Are you sure abortion is “as simple as going to the dentist“? Because I’ve never heard of dentists having bloody nightmares of themselves being punished for treating their patients.

But that’s exactly what some of the first full-time abortionists in the U.S. suffered from in the early 1970s.

“Abortion appeared sometimes to have a had a more profound effect on the people who were doing them than on those on whom they were being done,” Dr. Bernard Nathanson writes in Aborting America (141), his auto-biographical account of leading the pro-choice movement in the 1960s and ’70s. As a part of that, Nathanson also helped run the largest abortion clinic the world in New York State, in which doctors worked as full-time abortionists for the first time.

One abortionist at the clinic had “frequent nightmares” and “confessed to [his wife] that the dreams were filled with blood and children, and that he had latterly become obsessed with the notion that some terrible justice would soon be inflicted upon his own children in payment for what he was doing.”

Another abortionist took up drinking to cope with his work. Another was forced to quit after only three weeks of work, saying that, while he had no moral objections to abortion, “when I’m up this close to it, it’s just too much for me. Too bloody, too much pressure. You guys are turning out abortion here like it’s an assembly line, and you expect us to work at this with no feelings at all.”

One doctor cornered Nathanson one day and insisted he listen to a story. “He was shaking his head in disbelief” as he explained he had just performed abortions on a mother and daughter in the same day.

“Bernie, I swear to you,” he told Nathanson, “it was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had here. The mother is thirty-seven and a real wisecracker. The daughter is eighteen, and her mother talked her through it. At the end the mother came out exclaiming, ‘Wow, isn’t it wonderful? We had the same doctor.’ She was euphoric and flushed with success.”

Nathanson concludes, “The episode was more unsettling for the doctor than for the patients.”

Abortion is just a normal medical procedure, with no deeper meaning, right?

By God’s merciful grace, Nathanson was convinced to change his mind to the pro-life position by the late 1970s, and in 1996 he was baptized into the Catholic Church! So you never know how God is working in these people’s hearts.

Pray for the conversion of abortionists!

[See also: This Ancient Heresy Explains Our Culture’s Embrace of Homosexuality & Abortion]

[See also: Abortionist Has Terrifying Vision at Medjugorje, Converts on the Spot]