Editor's Note: The following article is excerpted from a speech given by Brenda Pratt Shafer to the National Right to Life Committee at a recent national gathering. Nurse Shafer participated in three partial-birth abortions. Prior to that experience, she considered herself "pro-choice."
September 1996 – [T]he partial-birth abortion is a three-day procedure.... The first two days, the women are brought in and they do a process in which they insert something that's called laminaria – it looks like a tampon but it's made out of seaweed – and they insert it into the cervix and when it gets wet it expands, thus dilating the cervix.
The second day, we brought them back in again and changed the laminaria thus dilating it even more, and also on the second day they did what is called the D&E abortions. And in this abortion … they brought the ultrasound machine in and attached it to the woman's stomach, and you could see the baby, you could see the heartbeat. And these are up to about four and a half months pregnant, that's about a far as they go on these. And I stood at the doctor's side, about three feet away from him, and I watched them take a pair of forceps and go up inside the uterus and literally tear a baby from limb to limb. He went in and tore off an arm and threw it in the pan, went in and tore off a leg and put it in the pan. He continued until he got to the head, then went up with the forceps and crushed the head and pulled it out. …
And I started thinking about it. ... I came home and I thought, well, if this is as bad as it is on the second day, I hate to see what the third day's going to be like. And they did explain to me a little bit what was going to happen. The third day I went in, the first abortion I saw was a lady who was 26-1/2 weeks pregnant.
The baby had Down syndrome and the nurse called her their special case. And I said, 'Why is she a special case?" "Well, the doctor doesn't like to do them past 26 weeks and she was a little bit past."
… This one particular lady didn't want the abortion. She had this Down syndrome baby, she was unmarried, her boyfriend didn't want the baby, and her parents didn't want the baby. She cried the whole three days she was in there. So we did her first to get her over with. We brought her in, prepped her, started an IV of Valium to calm her down. We did not use a general anesthesia and knock her out… We brought the ultrasound machine in and hooked it up to her stomach.
… I could see the baby, I could see the heartbeat. And the doctor wanted me to stand right beside him, because he wanted me to see everything there was about partial-birth abortion. So I stood there. He went in guided by ultrasound. He took a pair of forceps and went in and turned the baby because it wasn't in this position at the time. He found a foot and he pulled the baby's foot down through the birth canal, bringing it down, and grabbed another foot and literally started pulling the baby out, breech position, feet first. And he kept pulling it down, and I'm seeing this baby pulled out of the mommy, his butt, his chest, and then he delivered both these arms. And the lady's in stirrups, just like you have a baby or just like you're having an ob/gyn examination. And the baby, the only thing that was supporting the baby was the doctor was holding it in with his two fingers, holding the neck in to where the head was just inside the mommy.
And the baby was kicking his feet, hanging there, moving his little fingers and his little arms. I couldn't believe – I don't know what I thought killed it in those three days, but he was moving and I kept watching that baby move. And I kept thinking to myself, this isn't happening, and I thought I was going to pass out. And I kept telling myself, I'm a professional, I can handle this, you know, this is right, this is supposed to be, and I'm supposed to be able to handle this, I'm a nurse. He then took a pair of scissors and jammed them in the back of the baby's head. And the baby jerked out, like a startle reflex, like a baby does if you throw him up a little bit and they jump. And then the baby was real rigid. He then opened up the scissors to make a hole. He took a high-powered suction machine with a catheter and stuck it in that hole and suctioned the baby's brains out. And the baby went completely limp.
And I have seen that in my mind a thousand or more times, of that baby, watching the life just drain out of it. And like I said before, I've seen babies die in my hands, I've had people die in my hands. But it wasn't anything like seeing that vision of watching it. …
He pulled the head out, he cut the umbilical cord and threw it in a pan, and delivered the placenta and threw it in the same pan, he covered it up and took it out. Well, this mommy wanted to see her baby. …
... She held that baby in her arms and she screamed and prayed to God...to forgive her, and for that baby to forgive her, and she held it and rocked it, and told him that she loved him. And I looked in that baby's face, and he had the most perfect, angelic face I've ever seen, and I just kept thinking, he's an angel now, he's in heaven. And I couldn't take it. In all the years I've been a nurse, I lost it. And I pardoned myself and excused myself and I ran to the bathroom and I cried and I prayed. 
