Dennis Durband22

The start of each year is marked by Sanctity of Life Month, when we celebrate the wonder of human life. This year, we also take note of the holocaust of 33 years, more than 45 million abortion murders … and rivers of blood. Tragically, Arizona has played a key role in the culture of death which has plagued the world over the past several decades.

Make plans now to attend the Many Faces: One Voice pro-life rally at Indian Steele Park in Phoenix on Sunday, Jan. 22. The optional march from Park Central Mall to the park begins at 1:30 p.m., and the rally starts at 2 p.m. Sen. Jon Kyl is the keynote speaker.

State History

The inspiration for Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger spent her last years in a Tucson nursing home bed before dying Sept. 6, 1966. About 90 years ago, Sanger produced 5,000 flyers to hand out which proclaimed, “DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, PREVENT.” She was more into contraceptives than abortion. Nevertheless, she was an avowed racist who sought to reduce the reproduction of “human weeds, morons and misfits” – blacks and other targets of her bigotry.

We have our own “Hall of Shame” for abortionists in this state:

Abortionist John Biskind is responsible for the deaths of two women in his abortuary, and he’s serving hard time for the death of the second woman, the late Lou Ann Herron. Biskind punctured Herron’s uterus and allowed her to bleed to death in the abortion mill. A hospital administrator said her life could have been saved if the abortionists would have called for an ambulance. Carol Stuart-Schadoff, the administrator of the abortion mill, was sentenced to four years probation, paying restitution, performing 500 hours of community service and was barred from working again in the medical field. I can only shudder at the thought of someone like that performing “community service.”
Another abortionist behind bars, Brian Finkel, was one of the most notorious ever to ply the deadly trade. He was convicted on 22 counts of sexually molesting his defenseless patients. Finkel performed about 20 percent of the abortions in Arizona each year, but he won’t perform any more in the next three decades while he’s in prison. Aside from sexually molesting women, Finkel mocked them and sang silly songs to them. From my research, this kind of behavior is not unusual for abortionists, many of whom feel disdain for the women looking for solutions to unwanted pregnancies. Mark Crutcher, president of Life Dynamics, Inc., has investigated misconduct and violence by abortionists since 1992. He said “Finkel is not the exception, he is the rule. When it comes to abortionists, to think that Finkel is the bottom of the barrel only shows that you have no idea how deep the barrel is. Competent doctors do not end up working in abortion clinics. Finkel's attitude towards his ‘patients’ and thinking that he is above the law makes him your average abortion provider. No one wants their son or daughter to grow up to be an abortionist. So what we have in these clinics are bottom feeders, ones who can't get a job doing real medicine.” The Arizona Right to Choose organization called Finkel a “hero.”
The third member of this losers’ group is Robert Tamis, a repeat offender. In 1991, he was chastized by the Arizona medical board, which wrote him a letter indicating "the Board was concerned that you signed undated prescriptions that had no patient names filled in.” He did far worse than that. In 1992, Tamis performed an abortion on the unborn child of 19-year-old DaNette Perguson, who also died in the Tamis’s blood-stained mill. Tamis was just getting warmed up. On Feb. 3, 2001, a 39-year-old woman was hospitalized after her Tamis abortion. The patient was 18 weeks pregnant and sought an abortion for medical reasons, Tamis said. Tamis went ahead and performed the abortion in his clinic rather than in a hospital. As the woman was about to be discharged, she reportedly began to vomit and her blood pressure worsened. Paramedics were summoned and transported the woman to St. Luke's Medical Center, where a surgical team was alerted and waiting.
Abortionist P. Scott Ricke also makes our “Hall of Shame.” He had sex with a patient four days after he aborted her and told her to abstain from sex for a week in 1987. He also botched a third-trimester abortion he committed on another woman. Arizona’s assistant attorney general said that Ricke aborted a 28-week, 2.4 pound pre-born child and jeopardized the mother's health by failing to minimize risks at his Women's Surgical Clinic abortion mill. The patient claimed that the fetal head became lodged during her abortion February 7, 1987, that she was screaming in pain, that Ricke responded to her request for painkillers by telling her that "he didn't have any," that Ricke refused her request to be taken to a hospital, that he made as many as 40 unsuccessful attempts to start an IV, then asked her if he should crush the head in order to remove it. After three hours of torture, the woman was finally driven in an employee's car to the hospital. He left the patient several times during those three hours to do other abortions, and, after sending her to the hospital he remained at his facility to do three other abortions before going to the hospital to complete her abortion. Ricke was censured by the Arizona medical board in November 1987 for performing an after-hours abortion alone on a woman. He allegedly had sex with her before doing the abortion. A newspaper quoted Ricke as saying: "I believe that if a woman decides to have a termination, it should be done safely, legally and with some dignity." Ricke, who had drug and alcohol problems, encountered further trouble with the law for improprieties, but you’ve gotten the picture by now.

In 1985, 14-year-old Maria C. Akin went to abortionist Jonathan Agbebiyi at the A-Z Women's Center abortuary to have her unborn child killed. She got more than she bargained for – including a ruptured uterus and infection, discovered later in a hospital emergency room. She then underwent a total hysterectomy and became completely sterile. The abortionist got a slap on the wrist by the state.

The illustrations above serve to inform us that legal abortion does not imply safe abortion. These stories are just the tip of the iceberg; books have been written about the carnage of women broken and killed in profit-driven abortion mills. With the sorry, bloody record they have, is it any wonder that abortionists work so hard to protect the privacy of the physician-patient relationship? There are countless skeletons in the closets of the abortion mills that they don’t want the public to know about.

I was surprised to learn that some feminists detest abortion, but see it as a necessary evil. And the vast majority of abortive women said they oppose abortion and they only consented to it because it is legal. Though they see it as immoral, they knowingly violated their own moral conscience by having abortions.

It is well known that abortion can have devastating physical and psychological effects on aborting women. The abortionists themselves, as well as many abortion mill employees, can suffer horrible nightmares, depression and anger due to the grisly nature of their work. Husbands and boyfriends also suffer psychologically. In fact, nobody wins in abortion -- certainly not the unborn child who is murdered. Would-be brothers and sisters of aborted babies suffer from overwhelming fear, nightmares and are subject to higher levels of child abuse. These are not my opinions, but are the findings of researchers who have examined the records. A three-year-old boy was killed after his mother had an abortion and descended into a fit of rage afterward.

Warren Burger, who consented with Roe v. Wade as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, did not believe the decision opened the way for abortion on demand. Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, also wrote that he, too, did not believe the decision created abortion on demand, but he never publicly issued the paper.

Ten years ago, Crutcher wrote the book “Lime 5: Exploited by Choice,” which chronicled the deaths and butchering of abortive women. He said that when he sat down with his staff to create an outline for the book, they had no plans to include a chapter on sexual abuse and rape occurring in abortion mills. But they discovered so many cases of sexual improprieties that it became a separate chapter in the book.

Arizona is in the minority when it comes to states which have enacted laws requiring informed consent for women considering abortion. It is high time the governor made the health concerns of women a high priority and signed an informed consent bill into law. She had the chance to do so in 2004, but she vetoed the bill, subjecting thousands of Arizona women to the many risks posed by abortion – perforated uterus, breast cancer and worse.

“Women in Arizona and elsewhere have been the victims of the abortion industry's refusal to police itself,” said Denise Burke, staff counsel with Americans United for Life, in 2002. “In opposing these common-sense regulations, the abortion industry reveals an ugly agenda -- pocketing profits instead of investing in women's safety. How many more women need to die or be permanently injured from unsafe abortions? Until now, a veterinary clinic had more safety regulations.”

Arizona lawmakers have previously passed clinic regulations laws after the Biskind abortion fatality, but it has been reported that clinics in Arizona still operate without compliance.

The good news is that America is trending more and more to the pro-life view, which is the majority view. We need to speak out loudly and inform those in crisis pregnancy that there is a better alternative for women than abortion. It’s an alternative that supports a culture of life.

Dennis Durband is publisher and editor of The Arizona Conservative, is also a freelance writer and webmaster and a longtime journalist. He is willing to speak at The Humanist Public University at Tucson for a slice of strawberry pie, after the address rather than a whipped cream pie like that "given" to Ann Coulter.

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