Woman Comes To Abortion Clinic Nine Months Pregnant and in Labor
The abortionist herself had a late-term abortion
Many people believe third-trimester abortions never take place or are done only when the pregnant person’s life is endangered or there’s something terribly wrong with the baby. Why, they ask, would a healthy person pregnant with a healthy baby wait so long?
Some women don’t realize they’re pregnant until very late in pregnancy, or they deny the pregnancy to themselves until the very last minute.
There is an example of this in an abortionist’s book. Abortionist Suzanne Poppema wrote Why I am an Abortion Doctor in 1996. She’d been committing abortions for years and was on the board of the National Abortion Federation.
Poppema wrote about a woman who came to her abortion facility in active labor with a full-term baby.
An Abortion Worker Couldn’t Tell When a Woman Was in Labor
Unlike many abortion facilities, Poppema’s clinic offered legitimate gynecological care besides abortions. A woman came in with a suspected infection. She was reporting vaginal discharge and “horrible” abdominal pain.
The same woman had had an abortion at Poppema’s facility three years before.
A member of Poppema’s staff, allegedly a health care professional, did a pelvic exam on the woman to diagnose her medical problem. This person went and got Poppema and told her to come and examine the patient “right away.”
Poppema describes what happened:
The staff woman told me that there was ‘something weird’ in the woman’s vagina and that she couldn’t find the cervix. This poor woman was writhing on the examination table with fluid here and there, dripping all over the place. The diagnosis was obvious.
The patient was nine months pregnant and in labor. The “something weird” in her vagina was the baby’s head.
The employee who performed the pelvic exam was supposed to be a medical professional. She was presumably examining patients independently and making diagnoses and treatments.
Yet she couldn’t figure out that the woman was in labor. How poorly trained or incompetent does a medical provider have to be not to realize when a woman is about to give birth?
What does this say about the worker’s medical knowledge and the treatment she was giving patients?
Denying the Pregnancy Even Now
When Poppema told the woman she was pregnant, she said, “I can’t possibly be pregnant.” When Poppema insisted she was, the woman in labor said, “But I can’t have a baby. I won’t have a baby.”
Poppema responded, “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s no longer an option. You will be having a baby soon.”
In her practice, Poppema normally did abortions through 16 weeks. Some abortionists, I’m sure, would have simply killed the baby then and there. I don’t know if legal restrictions on abortion influenced how Poppema reacted or if she simply found killing a full-term baby distasteful.
Reasons Not to Deliver a Baby in an Abortion Clinic
Poppema says:
I felt perfectly comfortable delivering the baby right there, but our clinic—for obvious reasons—doesn’t really have any infant resuscitation equipment.
The “obvious reasons” had to do with the fact that at an abortion facility, the doctors don’t want babies to survive. They are in the business of killing babies, not saving them.
Poppema also says:
It had also occurred to me that we still had a whole room full of patients and it probably wouldn’t do them much good emotionally while waiting for an abortion to hear this newly delivered baby crying from the examination room—to say nothing of the spectacle of aide-unit personnel rushing into the clinic.
Of course. Because then, some of them might reconsider and leave.
Poppema sent the woman to the hospital.
Poppema’s Own Late-Term Abortion
Even though she doesn’t commit abortions late in pregnancy, she feels they should be legal. When people ask her why a pregnant person would wait so long to abort, she has a ready response:
I can tell them candidly: ‘Well, you know there are trained, intellectual and very bright women who have denied pregnancies for a long, long time.’ It’s not humiliating, but it’s very humbling.
Poppema herself had an abortion at 20 weeks.
She was healthy when she had the abortion, and so was her baby. She aborted because she thought having a baby would destroy her career plans.
She also says that she had “no emotional connection at all to the young man with whom I had become pregnant, nor did I desire one.” She didn’t want to be involved with him, nor did she want to be a single mother. Poppema rejected the option of adoption because she felt that if she gave birth, she would want to keep the baby.
Poppema had the abortion through saline induction. This procedure is seldom used today. It was done by injecting a caustic saline solution into the pregnant person’s womb. The solution slowly poisoned and killed the baby, burning the child’s skin and lungs.
Then labor was induced, and the woman “gave birth” to a dead (or dying) baby.
“I could actually feel the fetal convulsions not long after I was given the saline injection.”
Poppema says, “I could actually feel the fetal convulsions not long after I was given the saline injection.”
Poppema’s Feelings about the Aborted Baby
Poppema never saw her aborted baby, whom she repeatedly calls an “embryo.” She says:
I remember having a special kind of conversation with the embryo at the time: ‘I’m very sorry that this is happening to you, but there’s just no way that you can come into existence right now.’
“Embryo” refers to a much younger baby at less than eight weeks after conception. Poppema’s baby was a fully formed fetus. In fact, babies have been born as young as 21 weeks and a few days and survived. This is just slightly older than her baby was.
Poppema says that she “never once had a thought about what that child would have been like now,” though she goes on to admit that “[w]hether this is a form of denial and I really have second thoughts, I can’t say.”
She later reiterates that she’s never had second thoughts and says, “I feel absolutely at peace … For me, it was an excellent decision.”
But there is a hint that the abortion may have affected Poppema more than she admits.
Wondering If Her Miscarriage Was Punishment
Four years after her abortion, Poppema had a miscarriage. She says:
… I was haunted by thoughts of ‘justice being served’ even though I knew the two events were not connected. Intellectually, I knew there was no connection.
But the fact that I had even a passing thought of ‘one for the gods’ (my polytheistic way of believing I had interfered with the life process once, now it was the ‘gods’’ turn) has made me able to understand and share some of the guilt my patients bear and has helped me to offer them alternative ways of looking at their individual situations.
Neither the abortion nor the miscarriage kept Poppema from making a living as an abortionist.
But the experience of the woman who came in nine months pregnant, as well as Poppema’s own late-term abortion, show that people can be pregnant and not realize it until late in pregnancy and that some of these people, though physically healthy and with healthy babies, seek abortions.
Source: Suzanne T. Poppema, MD, and Mike Henderson Why I am an Abortion Doctor (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1996) 139-141, 88-89, 87,
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.
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This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.