Abortion Instruments — The Grantham Collection
Operation Rescue would like to recommend to you a new web site featuring photos of a collection of abortion instruments. Many are from as early as the 18th century and have been gathered from around the world.
But be forewarned: this collection is nothing less than horrifying.
“The most gruesome medical instruments ever made were designed for abortion,” says collection owner Randi Grantham.
We think you will agree. We pray this site will help you better understand the human suffering caused by abortion and prompt you to do all you can to stop it.
Click here to view The Grantham Collection — Instruments Of Abortion.
February 24th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Do keep in mind these weren’t for gratuitous abortions. These were instruments of desperation, typically used only after the mother had been in labor for several days and the baby died.
You ought not to be giving the impression that doctors were as casual about abortion then as they are now.
February 24th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
horrible. to think men actually took the time to invent instruments to crush babies’ heads.
February 24th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Sarah, at the time, rickets were a huge problem. Lots of girls grew into women with malformed pelvises. A term infant couldn’t pass through intact. The woman would be in labor for days until her uterus ruptured and she died. The baby would have already been killed by the labor.
Typically the “destructive operation” wasn’t done until the baby was already dead from the mother laboring for days.
At the time, a c-section had over an 80% maternal death rate. It was more a post-mortem last-ditch attempt to save the baby of a dead mother than a means of saving the mother’s life, since once you sliced her open odds were she’d either bleed to death or die of infection.
Once the baby died, they needed a way to get it out. Hence those nasty instruments. Obstetrical textbooks of the time stress that one was to wait for the baby to die before proceeding with the destructive operation. Though waiting would pretty much doom the mother, too, due to exhaustion or the risk of uterine rupture.
It was with great joy that obstetricians relegated their cranioclasts to the medical Museum of Horrors. And then in 1992 Haskell brought it back with a flourish, as some new and wonderful instrument of healing.
It’s just an interesting contrast.
February 25th, 2007 at 1:11 am
wow…. :’( that’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen, I had to stop after I read only a few.:(
May God have mercy on America!!
In Christ,
Rose
February 25th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
The only thing I don’t see is the coat hanger.
February 25th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
I am a physician who has delivered about 500 babies. Two of my friends delivered babies in the African bush where health and preventative medicine correspond to that of Europeans during the time these abortion instruments were used. Rarely is pelvic dystocia (deformed pelvis) a problem in the bush and is easily treated by cutting the ligaments of the symphysis pubis.
In 1828 New York passed its first anti-abortion law in an attempt to protect the life of the MOTHER. The death rate from legally allowed abortions was 30%, as opposed to 3% from delivery (The Phoenix of Abortion Freedom, C. Means 1971). Note that the anti-abortion law was passed to protect the mother’s life. The law could not be protecting their life if these aborting mothers were all going to die from pelvic dystocia. I doubt that reasons for aborting in 1828 were any different than any time before. Christina’s argument is a contrived attempt to justify elective/convenience abortions.
For just a minute forget the helpless, totally innocent, unborn baby who was (and is) murdered in the most painful, gruesome method imaginable and consider what happened to the mother.
When viewing these instruments bear in mind that the abortionist was blindly destroying the baby. Before the recent advent of ultrasound doctors delivering twin babies usually did not realize a twin was present until after the first baby was born. It was essentially impossible to feel that there were two babies much less where the parts of the babies were positioned in the uterus. All previous (and for the most part even current) abortions were done blindly with the abortionist feeling his way along. As you can imagine, it is hard to tell from the handle end of an abortion instrument whether you are snaring a baby’s lip or the inside of the mother’s uterus that tightly envelopes the baby. If a part of the uterus is ripped out instead of the baby’s lip, then the mother starts bleeding profusely. This profuse bleeding is not easily noticed because much of it pours into the mother’s abdomen instead of out of the vagina, but then any extra vaginal bleeding blends in with blood already puddling in the vagina from the baby and damaged placenta. With the next jank of tissue seized through the torn uterus a portion of intestine is removed, and in addition to uterine and intestinal bleeding, now fecal material gushes into the mother’s abdomen, and she is doomed to a slow agonizing death from peritonitis if she doesn’t bleed to death first.
Also pay attention to the poor design of many of the instruments as regards infection prevention. Many of the instruments do not break down for adequate cleaning and indeed have non-functional, ornate carvings or groves that collect tissue which decays and supports bacterial growth. Remember that in 1847 before the Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, was able to demonstrate and convince his fellow physicians that simple cleanliness and the bacteriocidal use of chlorine prevented childbed fever, there were extreme years when every single mother at the Maternity Department of the Vienna Lying-in Hospital died of infection from NORMAL deliveries in which no instruments were used at all. How much higher must the infection and death rate be when the pregnancy was aborted using instruments that reached high into the uterus and carried bacteria into the fresh wounds caused by the abortionist.
The butchers who wielded these instruments of agonizing death were (and are) the heartless enemies of mothers and babies.
February 26th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
RE: the absence of the coathanger: Mark Crutcher’s website, lifedynamics.com, shows more a few more recent WDM, a.k.a. abortion instruments, and a larger collection can be viewed at priestsforlife.org and neither of those collections includes a coathanger.
Life Dynamics also lists the NAMES of several hundred women killed by legal abortions performed with those instruments.
I have attended and photographed many abortion-related events, and seen many pro-aborts waving coathangers, but have never heard them NAME ONE woman whose death can be proven to be the result of such a self-inflicted act of destruction, much less produce any written documentation of such a death.
But after Dr. Bernard Nathanson’s expose of NARAL and the propaganda they invented to make legalized abortion on demand more attractive to Americans, who’d believe them now if they came up with one?
Further interesting reading on all this is available at realchoice.0catch.com. Check it out!
February 26th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
“The enormous amount of medical malpractice [the common euphemism for abortion] that exists and flourishes, almost unchecked, in the city of New York, is a theme for most serious consideration. Thousands of human beings are thus murdered before they have seen the light of this world, and thousands upon thousands more of adults are irremediably robbed in constitution, health and happiness.” (“The Evil of the Age,” The New York Times)
“The Civilization of today is opposed to babies, and its basest product is the abortionist. He is the human hyena, and the living, quivering flesh of foolish or unfortunate womanhood is the grave from which he tears his prey. He lives upon the crushed and mangled bodies of tender, breathless infants.” — (“Hellish Earl”, The National Police Gazette)
These comments were published before the New York Times was bought out and transformed into the leftwing propaganda rag that it is now and before abortion was criminalized prior to Roe.
Ca plus ca change, ca plus la meme chose.
Thanks to Dr. Graeser for sharing your insights along these lines.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:53 pm
“Typically the destructive operation wasn’t done until the baby was already dead from the mother laboring for days.” is a patently false statement. For one thing, prolonged labor doesn’t kill the baby; it exhausts the mother.
But let me explain why no one needs to crush the skull of a dead, unborn baby. Before ultrasound we physicians proved that the baby had died in utero by seeing the collapsed fetal skull on x-ray. Not hearing a heartbeat with our primitive fetoscopes usually only meant we were too deaf to detect it so that method of ascertaining fetal life was unreliable. Therefore, after a couple days of no fetal movement x-rays were taken showing the collapsed fetal cranium if the baby was dead. The bones (which in the early unborn baby are not joined together — hence the open anterior and posterior fontanelles felt in babies during the neonatal and early following months) collapsed because the brain which is exceeding gelatinous at that stage quickly liquefies within days after death. The calvarium bones have nothing to hold them out, and they collapse inwardly.
Indeed, I had a patient whose baby died at 4 ½ months gestation, and I was able to remove the baby vaginally needing nothing whatever to collapse the skull — it had already collapsed on its own.
No, these craniotomy instruments were (and are) used to smash the skulls of live, alert, awake unborn babies. As an aside, when I was a medical examiner I remember a woman describing the screams of an 18 year old girl who was killed a mile away in the woods by having her skull smashed one blow at a time. The babies scream too but do not have the air to make sounds.
March 5th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
horrifying, absolutely horrifying!
May 15th, 2007 at 1:11 am
ABSOLUTLEY DISCUSTING!
THOSE DOCTORS PERFORMING ABORTIONS WILL CERTAINLY HAVE THEIR OWN SUFFERING ONE DAY! Those poor precious innocent babies…
September 13th, 2008 at 10:47 am
that was the most gross tools ever seen more then a gun or a knife that murder go thing to babies go to heaven after that LET US PRAY FOR ABORTION TO STOP IN U.S.A AND CANADA