M2RB: Sex Pistols
Dr. Anthony Levatino is a pro-life physician from New Mexico but,
before having a change of heart on the issue of abortion he was an OBGYN
who also performed abortions.
Levatino did as many as 1,200 abortions — some of them after 20 weeks
of pregnancy. Then, after his daughter died in a tragic automobile
accident, he re-evaluated his position on abortion and stopped doing
abortions.
Today, Dr. Levatino told members of a Congressional committee that they should support a bill sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks that would ban abortions nationwide aft 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Levatino’s full testimony before the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice appears below:
Chairman
Franks and distinguished members of the subcommittee, my name is
Anthony Levatino. I am a board-certified obstetrician gynecologist. I
received my medical degree from Albany Medical College in Albany, NY in
1976 and completed my OB-GYN residency training at Albany Medical Center
in 1980.
In my 33-year career, I have been privileged to practice obstetrics
and gynecology in both private and university settings. From June 1993
until September 2000, I was associate professor of OB-GYN at the Albany
Medical College serving at different times as both medical student
director and residency program director. I have also dedicated many
years to private practice and currently operate a solo gynecology
practice in Las Cruces, NM. I appreciate your kind invitation to address
issues related to the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child
Protection Act (H.R.1797).
During my residency training and during my first five years of
private practice, I performed both first and second trimester abortions.
During my residency in the late 1970s,second trimester abortions were
typically performed using saline infusion or, occasionally,
prostaglandin instillation techniques. These procedures were difficult,
expensive and necessitated that patients go through labor to abort their
pre-born children. By 1980, at the time I entered private practice
first in Florida and then in upstate New York, those of us in the
abortion industry were looking for a more efficient method of second
trimester abortion.
The Suction D&E procedure offered clear advantages over older
installation methods. The procedure was much quicker and never ran the
risk of a live birth. Understand that my partner and I were not running
an abortion clinic. We practiced general obstetrics and gynecology but
abortion was definitely part of that practice. Relatively few
gynecologists in upstate NY would perform such a procedure and we saw an
opportunity to expand our abortion practice.
I performed first trimester suction D&C abortions in my office up
to 10 weeks from last menstrual period and later procedures in an
outpatient hospital setting. From 1981 through February 1985, I
performed approximately 1200 abortions. Over 100 of them were second
trimester Suction D&E procedures up to 24 weeks gestation.
Imagine if you can that you are a pro-choice
obstetrician/gynecologist like I once was. Your patient today is 24
weeks pregnant. At twenty-four weeks from last menstrual period, her
uterus is two finger-breadths above the umbilicus.
If you could see her baby, which is quite easy on an ultrasound, she
would be as long as your hand plus a half from the top of her head to
the bottom of her rump not counting the legs. Your patient has been
feeling her baby kick for the last 2 months or more but now she is
asleep on an operating room table and you are there to help her with her
problem pregnancy.
The first task is remove the laminaria that had earlier been placed
in the cervix to dilate it sufficiently to allow the procedure you are
about to perform. With that accomplished, direct your attention to the
surgical instruments arranged on a small table to your right. The first
instrument you reach for is a 14-French suction catheter. It is clear
plastic and about nine inches long. It has a bore through the center
approximately ¾ of an inch in diameter.Picture yourself introducing this
catheter through the cervix and instructing the circulating nurse to
turn on the suction machine which is connected through clear plastic
tubing to the catheter. What you will see is a pale yellow fluid that
looks a lot like urine coming through the catheter into a glass bottle
on the suction machine. This is the amniotic fluid that surrounded the
baby to protect her.
With suction complete, look for your Sopher clamp. This instrument is
about thirteen inches long and made of stainless steel. At the end are
located jaws about 2 ½ inches long and about ¾ of an inch wide with rows
of sharp ridges or teeth. This instrument is for grasping and crushing
tissue. When it gets hold of something, it does not let go. A second
trimester D&E abortion is a blind procedure. The baby can be in any
orientation or position inside the uterus. Picture yourself reaching in
with the Sopher clamp and grasping anything you can.
At twenty-four weeks gestation, the uterus is thin and soft so be
careful not to perforate or puncture the walls. Once you have grasped
something inside, squeeze on the clamp to set the jaws and pull
hard–really hard. You feel something let go and out pops a fully formed
leg about six inches long. Reach in again and grasp whatever you can.
Set the jaw and pull really hard once again and out pops an arm about
the same length. Reach in again and again with that clamp and tear out
the spine, intestines, heart and lungs.
The toughest part of a D&E abortion is extracting the baby’s
head. The head of a baby that age is about the size of a large plum and
is now free floating inside the uterine cavity. You can be pretty sure
you have hold of it if the Sopher clamp is spread about as far as your
fingers will allow. You will know you have it right when you crush d own
on the clamp and see white gelatinous material coming through the
cervix. That was the baby’s brains. You can then extract the skull
pieces. Many times a little face will come out and stare back at you.
Congratulations! You have just successfully performed a second
trimester Suction D&E abortion. You just affirmed her right to
choose.
If you refuse to believe that this procedure inflicts severe pain on that unborn child, please think again.
Before I close, I want to make a comment on the necessity and
usefulness of utilizing second and third trimester abortion to save
women’s lives. I often hear the argument that we must keep abortion
legal in order to save women’s lives in cases of life threatening
conditions that can and do arise in pregnancy.
Albany Medical Center where I worked for over seven years is a
tertiary referral center that accepts patients with life threatening
conditions related to or caused by pregnancy. I personally treated
hundreds of women with such conditions in my tenure there. There are
several conditions that can arise or worsen typically during the late
second or third trimester of pregnancy that require immediate care. In
many of those cases, ending or “terminating” the pregnancy, if you
prefer, can be life saving. But is abortion a viable treatment option in
this setting? I maintain that it usually, if not always, is not.
Before a Suction D&E procedure can be performed, the cervix must
first be sufficiently dilated. In my practice, this was accomplished
with serial placement of laminaria. Laminaria is a type of sterilized
seaweed that absorbs water over several hours and swells to several
times its original diameter. Multiple placements of several laminaria at
a time are absolutely required prior to attempting a suction D&E.
In the mid second trimester, this requires approximately 36 hours to
accomplish. When utilizing the D&X abortion procedure, popularly
known as Partial-Birth Abortion, this process requires three days as
explained by Dr. Martin Haskell in his 1992 paper that first described
this type of abortion.
In cases where a mother’s life is seriously threatened by her
pregnancy, a doctor more often than not doesn’t have 36 hours, much less
72 hours, to resolve the problem. Let me illustrate with a real -life
case that I managed while at the Albany Medical Center. A patient
arrived one night at 28 weeks gestation with severe pre-eclampsia or
toxemia.
Her blood pressure on admission was 220/160. As you are probably
aware, a normal blood pressure is approximately 120/80. This patient’s
pregnancy was a threat to her life and the life of her unborn child. She
could very well be minutes or hours away from a major stroke. This case
was managed successfully by rapidly stabilizing the patient’s blood
pressure and “terminating” her pregnancy by Cesarean section. She and
her baby did well. This is a typical case in the world of high-risk
obstetrics. In most such cases, any attempt to perform an abortion “to
save the mother’s life” would entail undue and dangerous delay in
providing appropriate, truly life-saving care.
During my time at Albany Medical Center I managed hundreds of such
cases by “terminating”pregnancies to save mother’s lives. In all those
hundreds of cases, the number of unborn children that I had to
deliberately kill was zero.
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