I dropped my daughter off at school this morning and watched as she lugged her backpack, lunch, and a few cans of food for the annual Food Drive into the school. After homeschooling her for two years, we enrolled her in the local charter school, a project-based learning environment where kids learn how to do things like build robots, produce an invention, and speak foreign languages, all starting in the 6th grade. The kids are visiting Costa Rica next year, and then Japan in 2015, journeys that were unheard of in our previous, perpetually budget-strapped school district in Oregon. The kids are making memories that will last a lifetime. Today is Picture Day at her school, which will serve to cement those precious memories into adulthood. But her school is not the only place taking commemorative photos. No, snapping photos is happening somewhere else, too, but in a grotesquely morbid way.

Only four American doctors remain who perform third-trimester abortions. One of those “doctors” is Susan Robinson. Dr. Robinson, aside from her other duties in her practice, kills viable babies for a living, what she deems “abortion medicine.” And as if that isn’t troubling enough, it gets even worse: she takes photos of the dead babies for their mothers to take home in memorial. Yep, you read that right. Dr. Robinson, after “euthanizing” infants mere weeks from being born snaps photos of them for the mother to take home to remember the dead infant. Robinson explains the method she uses to abort often completely healthy babies:

“We sedate the patient and euthanize their fetus, their baby, with an injection. The fetus passes away, doesn’t feel anything.”

So in one breath, she utters the term “euthanize”—which brings to mind what happens to millions of animals every day in shelters across America—and “baby.” Now last I checked, “euthanizing” (aka killing) human beings is also known as murder. Were the infant outside the womb, it would most certainly land her in a federal penitentiary next to the likes of Dr. Death himself, Kermit Gosnell. But in this country, at least for now, it’s legal in several states. How killing a viable infant, simply because it lives inside the womb, whose death warrant is issued by the mother, does not rise to first-degree murder really is mindboggling.

Rationalizing her work, Dr. Robinson insists that many of the women who enter her practice requesting third-trimester abortions had no idea they were pregnant:

“I could tell you a million reasons why women who are perfectly smart—and they are, these are not stupid women—don’t come to know they are pregnant. They have no weight changes, they don’t feel sick, they don’t feel movement, or if they do they think it’s gas. Suddenly someone says, “Hmm, your stomach’s looking big, have you taken a pregnancy test?” And the person may have taken a test, and it may have come out negative—I’ve had women that only got a positive on their third test. And either way they think they just got pregnant. They have no idea they’re in their 24th week. So they make an appointment for an abortion, and it takes a few weeks, and they have their ultrasound and find out that they’re at 27 weeks, which is too far for an abortion anywhere. So then what happens? They either give up or have a baby, or they go on the Internet and they find us.”

Now if you’re anything like me, the third trimester of pregnancy is pretty darned noticeable, sorta like a Weeble Wobble trying to keep itself upright. Seriously, I needed a forklift to get off the sofa, and was downing milkshakes like a competitive hot-dog chugger at the county fair. Not to mention the aggressive jumping jacks my daughter performed every night at 10:00 pm sharp, followed by a healthy round of hiccups. The thought that it was just an un-comfy bout of gas never crossed my mind. Sorry, but I’m not buying the “I didn’t know I was pregnant” at 30+ weeks argument, even given the presence of obesity.

Further, Dr. Robinson insists that many who demand third-trimester abortions do so because their infants are in some way unhealthy, and that the women request commemorative photos, complete with documentation of the abnormality:

“With fetal anomaly patients, we ask them right up front if they plan to hold their baby after it’s born. These patients, their emotional needs are so different from the ones who are looking at their pregnancy as an absolute disaster, who are just thinking, “Get it out of me, please, please, please.” Those patients—the maternal indications patients—they are not relating to their fetus as a baby, they’re relating to it as a problem.

But with a fetal indications patient—if she refers to it as her baby, I’ll refer to it as her baby. If she’s named the baby, I’ll use the baby’s name too. I would say that most of these patients do decide to see and hold their baby, although many of them have a hard time dealing with the idea at first. We’ll take remembrance photographs, we’ll give them a teddy bear, the footprints… I don’t want them to go home from the procedure with absolutely nothing to remember and honor the baby, and its birth.”

Now part of me can understand wanting to remember an infant that would surely—not maybe, but surely—die soon after birth because of an inoperable abnormality. “Euthanasia,” as Robinson terms it, is perhaps the most humane way to end the life of an otherwise non-viable baby, and may save the parents a little anguish. Robinson explains:

“There’s a disabled-rights side to this, and I don’t doubt the ability of people with disabilities to find happiness and fulfillment in their lives, but what I have a problem with is the “I could have been aborted” line. Hell, I’m glad I wasn’t aborted too! I just find that argument specious. When parents are saying, “We do not feel we can adequately cope with that issue,” I believe them, and I don’t think they’d have an easy time putting a child with severe disabilities up for adoption successfully.”

But…Robinson readily admits that many of the women who come into her clinic for “euthanizing,” which she claims are “never casual” decisions, carry either otherwise healthy and strong infants, or their babies have a non life-threatening abnormality—please, someone define “normal!”—like Down Syndrome, and can survive outside their mother’s womb, and into a productive adulthood. Don’t those babies deserve a chance at life? Even if it ever so slight? With photos celebrating their birth, rather than of their “euthanized” bodies? I think Sarah Palin, and countless other parents, would concur.

My very first blog for Victory Girls described the experience I had with a friend who underwent a late-term abortion. She was fully aware of the pregnancy, but procrastinated until she was about six months along, then aborted the infant. It was an horrific experience, one that likely pushed her into drug and alcohol abuse. She didn’t need a photo of her dead baby to remind her; it was seared into her memory with a mental branding iron. Dr. Robinson may sincerely believe that she is “helping” women through the trauma of aborting a viable baby, snapping commemorative photos of the deceased infant, but for me she’s the Jeffery Dahmer of the lucrative late-term abortion industry.