Dark Horses

But when the fetus does break through—most often in Dr. Denes’ commentaries, not in the interviews—it almost always creates a crisis the reader can feel. One example should suffice. The author goes into the room where the abortuses are kept until, at the end of the long day’s work, they are gathered into plastic bags and taken “by special messenger,” in a city taxi, to a “sister” hospital that enjoys the use of an incinerator. She steadies herself in “this garbage-can-filled graveyard” until she can “look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person in there floating in a bloody liquid . . .” She has to call the nurse to put the lid back on. As I say, that should be enough for most people. But the book is full of this kind of thing. Guilt and gore, in saecula saeculorum. Sometimes you wonder how she can go on. Indeed, she tells us, she had to take frequent breaks, once for several months, in her interviewing. But she sticks to it, no more able to stop than to exorcise herself. From time to time she pauses to remind the reader, and herself, that it’s really all good clean scientific research she’s engaged in, as necessary and socially justified as those abortions.

But a few pages on she’s shocking us again: “In my interviews . . . the word ‘murder’ surfaces again and again, and it sticks on the tongue like a searing coal of fire that one knows will do further damage whether it is swallowed or spat out.” Then up to the “Saline Floor” where it’s horrible because the babies are so big and real, and so hideously tortured and burned by salt solutions. Then down to the “D&C Floor” where it’s “better”—the babies are smaller, but their tiny, “perfectly formed” limbs and heads come spinning out of the suction tube, along with so much blood that even the doctors, fast-working, efficient professionals to a man, have trouble carrying on.

MS

About the Author

M. Stanton Evans

But when the fetus does break through—most often in Dr. Denes’ commentaries, not in the interviews—it almost always creates a crisis the reader can feel. One example should suffice. The author goes into the room where the abortuses are kept until, at the end of the long day’s work, they are gathered into plastic bags and taken “by special messenger,” in a city taxi, to a “sister” hospital that enjoys the use of an incinerator. She steadies herself in “this garbage-can-filled graveyard” until she can “look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person in there floating in a bloody liquid . . .” She has to call the nurse to put the lid back on. As I say, that should be enough for most people. But the book is full of this kind of thing. Guilt and gore, in saecula saeculorum. Sometimes you wonder how she can go on. Indeed, she tells us, she had to take frequent breaks, once for several months, in her interviewing. But she sticks to it, no more able to stop than to exorcise herself. From time to time she pauses to remind the reader, and herself, that it’s really all good clean scientific research she’s engaged in, as necessary and socially justified as those abortions.

But a few pages on she’s shocking us again: “In my interviews . . . the word ‘murder’ surfaces again and again, and it sticks on the tongue like a searing coal of fire that one knows will do further damage whether it is swallowed or spat out.” Then up to the “Saline Floor” where it’s horrible because the babies are so big and real, and so hideously tortured and burned by salt solutions. Then down to the “D&C Floor” where it’s “better”—the babies are smaller, but their tiny, “perfectly formed” limbs and heads come spinning out of the suction tube, along with so much blood that even the doctors, fast-working, efficient professionals to a man, have trouble carrying on.