collections, history of medicine, museum and knowledge politics, web resources
Revulsive abortion instrument website
My good friend and colleague Jim Edmonson (who is Head of the great Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio) sent me and some of his other colleagues an email the other day.
Jim tells the story about how one of his friends, an obstetrician and collector of obstetric and gynaecological instruments, has recently been in an auction bidding war against another collector, named Randi Joe Grantham. It turned out that
Grantham was bidding on destructive instruments (cranioclasts, basiotribes, curettes, &c, &c), and paying ridiculous sums for this category of instrumentation. Turns out, it was all acquired to be featured on his anti-abortion website — beware, it is not for the faint of heart: http://www.abortioninstruments.com/ (quoted with Jim’s permission).
Jim thinks this “takes the new top prize for creepy co-opting of medical/surgical antiques for perverse purpose”.
I partly agree, partly not. Grantham’s web site is creepy, indeed, and will probably be used for all kinds of bad political purposes by the pro-life lobby.
But it’s also absolutely fascinating. If ever the word ‘sublime’ is appropriate, it’s here. Some of these instruments give associations to medieval torture instruments of the worst kind, like this one:
“This abortion instrument works by pushing the spike into the child’s head. Once it is inside, the button is pushed. When it flattens, you can pull the child out.”
The site also reminds me that the abortion issue is not a black and white thing. The debate is all too often divided in terms of absolute women’s rights (pro-choice) and absolute foetus rights (pro-life).
But there are no easy solutions here. My immediate impulse is to defend women’s rights over their bodies — yet one shouldn’t close one’s eyes to the facts of revulsive earlier abortion practices.
In other words, as much as I support the pro-choice stand, I also support Grantham’s rights to put these disgusting images on his web site — and also his moral right to overbid the obstetrician/gynaecologist collector.
So I don’t think Grantham is perverse, he just believes otherwise. I will forever struggle politically against him, but I don’t think we should ostracize him and his confederates.
10 Apr 2009 Thomas
abortion is one of the most repulsive things i have ever seen
how can anyone defend this? it just goes beyond evil and worse its so inhumane,,,terrorists get better treatment then these unborn babies do!!!!!!!! and as for these dam abortionists cause they ARE NOT DOCTORS, how can you live with yourselfs…everything you own and eat came off the backs of these unborn babies lives you ignorant fools,,,,DAM YOU
its a funny thing all the pro abortion people who i have spoken to all have 2 things in common…….ignorance beyond human understanding,,,,,and guess what they are all already born,,,,GO FIGURE!!!!!!!
The collection of “abortion” instruments is misleading. A lot of them were originally invented to allow the physician to intervene and save the life of the mother during a pre-Caeserean-era birth crisis, such as the cranium being too large to pass through the pelvis. Maternal death during childbirth was common; many of the instruments portrayed here prevented such deaths.
P.S. “Smellie’s” forceps, and many of the other forceps portrayed in the collection, were also used to not only save the mother’s life, but the infant’s as well during a difficult delivery. Sometimes it was the only way to ensure a live birth. “Forceps delivery” is practiced even today. It’s dishonest to portray forceps exclusively as an “abortion” instrument.
Furthermore, the photo at the top of the page, of a dead-looking infant with forceps still on its head, implies, by the context, that the viewer is looking at an “aborted” full-term infant. More likely we are seeing an infant that died during its very difficult birth, the forceps used in a failed attempt to save it.
Medical instruments are designed to get a hard flesh-blood-and-bone job done; to the untrained observer, all of them, not just obstetrical instruments, can appear to be diabolical. The instrument used, for example, to hold the eyelid open during ocular surgery looks like a Medieval torture device. So it is with the forceps on the dead infant’s head in this picture.
Forceps have saved many an infant’s life since their invention. Chances are good that whoever put the forceps on this infant’s head was trying to deliver it alive. The forceps look cruel in this picture, stuck there on the poor dead baby’s head, but only because of the context. A dishonest and purposely inflammatory presentation.
The more I consider this, the more surprised I am that you, the obviously intelligent writer of the above post called “Revulsive abortion instrument website,” seem to be taken in by the propagandist intent of the display.
The antique instruments in particular were designed and invented not to end unwanted pregnancies on a whim, but in order to intervene in a birth emergency, when the only way to save the life of the laboring mother, who was trying her best to deliver a live infant, was to dismember and remove the infant from the woman’s body.
Yes, often the skull was crushed, because it was too big to pass through the pelvic ring, and if nothing was done, both the mother and the infant died, which happened all the time before these instruments were employed. Grantham may consider such a circumstance an “abortion,” but thinking people do not. There is an obvious difference.
Calling these instruments “abortion instruments” exclusively is dishonest on Grantham’s part, and for you to call them by the same name is to be gulled.
Recommended reading: DEVILS, DRUGS AND DOCTORS, by Howard W. Haggard, M.D., 1929. In particular, Part One: The Conquest of Death at Birth, chapters 1,2,3 and 4. Read about the invention of some of the very instruments in Grantham’s display.
The rest of the book is brilliant, too, but the pertinence of Part One to he subject matter here cannot be overemphasized.
Surgical instruments were all invented for good, and some are also used for killing babies. I only wish pro-choice people would be honest, it is killing babies, no matter how philosophical you get about it.