Twisted imagery

Pro-life activist group Live Action released an undercover video and recording this morning of a prominent abortionist comparing a dead, unborn baby to “meat in a Crock-Pot,” and joking he used a “pickax” and “drill bit” as surgical abortion tools. The video is the fourth Live Action has published in 10 days as part of an undercover investigation into abortion facility practices.

The latest video (see below) features LeRoy Carhart, a former associate of the late abortionist George Tiller, and one of just a few people in the country willing to perform late-term abortions. Carhart divides his work hours between his abortion centers in Bellevue, Neb., and Germantown, Md. He performs late-term abortions in Maryland because they are legal there, while Nebraska outlaws most abortions at 22 weeks of gestation.

Carhart most recently made headlines in February, when one of his Maryland patients, 29-year-old Jennifer McKenna Morbelli, died after he aborted her 33-week baby.

Live Action sent two pregnant women—one last December and another in March—into Carhart’s Nebraska facility, the Abortion & Contraception Clinic of Nebraska, one with a hidden camera and the other with a microphone. They pretended to be seeking abortions.

The woman who visited in March was 26 weeks pregnant. She asked Carhart about getting an abortion at his Maryland facility, and asked how the baby would be delivered during the abortion.

“It’ll compress down and come through … because it’s not alive. [It] gets soft, like, mushy,” Carhart said, making a squishing noise picked up by the hidden microphone. “So you push it through.”

“So what makes the baby mushy?” asked the woman.

“The fact that it’s not alive for two or three days,” Carhart answered. He performs late-term abortions by killing the baby with a lethal injection a few days before inducing delivery.

The woman probed, “Will it start to decay or something?”

“No, it’s like putting meat in a Crock-Pot, OK? It doesn’t get broke—it gets softer. It doesn’t get infected,” said Carhart.

Later, the investigator asked whether Carhart had a “toolkit” to remove the baby if she wasn’t able to deliver it. In response, Carhart joked, “A pickax, a drill bit, you know,” and laughed. He then said there were “instruments that have been developed” for such procedures.

When the woman asked what would happen if the baby survived the abortion, Carhart said it would go to the hospital and then to foster care, but added, “With the medicine we would have given it—I’d have better luck standing in front of a train and getting hit and surviving—going 100 miles an hour—than the baby will.”

Carhart also told the woman not to call 911 if she went into labor at her hotel before returning to his facility to deliver the dead baby: “Just get in the car. Call me.”

The abortionist’s statements to Live Action’s investigators are “shocking and disturbing” for their callousness, Live Action founder Lila Rose told me.

Carhart opened an abortion center in Germantown in 2010 after Nebraska tightened its abortion laws. In Maryland, abortions are legal up to 28 weeks—or later if the life or health of the mother is considered threatened or if there is a fetal abnormality.

Although Carhart claimed to a Washington Post reporter in 2011 that he had only performed late-term abortions involving fetal abnormalities at his Germantown facility, his comments to the Live Action investigator in Nebraska suggest that is no longer the case. While acknowledging the investigator’s baby had no problems, he told her she could get an elective abortion in Germantown.

“Here we cannot do it, but in Maryland we can do it,” he said.

“Carhart is basically rubber-stamping [late-term] abortion for two women with perfectly healthy babies,” said Rose.

In the recording, Carhart makes a reference to Morbelli, the woman who died in February after getting a 33-week abortion in Germantown.

“We have had one woman that died in the clinic, OK?” he said to the investigator. “She was a lot farther along than you. It was reported to the coroner and everything, and they said, ‘Yeah, she died, again, of complications of the pregnancy, but not from the abortion.’ Everything from the abortion went fine.”

But that has yet to be determined. Maryland authorities began a probe into Morbelli’s death in February, and the state medical examiners’ office has apparently not yet released a full autopsy report that would help reveal whether Carhart’s abortion was the cause of death. Morbelli, from New York, had sought the abortion after learning her baby had an undisclosed abnormality. She had originally planned to keep the baby, a girl she named Madison Leigh.

A previous Live Action video showed a Washington, D.C., abortionist admitting he wouldn’t help a baby survive if it was born alive in his facility after a botched abortion.