In case you missed the original story, here's the bottom line: Williams was scheduled for a late-term abortion, but her doctor did not arrive at the abortion clinic in time. When her baby was born alive, a staff person scooped her up, put her in a biohazard bag and dumped her in a trash can.
In the exclusive interview with the Florida Catholic, Williams spoke of the decision to have the abortion in 2006 and about her complete surprise that her 23-week-old unborn baby actually looked like a baby.
“I thought it would be a blob thing, but bigger, not a baby,” she said in the interview. “She looked like a Water Baby. Like those dolls you fill up with water. She was really little, like this, she said, holding her hands about 12 inches apart." (According to the Florida Catholic, a "Water Baby" is a doll sold at Toys R Us to replicate the "warmth, weight and feel of a real baby.")
How can a young woman who had previously lost a baby through miscarriage and who said she asked "a lot of questions" at the clinic about procedures and equipment think that her 23-week-old unborn child would look like a "blob thing"? If ever there was an argument for informed consent, this is it.
Our public schools in particular and our society in general certainly seem to be providing our children with all the information they need to have sex, but obviously no one is explaining with quite so much detail what happens after you have sex and make a baby. Even my 8-year-old knows that a baby looks like a baby inside its mother because she's seen her own ultrasound photos.
Today's moms-to-be can get 4D ultrasounds with before and after photos to show just how much their unborn babies look like the babies they eventually hold in their arms. But clearly there are some women who are not seeing so much as a textbook diagram of what their babies look like in utero. They're not even being told what their babies look like. And so these young women, thinking they are carrying around a blob and not a baby with a beating heart, head off to a clinic where staff people think nothing of letting women give birth in recliners in a waiting room -- or throwing live human beings away.
Williams is against abortion now. “No one should lose their life if you get pregnant,” she said in the Florida Catholic interview. “If I got pregnant again I would have the baby.” She said women considering abortion need to know that help is available.
And they need to know the details about the baby inside them -- what it looks like, what it feels, what its little body is doing day after amazing day in the womb. Maybe then young pregnant moms will have as much information about the babies in their wombs as they seem to have about the babies on toy store shelves.
