The 7 Creepiest Parts of a Story Intended to Humanize an Abortionist
A writer added "humanizing" anecdotes to her profile of an abortionist — but it just came off as creepy.
Writer Kayla Webley just can’t keep the creepy out of a lengthy profile of an abortionist published in Marie Claire this month, despite her efforts to portray the doctor as a warm and compassionate caregiver.
The profile is part of a two-part series from the magazine on a mother’s “right” to have an abortion, and it’s chock full of “humanizing” anecdotes, and facts and figures clearly intended to de-stigmatize abortion and abortionists.
Here are the seven creepiest parts of the story.
1. The featured image looks like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. Abortionist Colleen McNicholas sits under a glaring lamp in an otherwise dark room, looking intently into a monitor as she prepares to reach into the womb of the woman laid out right in front of her, with feet in stirrups. Just behind her is the metal tool she’ll use to pull the unborn child out of the woman, ending its life in the process.
2. Right off the bat, the writer points out that McNicholas stopped at a bagel shop on her way to the office to grab food for her co-workers, implying that this small act makes her a caring person.
McNicholas pulls into a spot — she likes to park in front of the fence nearest the protesters so patients don’t have to — and heads to the entrance, carrying two dozen bagels she brought for the clinic’s staff.
Nothing like an everything bagel with cream cheese before a day spent slaughtering the unborn. Who’s hungry?
3. McNicholas munches on that bagel all day, and does not take a lunch break.
She has just enough time to change into scrubs, shove a few bites of a bagel into her mouth (she’ll munch on this one bagel all day in lieu of a lunch break), and wash her hands for the required three minutes before it’s time for the first abortion.
The implication here is that McNicholas is commendably willing to sacrifice her physical needs for the sake of her work. But picture what’s really going on here. She pulls another fetus out of the womb limb from limb, disposes of the remains, and then … reaches for a bite of her bagel? The quality of that bagel has got to deteriorate pretty substantially by the end of the day.
4. The story touts a kill-count to build on the idea that McNicholas is really hardworking, citing one eight-hour work day in which she ended the lives of 31 unborn babies.
By the end of her eight-hour workday, she will have terminated 31 pregnancies … It’s an exhausting schedule (“Good thing you learn how to not sleep in med school, huh?” McNicholas says, laughing), but one she feels she has to maintain.
That’s 1.29 dead fetuses every 20 minutes. No wonder she doesn’t have time for lunch.
5. McNicholas has a love for abortion that drives her to constantly crisscross the country, hungry to unsaddle the world of as many burdensome pregnancies as possible.
“Part of the problem with being so committed and feeling so passionate about an issue is that it’s hard to say no,” McNicholas, 35, says. “It’s hard to say, ‘I can’t do that,’ because that means somebody is going without care …”
6. In fact, she says the hardest part of her job is saying no to an abortion, because a woman has carried the fetus to the point when state or federal law determines it has become human. Note that it’s not just pro-life advocates who find this odd.
“Lots of people assume the hardest part of my job is the work — abortion after abortion, how sad that is,” she says. “But the truth is, the hardest part of my job is when I have to say no to somebody.”
7. It’s not weird McNicholas loves performing abortions though, according to Marie Claire, because she’s not ending the lives of fetuses or children, she’s simply suctioning “pregnancies” out of the womb.
Whether McNicholas is performing a medical abortion, where the patient takes one pill at the clinic and a single dose of four others within the next 48 hours at home, or a surgical abortion, where the pregnancy is suctioned out of the uterus, she only needs about 10 minutes with each patient.
Bonus round. The woman who took over murdered abortionist George Tiller’s practice has not one, but six framed photos of the guy hanging in her office. Six.
Founder and CEO Julie Burkhart heads both the foundation and the clinic. She worked for Tiller for seven years and has six photos of him framed in her office. Burkhart says she “felt a calling” to reopen the clinic after his death.
Copyright 2016 The Daily Caller News Foundation
