Abortion Doctors: Salary and Experience

A few years ago I read an excellent book called The Marketing of Evil.  I highly recommend reading it, and it’s available for only $4.95 at the previous link.  The book includes a chapter about abortion, a copy of which I found online here.

I should stress that the following is based on anecdotal testimony of a few former abortion doctors many years ago, so the salary information and financial practices described below are not necessarily indicative of the entire industry then or now.

Even so, there are two aspects to this chapter that I find highly informative.

1.  The abortion industry is lucrative.

“Why do doctors do abortions?” asks Anthony Levantino, M.D., an OBGYN who provided abortions for his patients in his Albany, N.Y., office for eight years. . . .

“Along the way,” says Levantino, “you find out that you can make a lot of money doing abortions. I worked 9 to 5. I was never bothered at night. I never had to go out on weekends. And I made more money than my obstetrician brethren. And I didn’t have to face the liability. That’s a big factor, a huge perk. I almost never, ever had to worry about her lawyer bothering me.

“In my practice, we were averaging between $250 and $500 per abortion – and it was cash. It’s the one time as a doctor you can say, ‘Either pay me up front or I’m not going to take care of you.’ Abortion is totally elective. Either you have the money or you don’t. And they get it.”

Cash payment is common in the abortion industry, says Everett.

“I’ve seen doctors walk out after three hours’ work and split $4,500 dollars between them on a Saturday morning – more if you go longer into the day,” she said. “Of the four clinics I’ve worked in, none of them ever showed that they collected the doctors’ money; they collect it separately, and do not show it on any of the records in those clinics. That way, the doctors are independent contractors and the clinic doesn’t have to be concerned with their malpractice insurance, and doesn’t have to report their income to the IRS.”

“Every single transaction that we did,” adds Whitten, “was cash money. We wouldn’t take a check, or even a credit card. If you didn’t have the money, forget it. It wasn’t unusual at all for me to take $10,000 to $15,000 a day to the bank – in cash.”

Lets see, if you made $10,000 a day, multiplied by about 240 workdays in a year, that’s $2.4 million.  In a year.  $12 million every five years.  Even if these doctors made just one third of that, we’d still be talking pro sports money here.  But these doctors just couldn’t stomach the work after a while…

2.  Abortion is a gruesome experience for the doctor.

Warning, this is a bit difficult to read:

“One night a lady delivered and I was called to come and see her because she was uncontrollable,” says David Brewer, M.D., of Glen Ellyn, Ill. As a military physician in Ft. Rucher, Ala., Brewer performed abortions for 10 years. “I went in the room, and she was going to pieces; she was having a nervous breakdown, screaming and thrashing. The nurses were upset because they couldn’t get any work done, and all the other patients were upset because this lady was screaming. I walked in, and here was her little saline abortion baby kicking. It had been born alive, and was kicking and moving for a little while before it finally died of those terrible burns, because the salt solution gets into the lungs and burns the lungs, too.”

“I’ll tell you one thing about D&E,” says Levantino. “You never have to worry about a baby’s being born alive. I won’t describe D&E other than to say that, as a doctor, you are sitting there tearing, and I mean tearing – you need a lot of strength to do it – arms and legs off of babies and putting them in a stack on top of a table.”

If you are prepared to read it, here is a description of D&E in a case before the United States Supreme Court.

So what changed Dr. Levantino’s and Dr. Brewer’s minds about what they were doing in the face of millions of dollars of profit?  Dr. Levantino’s conscience was awoken when he lost his own child and he could no longer carry out the death of another person’s child.  Dr. Brewer’s experience was a bit more abrupt:

One particular abortion changed Brewer’s life. “I remember an experience as a resident on a hysterotomy (a late-term abortion delivered by caesarean section). I remember seeing the baby move underneath the sack of membranes as the caesarean incision was made, before the doctor broke the water.”

The thought came to me, ‘My God, that’s a person.’ Then he broke the water. And when he broke the water, it was like I had a pain in my heart, just like when I saw the first suction abortion. And then he delivered the baby, and I couldn’t touch it. I wasn’t much of an assistant. I just stood there, and the reality of what was going on finally began to seep into my calloused brain and heart.

They took that little baby that was making little sounds and moving and kicking, and set it on the table in a cold, stainless steel bowl. And every time I would look over while we were repairing the incision in the uterus and finishing the Caesarean, I would see that little person kicking and moving in that bowl.

And it kicked and moved less and less, of course, as time went on. I can remember going over and looking at that baby when we were done with the surgery and the baby was still alive. You could see the chest was moving and the heart beating, and the baby would try to take a little breath like that, and it really hurt inside, and it began to educate me as to what abortion really was.

Eventually, your conscience catches up with you one way or another.