The Disturbing Doctor Touring the Country to Promote Her Career of Third-Trimester Abortions

Abortion doctor Shelley Sella is so proud of her 20-year career killing babies that she is traveling around the country in a sort of victory tour. Calling herself, in celebratory fashion, “the first woman to openly practice third-trimester abortion care in the U.S.,” Sella has spent the past year promoting her new book and evangelizing people into supporting late-term abortions. Her book, titled Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care, tells the stories of six babies she killed. And, yes, she herself calls them “babies.”

Sella has headlined events in Washington, Illinois, Missouri, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Wyoming, and has appeared in such publications as New York Magazine, the Nation, Time, and Mother Jones.

She was set to deliver a lecture at Texas Tech University this year. Blessedly, however, thanks to the intervention of the local Knights of Columbus chapter and Turning Point USA, the university canceled the event. The groups had argued that a government institution and building ought not be the site for the promotion of an activity (abortion) that is illegal in Texas.

Sella’s tour goes on, however. She is due next month to speak at a “Meet the Author Event” in Oakland, California.

In her book, Sella explains that her desire to perform abortions emerged from a radical feminism. Evidently, she was so passionate about her love for abortion that only the prospect of killing babies who could survive outside the womb excited her. This so thrilled her that she spent 20 years commuting by plane from California to work in late-term abortion clinics in New Mexico and Kansas.

Sella told Mother Jones that she is outraged by state constitutional amendments that guarantee a right to abortion up to the point of viability. “Now’s the time,” she said, “to push back on viability and gestational limits, because Roe has been overturned.” Roe, Sella explained, was “problematic” because it allowed for restrictions post-viability. “So to think, ‘Let’s go backwards and restore Roe,’ to me, is wrong thinking. We have an opportunity to think big.”

The full development of the babies that Sella aborted over the course of her career seems to excite her.

In her book, she writes: “A third-trimester pregnancy is not ‘a clump of cells.’ It is not ‘tissue.’ Although until birth it is technically a fetus, most would consider a third-trimester pregnancy a baby, and if it were born alive, it would be a baby.”

Sella need not have waited until the third trimester of pregnancy to kill babies who look like babies. Doctors who prescribe abortion pills in the first trimester of pregnancy often kill babies who look very much like babies. By week 9 of pregnancy (seven weeks after conception), a baby has his or her limbs, all of his or her fingers and toes, and his or her eyes. Of course, a few more weeks of development do nothing to make babies human; they were human from their conception.

Sella could have also performed abortions in the second trimester of pregnancy if she wanted to kill babies who are viable. But apparently, this wasn’t exciting enough for her, since by the end of the second trimester, babies are only around two and a half pounds. Third-trimester abortions — Sella’s favorite — basically always kill babies who would survive if they were born. At the beginning of the third trimester, 28 weeks, babies have around a 90 percent chance of surviving. By week 34 or 35, a baby may not even need to be admitted to a NICU.

In Sella’s method of late-term abortions, which she explains in her book, she kills the baby by stopping his or her heartbeat via a lethal injection. The mother then delivers the dead baby whole. If the women in these cases had just delivered their babies alive instead of dead, they could have placed them for adoption.

In the article for the Nation in which Sella promoted her book, the journalist was given access to a late-term abortion clinic and witnessed an abortion at 28 weeks’ gestation according to Sella’s method. The description of the baby’s murder is truly horrifying.

The 28-year-old mother, Ayana, who was 28 weeks pregnant, saw her baby move on ultrasound right before the needle was inserted into the baby to kill her. This led Ayana to shed a tear, prompting the abortion doctor to question her about her reaction. “I just got a little emotional once it started moving,” she said. At this point, the abortion doctor reassured her that the baby wouldn’t feel any pain as she died. (Studies have shown, however, that babies begin to feel pain as early as 15 weeks’ gestation.) After the baby was killed, it took another two days for Ayana to give birth to the dead child.

The reason Ayana killed her baby? She had other kids and believed the new baby would put “pressure” on them. “I just had to realize that I wasn’t ready,” she told the journalist.

Sella wants to convince abortion advocates that this sort of rationale should be celebrated as perfectly legitimate.

“I want readers to think about viability in the way I do: It is determined by the patient themselves, based on their reality,” she explained to New York Magazine.

Any reason should qualify for killing one’s baby, she argued. “There’s no hierarchy of desperation,” she said. “People who have difficult life situations are as deserving of care as those who are ending the pregnancy for other reasons.”

Killing a baby is killing a baby, and whether a baby is killed in the first trimester or the third trimester doesn’t change that reality.

But there is something especially revealing about an abortion doctor excited about killing five-pound babies who would have snuggled up with their mothers had they been born alive. Sella had no doubt she was killing babies, and she loved it anyway.

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