BEHIND THE DOOR

Behind the abortion clinic door
Unique book documents unseen culture's devastating toll on women and workers
Posted: January 18, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern

Editor's note: Mark Crutcher's heavily documented probe into the culture of abortion clinics resulted in a groundbreaking book, "Lime 5: Exploited by Choice." Crutcher, president of the pro-life group Life Dynamics, used public records and first-hand accounts to uncover abortion's devastating and often gruesome toll, not only on unborn children, but on women and abortion providers. Since it was published in 1996, the evidence has only mounted, contends Crutcher, who spoke to WorldNetDaily yesterday.

QUESTION: Why did you write the book?
ANSWER: We wanted the American people to have an inside view of what goes on beyond the closed and secretive doors of these abortion clinics. Everybody has this view that it's like any other medical environment in which people act in a certain professional manner and everything is clean. We knew that was not the case with the typical abortion clinic, and we wanted to show people the reality. That's another reason we went overboard on the documentation.

Q: What is your most important point?
A: Abortion is not something that can be applied in a way that will benefit women. Abortion is something that is done for the benefit of sexually irresponsible males. I think you can see that no woman is going to profit from having gone into one of these places.

Q: Can you summarize the culture you describe in the book?
A: When someone, whether it be the doctor or clinic receptionist or the nurses, or whomever, once they cross that line of going into the killing business – and believe me they know they are in the killing business, better than anybody else – when that happens, all the other things that normally attend a medical environment evaporate. In other words, their concern about the patient goes away. Their concern about cleanliness, about medical ethics and standards goes away. The abortion industry wants you to think that an abortion clinic is just like any other free standing clinic, except they happen to do abortions rather than some other medical procedure. We want people to understand that's not what's going on here. These places are unique.

Q: From your research, what surprised you the most?
A: We knew about the number of women injured and killed, but the thing that surprised me the most was what we found about the number of women who get sexually assaulted and raped inside abortion clinics. When I did the initial table of contents there was not a chapter to deal with that, because we didn't think we had any reason to believe it was common. We had heard about it in isolated instances. But as we did more research, we actually added that chapter to the book because we got so much data. As we continued to research it, we started to find not only that is was common, but we started looking at the nature of the sexual assaults, plus the reasons they would likely occur in an abortion clinic. Once we did that, it became one of those things where you say, "Wow, we should have known this was going on all along. It makes perfect sense."

Q: What leads you to believe this is widespread?
A: About the time we decided that maybe it should be a chapter added to the book, we wondered too, "Were we just coming across an anomaly?" We knew we were coming across many cases, and we just put a small fraction of the total number of cases we had in the book. But we wondered if we were just coming across the exception. We do medical malpractice suits against the abortion industry when they've killed or injured or sexually assaulted someone. And at the time, we had quite a number of cases in which we were involved, as we do at any given time, and I had a young lady helping me here gather the information for the book. I had her go and call all of our clients and ask them outright a question we had never asked, "While you were at the facility, were you the victim of anything sexually inappropriate?" One-third of the clients we called said there were things that happened that were sexually inappropriate. Sometimes it would be a crude comment, all the way up to actual sexual contact or rape.

Q: Why, if the information is so devastating, don't we hear more about it?
A: The main reason we don't hear anything about it is because the people from whom we would hear about it are on the other side. The American news media in this country is so firmly under the control of America's abortion industry that they are not going to report on this. I can absolutely promise you that if I wrote a book in which I documented that the abuses that I talk about here were not going on in abortion clinics but were going on in veterinary clinics, this book would have been on the New York Times bestseller list, because the media would have made sure that we heard about it. But the media is so absolutely the lap dog of the abortion industry that they are not going to report on this stuff. One thing that is interesting, is we were contacted by ABC News when I began to talk about this book on talk shows, just before its release. We actually provided them with data we had gathered and actually provided names of women who had been the victims of sexual abuse. We even provided them the name of a girl who was currently working at an abortion clinic who was confirming the things we were saying. Once we had done all of that, they came back to us and said they had decided it wasn't a story. In other words, they came to us and said, "How can you prove this to us?" The minute we proved it to them, they said, "Oh well, it's not a story." What we figured out was, they were right, it wasn't a story. Because what their story was going to be was, "Pro-life group accuses abortion industry of X," and then the subtitle, "Charges found to be unsubstantiated." When we were able to substantiate the charges we were making, they were no longer interested.

Q: Has anyone in the abortion industry come back to you with a critique?
A: The interesting thing is, over the years that "Lime 5" has been out, the abortion industry has railed against it saying, "Well, this is an other example of anti-choice extremism and pro-life vigilantism," and all these other platitudes they throw out. The interesting thing here is, not one of them, not one has ever denied that what we're saying is true. I think that one of the problems they have is … the book is 319 pages long with over 730 endnotes citing the documentation we give. And these endnotes, by the way, are not pro-life sources. They are medical journal articles, death certificates, autopsies, documents from the federal government and many from the abortion industry itself. Once they see that, it's pretty hard to deny the reality of it. They come out here and attack us with all sorts of platitudes that they will throw out very casually, but they cannot refute the truth of it. I asked one of them one time on a talk show – she was doing this thing, saying, well, this is just another book by these anti-abortion extremists, etc. And I said, "Ok, I'm an anti-abortion extremist, the question is, 'Is what I am saying true or not? Will you sit here and tell me that the documentation that we've got, which is mostly court records, is erroneous?'" She wouldn't answer. The one complaint I have from people, from a technical standpoint, is that we over-documented what we put in. I said, "Yeah, I know, we could have left out a lot of that documentation." But by putting that documentation in there, it was like a hatchet right between the eyes for our opponents. They couldn't deny it.

Q: What has your research shown since the book was published in 1996?
A: Just more of the same. At the time I wrote "Lime 5," we had enough documentation that easily the book could have been 2,500 to 3,000 pages long. The only thing that is different today is that I would have enough documentation, if I were to do it again, so that it would be 10,000 pages long. Really, I think I make this point in the book, the abortion industry is in a really bad situation in that in order to correct the things we've talked about in this book, they would have to have the ability to recruit or attract a much higher caliber of practitioner to do abortions. The problem is, they are never going to be able to do that, because what we now know, and what this book points out and documents, is that these things occur because abortion can only attract the washouts and the losers and the moral degenerates of the medical community. Well, by nature, they are not going to be able to do any better than this. As a matter of fact, I think we have some quotes in the book, and more since then, where the abortion industry is basically saying the same thing. These are the kind of doctors we get, they do these things. You are not going to get a top-flight, successful OBGYN to go to work at an abortion clinic. It's not going to happen. Abortion is always going to be the red-light district of medicine. If abortion is legal for another 10 minutes or another 10,000 years, this is how it's going to be practiced.

Q: You have offered in your book a "contract with American women." What is that about?
A: These are ideas we gleaned from our research to cure the problems we identified. Assuming that abortion is going to be legal, these are the things that they could do to help make it at least safe for the mom. Obviously it's never going to be safe for the baby. The baby dies every time. But at least if you're going to make it legal, these are the things they could do to make it safe for the mom. The problem is they aren't going to do it. The abortion industry will fight tooth and nail against these requirements. And every one of them are things we put in there because we saw their absence causing severe injuries or death to women. But they are never going to correct that because if they do, they will raise their level above the level of practitioners they are able to attract.

Q: This month is the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision. Do you have any reflections?
A: We've had well over 40 million babies butchered in these abortion clinics. Not to mention an untold number of moms as well. And it's obviously a tragic part of American history and one the country should hang its head in shame over. The good news, that I can tell you, is the pro-life movement is winning this battle going away. There is no doubt about it. The abortion clinics are closing down all over this country. I wrote another book called "Access," talking about that very issue. The abortion industry is collapsing. And even the abortion industry has admitted that. Polling over the last few years, including in the last few days, has shown consistently that pro-life sentiment in America is growing. American people are starting to sense, I believe, that there is something terribly wrong here. That it's not about choice. It's not about whether people are going to have the freedom to control their own bodies. It's about much more than that. And they are starting to get very uncomfortable. And every time there are revelations about the outrageous things that go on in the abortion industry, more and more people get this uneasy feeling that something is not quite right here. One poll taken in December, the Zogby poll, found that 32 percent of the people said they had changed their opinion on abortion in the last 10 years. Of the 32 percent who said they had changed their opinion on abortion, there was a five-to-one ratio between the ones who said they had become more pro-life and the ones who said they had become more pro-choice. So the pro-life media is winning this battle going away. Of course, the secular media is never going to tell you that. They are not going to tell you their side is getting their head clubbed in. But that is what is happening. And the abortion industry is getting more and more vicious as they get more and more desperate.