|
|
|
Truth
is powerful and inbodies those who seek it with an open mind. |
|
|
EX-ABORTIONIST
|
|
Dr.
Anthony Levatino has practiced obstetrics and gynecology
since 1980. As a part of his medical training, Dr.
Levatino was taught to do abortions.
Dr. Levatino provided abortions for his patients in
his office for eight years. In 1985 he quit doing
|
|
| abortions
and is now in private practice as an obstetrician gynecologist.
I have never been involved in a large-scale abortion
mill, a business that was set up for the sole purpose
of performing abortions. My experiences are perhaps
a bit more universal in terms of obstetricians and gynecologists
in the country who were trained to do abortions during
their residencies and then continued doing so as part
of their private practice, but not even the major part.
Certainly it was never a major part of our private practice.
My partner and I, however, were relatively important
in the Albany area for one infamous fact, which to this
day I regret. Our group was just about the only group
that was performing late abortions, D&E procedures,
Dilatation and Evacuation. And we received referrals
from all over the area in our part of the state, even
from neighboring counties 70 to 80 miles away. We had
a lot of patients. I’ve never actually counted.
I’m glad I can’t say that I’m responsible
for 50,000 plus abortions, but I know I’ve done
hundreds of the procedures. That’s direct, hands-on
involvement, with the forceps in your hand, reaching
into somebody’s uterus and tearing out a baby.
Why do doctors do abortions? There are many reasons.
It’s profitable, there’s a lot of money in
it! But there’s a philosophical things that come
first. As I’m fond of telling people, if you are
pro-choice and you happen to be a gynecologist, then
it’s up to you to take the instruments in hand
and actively perform an abortion. It’s the most
natural association in the world. Along the way you
find out you make a lot of money doing abortions. In
my practice we were averaging between $250 and $500
for an abortion, and it was cash. There are other reasons;
they’re perhaps no less important. I’ve heard
many times from other obstetricians: Well, I’m
not really pro-abortion, I’m pro-woman. How many
times have you heard that one? The women’s groups
in this country, they’re not alone, but they’ve
done a very good job selling that bill of goods to the
population. That somehow destroying a life is pro-woman.
But a lot of obstetricians use that justification to
themselves, and I can tell you, a lot of them believe
it. I used to. It’s not hard to be convinced of
it. During my residency, at least once, sometimes twice
a week, I would be the resident whose turn it was to
sit down and do the four, or five, or six suction D&C
abortions that morning. When the abortionist finishes
a suction D&C, he has to open a little suction bag
and he has to literally reassemble the child. He has
to do that because he wants to make sure he didn’t
leave anything behind. I had complications, just like
everybody else. I have perforated uteruses. I have had
all kinds of problems-bleeding, infection-Lord knows
how many of those women are sterile now. I remember
getting called down to my chairman’s office because
a young lady that I had done an abortion on showed up,
and the abortion had been incomplete. I had not done
my job right, and she passed an arm or a leg and she
freaked out because she didn’t realize what had
happened. My discomfort came at that point because there
was a tremendous conflict going on inside me. Here I
was doing my D&Cs, five and six a week, and I was
doing salines on a nightly basis whenever I was on call.
The resident on call got the job of doing the salines
and there would usually be two or three of those. They
were horrible because you saw one intact, whole baby
being born, and sometimes they were alive. That was
very, very frightening. It was a very stomach-turning
kind of existence. Yet, I was doing that at the same
time that my wife and I were trying to have a child,
and we were having difficulty with that. We had been
married a couple of years at that point- and no baby.
Suddenly, we realized we had an infertility problem.
I kept doing abortions, I didn’t stop. But it was
tough. We started desperately looking for a baby to
adopt, and I was throwing them in the garbage at the
rate of nine and ten a week. It even occurred to me
then: I wish one of these people would just let me have
their child. But it doesn’t work that way. So the
conflict was there. Most of the time in our practice
was spent providing obstetrical care for people who
wanted their children. It is very common for an obstetrician
to have an ultrasound machine. We use that ultrasound
machine on a daily basis. As a doctor, you know that
these are children; you know that these are human beings
with arms and legs and heads and they move around and
they are very active. But you get reminded – every
time you put that scanner down on somebody’s uterus
– you are reminded. Because you see the children
in there – hearts beating, arms flinging. We have
a ball with it. It is a lot of fun. We have people coming
in who have bleeding and who are afraid they may have
a miscarriage—now this is someone who wants to
have their child. There is no better news for me than
to put that scanner on them at seven and eight weeks
and show them a heartbeat and say: Your baby is okay.
You do that as an obstetrician all the time. And then,
an hour later, you change your clothes, walk into an
operating room and do an abortion. If you have any heart
at all, it affects you. We were lucky. My wife and I
were very fortunate because we had gone through all
the usual adoption agencies trying to find our child.
We ran up against one road block after another, until
suddenly I got the bright idea: I know 45 obstetricians
on a first-name basis in this town, one of them has
to have a baby available for private adoption. So, we
advertised. We talked to every obstetrician in town.
It still took four months, but one day we got a call,
I will never forget that day. Three days later we had
adopted a healthy little girl. We were satisfied. We
called her Heather. After graduation I joined a gynecologist
in the Albany area. My partner did D&E abortions.
In fact, he was the referral center for D&E abortions
in the area. So, I learned to do D&E abortions.
Now I had a family of my own, and there was no pressure
to adopt a child anymore. As often happens, although
the books say it is not supposed to, after we adopted
a child, after years of trying, we had a child of our
own. So we had a boy and a girl, and we were perfectly
happy with that. And I learned the grizzly business
of D&E abortion. Again, I didn’t particularly
like doing abortions, but my partner did abortions and
I didn’t object to it morally, so we worked together.
I was on salary at the time, as a new partner, so it
made not a whit of difference on my income. I did it
to be agreeable. It’s a lousy reason in retrospect,
but that was my reason. That was our business for years
to come. Life was good until June 23, 1984. On that
date, I was on call, but I was at home at the time.We
had some friends over, and our children were playing
in the back of the yard. At 7:25 that evening, we heard
the screech of brakes out in front of the house. We
ran outside and Heather was lying in the road. We did
everything we could, and she died. When you lose a child,
your child, life is very different. Everything changes.
All of the sudden, the idea of a person’s life
becomes very real. It is not an embryology course anymore.
It’s not just a couple of hundred dollars. It’s
the real thing. It’s your child you buried. The
old discomforts came back in spades. I couldn’t
even think about a D&E abortion anymore. No way.
I tried to carry on business as usual, and I did just
the office abortions for the next few months. My wife
has said that she wishes she had videotapes of me during
that time. We were under enough strain as it was, but
if I knew I had an abortion scheduled in the office
the next day, I got very surly. I was hard to be around.
I got very, very rough with the staff in our office.
Every time I was asked to schedule an abortion, I got
very angry. I began feeling that people were doing something
to me. That was ridiculous—I was doing it to myself.
After a few months of that I started to realize—This
is somebody’s child. I lost my child, someone who
was very precious to us. And now I am taking somebody’s
child and I am tearing him right out of their womb.
I am killing somebody’s child. That is what it
took to get me to change. My own sense of self-esteem
went down the tubes. I began to feel like a paid assassin.
That’s exactly what I was. It got to the point
where it just wasn’t worth it to me anymore. It
was costing me too much personally. All the money in
the world wouldn’t have made a difference. So I
quit. I slept a lot better at night after that. |
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
