Woman chooses abortion believing baby is a boy, but abortionist withholds the truth

In her memoir, abortionist Christine Henneberg wrote about a woman who had an abortion because she believed she was carrying a boy and wanted a girl. 

Henneberg, who watched the abortion via ultrasound as she committed it, saw that the child was, in fact, a girl — but didn’t tell the woman. Instead, she allowed the woman to believe she had aborted a male baby instead of the girl she wanted.

The woman was 14 weeks pregnant. When she was on the abortion table, she said, “I didn’t want to be here today, you know.”

Instead of stopping the abortion and discussing alternatives, or trying to make sure the patient truly wanted an abortion, Ronnie, the abortion worker assisting Henneberg, simply said, “It’s okay. Nobody wants to end up here.”

Apparently, a woman saying she doesn’t really want an abortion is business as usual in Henneberg’s abortion facility — no need for more counseling.

The woman having the abortion continued to talk, mentioning the two little boys she had at home. Henneberg writes:

From my secluded, light-filled perch between the woman’s legs, I glanced up at Ronnie. A silent sigh passed between us. We both knew this was the best way to get a woman through these 10 minutes: get her talking about the kids she already has.

“These 10 minutes” refers to the time it takes to commit a suction aspiration abortion. These abortion providers seem to find it easy to discuss pregnant women’s other children as they kill the babies in their wombs.

Henneberg says of the woman, “[h]er inhibitions [were] down, narcotic pulsing through her veins.” This, Henneberg implies, is the reason the woman continued talking, saying:

Every single morning I’m getting sick. That’s how come I gotta do this, you know… I mean; we want more kids. But we want a girl this time. And when I got to be three months along and I was still getting sick every morning, my mama said, ‘You know you gotta go in there to the clinic.’

‘Mm-hmm,’ Ronnie cooed to her. I kept my head bent low as I peered down the speculum.

She said, ‘You know you don’t never get sick after three months if you havin’ a girl.’”

But both Ronnie and Henneberg could see, clearly, on the ultrasound, that the baby they were aborting was a girl.

Henneberg had already dilated the woman’s cervix and broken her water. She writes, “There was nothing to be said or done. Suddenly, forcefully, I was the one without options — the doctor. Every choice, every freedom, I had yielded to her.”

Even if it was too late to stop the abortion, the abortion facility was negligent in not giving the pregnant woman proper counseling. If they had asked her about her reasons for choosing abortion, they would have known she was under the misconception that her baby was a boy, and they could have informed her that her child was female.

Instead, Henneberg aborted the little girl, and watched her death on the ultrasound screen:

On the ultrasound screen… I watched her fetus tumble under the tip of the cannula, somersaulting with every flick of my wrist, then disappearing from the cushioned warmth of her sacrum and whipping through my hands—gone.

She never told the woman that her child was a girl. This mother will never know that she aborted a daughter and not a son — unless she somehow manages to read Henneberg’s book and recognize her own story within it.

Henneberg’s observations also show that stories from former abortion workers about seeing babies aborted on the ultrasound screen are true. Henneberg could clearly see the baby’s features as she was being aborted and could tell that the baby was a girl. The child was only 14 weeks along, but clearly visible as a girl on the ultrasound screen.

Source: Christine Henneberg Boundless: An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother (San Francisco, California, 2022) 265-267

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