This investigation of Planned Parenthood,
who's based on false premises, one after another after another.
Time to stop wasting time, get on with meaningful work.
And stop picking on women and trying to take their choice away.
I yield back the balance of my time.
The time of the gentleman has expired.
We welcome our distinguished witnesses today.
Do you and each of you swear
that the testimony that you are about to give shall be the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
And I'll now begin by introducing today's witnesses.
The first witness is Dr.
Anthony Levatino. Dr.
Levitino is a board certified obstetrician gynecologist.
Over the course of his career, Dr.
Levitino has practiced obstetrics
and gynecology in both private and University settings,
including as an associate professor of OB GYN at the Albany Medical College.
And Dr. Levitino will begin with.
You welcome.
Thank you, chairman and members of the committee.
I only have five minutes, so I'm going to get right to it.
Second Trimester D any abortions perform
between roughly 14 and 24 weeks of gestation.
Your patient today is 17 years old.
She's 22 weeks pregnant.
Her baby is the length of your hand plus a couple of inches.
And she's been feeling her baby kicked for the last several weeks.
But she's asleep on an operating room table.
You walk into that operating room scrubbed and gown, and after removing laminaria,
you introduce a suction catheter into the uterus.
This is a 14 French suction catheter.
If she were twelve weeks pregnant or less.
Basically, the width of your hand is smaller.
You could basically do the entire procedure with this.
But babies this big don't fit through catheters this size.
After suctioning the amniotic fluid out
from around the baby, you introduce an instrument called the sofa clamp.
It's about 13 inches long.
It's made of stainless steel.
The business end of this clamp is about
two and a half inches long and a half inch wide.
There are rows of sharp teeth.
This is a grasping instrument.
When it gets a hold of something, it does not let go.
A DNA procedure is a blind abortion.
So picture yourself introducing this
and grabbing anything you can blindly and pull.
And I do mean hard.
And I'll pop the leg about that big
which you put down on the table next to you, reaching again, pull again.
Pull out an arm about the same length
which you put down on the table next to you.
And use this instrument again and again
to tear out the spine, the intestines, the heart and lungs.
Head in the baby that size is about the size of a large plum.
Can't see it, but you pretty good idea. You've got it.
If you've got your instrument around something and your fingers are spread
about as far as they go, you know you did it right.
If you crush down on the instrument, white material runs out of the cervix.
That was the baby's brains and you can pull out skull pieces.
You have a day like I had a lot of times.
Sometimes a little face comes back and stares back at you.
Congratulations.
You just successfully performed a second trimester denied abortion.
You just affirmed her right to choose. One more question,
doctor levitino. Why did you end your practice of doing abortions?
I did over 1200 abortions over a four year period in private practice.
Now counting the ones that I did during my training.
I met my wife during my first year of training at Albany medical center.
We got married about a year later and found that we had an infertility problem.
After years of failed infertility treatment and several years trying
to adopt a child, we were blessed with adopting a little
girl that we named Heather in August of 1978.
As sometimes happens in those situations,
My wife got pregnant the very next month and we had two children ten months apart,
two months short of my daughter Heather's 6th birthday, she was killed in an auto
accident and literally died in her arms in the back of an ambulance.
Anyone who has children might think they have some idea of what that feels like,
but unless you've been through it yourself, you have no idea whatsoever.
I know people find it hard to believe, but what do you do after disaster?
You bury your child and then you go back to your life.
And I don't remember exactly how long it
was after my daughter died that I showed up at Albany medical center or number nine
to perform my 1st 2nd trimester DNA abortion.
I wasn't thinking of it as anything special.
This was routine to me,
but I reached in, literally pulled out an arm or leg and got sick.
Earlier on, I described stacking up body parts on the side of the table.
It's not to gross people out using a simple term.
When you do an abortion, you need to keep inventory.
You have to make sure you get two arms and two legs and all the pieces.
If you don't, Your patient's going to come back infected, bleeding, or dead.
So I soldiered on and finished that abortion.
And I know it sounds like I said hard for people to believe,
but I'm telling you, straight up my experience
after over 1200 abortions, first and second trimester up to 24 weeks
and all the rest of it, and being very dedicated to it.
For the first time in my life, I really looked I really looked
at that pile of body parts on the side of the table and I didn't see her
wonderful right to choose and I didn't see all the money I just made.
All I could see was somebody's son or daughter.
And I stopped doing late term abortions
after that and several months later, stopped doing all abortions.
Thank you.