The Abortion Reporter

The late August edition of Newsweek profiles someone they call "The Abortion Evangelist." Leroy Carhart of Omaha, Nebraska was a colleague and also a friend of notorious and recently-murdered late term abortionist George Tiller. The two were confidants. They'd call each other to discuss tough patients.  Carhart says, "We became each other's therapists."  In their line of work you'd need therapy.

 The Newsweek piece points out that, every third Sunday for five years, Dr. Carhart would perform abortions in the morning at his Omaha clinic and then drive five hours to Wichita, Kansas so he could spend Monday assisting Dr. Tiller.Carhart didn't do late term abortions at his own clinic, only at Tiller's. These two are the most famous of the very few, probably less than ten, abortionists willing to perform the procedure in a woman's third trimester. But Carhart has vowed to mentor others so as not to let the process die with him. In fact he's already got two trainees.

Two cases bearing Carhart's name have gone to the United States Supreme Court. He challenged Nebraska's Partial Birth Abortion Ban and, in 2000, the high court sided with him, overturning the ban.  The procedure involved partially delivering a baby, suctioning its brains, then completing the delivery.  Really...infanticide. Congress passed a national ban in 2003. Carhart challenged it. This time the Supreme Court upheld the ban on Partial Birth Abortion.     

Carhart now performs an equally gruesome, but still legal type of late term abortion.

What's unusual about this story is not its pro-abortion bias. That's normal for Newsweek. It's that the writer, Sarah Kliff, has become a story herself. She's covered abortion for Newsweek for two years.  She describes herself as "well-versed in abortion policy," the arguments, the legislation, even the passion.  In a separate, more personal web column she writes, "both sides feel abortion is an issue worth waging war over."

In this same column, Sarah describes her first experience actually observing abortions.  It happened during her visit to Carhart's clinic.  Each was a first trimester abortion, a ten to fifteen-minute procedure... over before she knew it.  She saw "a pinkish fluid" flowing through a suction tube, the "contents" of the uterus. To Sarah there wasn't the gross-out factor she'd kind of been expecting.  It was something different:  an emotional reaction to the patients and their families.  She'd learned their stories and she realized no one wanted to be there.  Some were convinced they were "where they needed to be." Others weren't ...quite.

 What a contrast:  Leroy Carhart, so certain, so committed to abortion, he won't take a long vacation because, he says, "you can't leave women waiting."     He has medical licenses in seven states in case another abortionist is hurt, retires or is, like Tiller, killed, so he can do what he believes needs to be done. Then there's his profiler, Sarah Kliff , likely still pro-choice, but....now...much less comfortably so.