A nurse walks with a patient in the Mother Baby Unit of The Woman’s Hospital of Texas in Houston on January 20, 2023.Jewel is a student in her early 20s who lives in Texas. When her doctor confirmed she was pregnant, Jewel felt panicked. She knew it wasn’t the right time for her to have a child, and that abortion was illegal in her state.
Dr. Fleischman performed an ultrasound, which dated the pregnancy between five and six weeks. She discussed Jewel’s options and, after confirming that Jewel wanted to end the pregnancy, completed a manual uterine aspiration procedure. This method uses a hand-held device and takes a few minutes to complete in a regular exam room.
Primary care clinicians like us who provide early abortions in their practices have long known that the pregnancy tissue we remove does not look like what most people expect. After Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and early pregnancy termination was banned across more than a dozen states, we felt it was important to make this information public and show the images we have seen more widely.
Many people, even those who support abortion rights, did not believe the photos were accurate. Some insisted we had deliberately removed the embryos before taking the photos. The images weren’t consistent with those often seen in embryological textbooks, magnified on ultrasounds or used in anti-abortion propaganda; these enlarged images are not what you see with the naked eye after an abortion.
But showing these images is vital to counter misinformation, not only for patients but for our colleagues as well. Dr. Jeffrey Levine is a professor of family medicine and director of reproductive and gender health programs at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He’s been teaching abortion care to fellows, residents and medical students for nearly two decades.“When we examine the tissue after a procedure, everyone is consistently surprised.