours before the performance of an abortion, the pregnant woman shall be offered the opportunity to undergo fetal ultrasound imaging for the purpose of determining gestational age. Any such fetal ultrasound imaging shall be performed by a qualified medical professional…
The qualified medical professional performing fetal ultrasound imaging pursuant to subsection B shall verbally offer the woman an opportunity to view the ultrasound image, receive a printed copy of the ultrasound image and hear the fetal heart tones pursuant to standard medical practice in the community, and shall obtain from the woman written certification that this opportunity was offered and whether or not it was accepted…
The law did not mandate that the abortion facility perform an ultrasound and show it to the pregnant person – it just gave the pregnant person the opportunity to have an ultrasound done and to see it if she wanted to.
Nevertheless, Planned Parenthood campaigned against the law. According to Cecile Richards, then-President of Planned Parenthood:
[The law] is still an appalling and offensive government overreach that is designed to shame women who are seeking legal health care. Governor McDonnell clearly has a political agenda to restrict women’s access to health care, and the ultrasound law is just the latest example of his extreme agenda.
The bottom line is that Governor McDonnell is looking to further his own political ambitions at the risk of hurting women’s health in Virginia. The country has stood up and is taking notice.
On its website, Planned Parenthood states that the law “shames women seeking reproductive health care” and “inject[s] the government into the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship.”
All this rhetoric against legislation that simply allows pregnant people the option to find out what’s going on in their own bodies.
An Ultrasound-Guided Abortion
Juno Carey says that the picture of the baby on the ultrasound screen no longer bothers her – she’s seen it so many times her heart has become hardened. But she’s not the only abortion worker who’s been emotionally affected by seeing an ultrasound.
At the Pro-Life Action League’s conference “Meet the Abortion Providers,” former abortion worker Joan Appleton told her story. Appleton was a nurse at an abortion facility. She watched an ultrasound-guided abortion in the late first or early second trimester.
Appleton makes reference to the movie The Silent Scream. This was a film created in the 1980s by former abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson. It showed an ultrasound of a twelve-week-old preborn baby being aborted.
Appleton says:
I can’t remember offhand what the specific problem was, but we wanted to do the abortion by ultrasound, to make sure that we did indeed get the entire, all [of] the baby. The terminology was that we wanted to make sure we had the entire ‘pregnancy.’
I handled the ultrasound while the doctor performed the procedure, and I directed him while I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. I had seen Silent Scream a number of times, but it didn’t affect me – to me it was just more pro-life propaganda.
But I couldn’t deny what I saw on the screen. After that procedure, I was shaking, literally, but managed to pull it together, and continue on with the day.
Appleton didn’t leave her job right away, but the image of the baby stayed with her. She left the abortion industry and became pro-life. You can read her testimony here.
You can read more about ultrasounds and their impact here.
Footnotes
1. Juno Carey A Necessary Kindness: Stories from the Frontline of Abortion Care (London: Atlantic Books, 2024) 46
2. Ibid.
Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 900 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies.
Permission is given to pro-life organizations to repost or reprint this article, but please include the following:
This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.
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