Why I plan to emulate Dr. George Tiller [not kidding]

If I’d passed her on the street, I probably wouldn’t have known her. Her gait is a bit stiff and her left eye somehow different from her right. She’s not famous, exactly, but some people might know her name: Emily Lyons. She’s the nurse who survived the 1998 bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham at the hands of Eric Rudolph.

I was 14 years old when that clinic was bombed, killing a police officer and spraying Emily’s body full of hot nails and shrapnel. Back then, I lived in a small Alabama town, went to church every Sunday and was adamantly opposed to abortion. But by the time I met Emily last year, I was president of the Birmingham chapter of Medical Students for Choice, a group supporting abortion rights. Watching her walk slowly into our fund-raiser on her husband’s arm —- a woman who’d endured more than 18 operations —- I thought of all she’d been through and knew that I’d come to the right decision in my support of reproductive rights.

That conviction only became stronger after I read that Kansas physician George Tiller had been murdered at his Wichita church.

I’m a third-year medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I plan to become an obstetrician-gynecologist. I dream of delivering healthy babies, working with families and supporting midwifery. But as part of my practice, I also envision providing abortions to women who need them.

The road I took to get here isn’t your stereotypical one. My parents are conservative Christians who believe abortion is wrong. Growing up, I naturally shared their view. But I’ve also wanted to be a doctor since I was 4 years old, and in high school, I began to feel drawn to issues of women’s health. In college, I designed my own major to broaden my understanding of women’s health by including psychology, sociology and women’s studies.

I also served as a counselor for a volunteer organization that helps victims of rape. I sat in hospital rooms with young women who would look at me and say, “I just couldn’t carry his baby.” I could feel their desperation.

At the same time, I found myself shocked at how little many of my friends —- women who were studying biology and planning to become doctors —- knew about their own sexual health. They didn’t know about or couldn’t get the reproductive health care they needed because of barriers put up by their culture, their religion and their parents.

I began to feel as if I were leading a double life. At school, the choices I saw women struggling with were forcing me to question my old convictions. When I went home, I’d go to church with my parents but would find that my views contrasted starkly with those I heard in the sermons. It was a difficult time, because I felt that neither my family nor my church would welcome my questions or understand my struggle.

For the most part, I don’t talk to my parents about those beliefs. They already feel as though I’ve turned my back on much of what they taught me because my husband and I bought a house and lived together for a few months before we were married. Two and a half years later, that rift isn’t fully healed. I know that my views on reproductive rights would be another blow.

But ultimately, we have more in common than they might think. I agree that ending an unwanted pregnancy is a tragedy. When I advocate for reproductive rights, for choice, I don’t claim that abortion is morally acceptable. I think that it’s a very private, intensely personal decision. But I was stunned when one of my professors, a pathologist and a Planned Parenthood supporter, told me that decades ago, entire wings of the university’s hospital were filled with women dying from infections caused by botched abortions. It’s clear that women who don’t want to be pregnant won’t be deterred by limited access to providers or to clinics. And I believe that it’s immoral to let them die rather than provide them with safe, competent care.

I still have a long way to go in my medical training. I’ve never witnessed an actual abortion procedure, though I have been trained, through my work in Medical Students for Choice, in manual vacuum aspiration, a simple procedure used for both incomplete miscarriages and elective terminations in the first trimester. I plan to choose a residency program that provides further training —- a place where I won’t worry that asking to be taught to perform an abortion could somehow limit my future options. At the start of medical school, I was very careful about how I presented my views to the faculty for fear that I could jeopardize my grades or hurt my chances for recommendations or of being accepted into a program run by any of the professors.

As I continue my education, my views on abortion are still evolving. Take late-term abortions. When I first heard about them, I was horrified.

It wasn’t until I spent time in ultrasound rooms in graduate school that I began to see late-trimester abortions in a very different light. In one case, the patient’s baby had just been diagnosed with a lethal congenital anomaly. The high likelihood was that it wouldn’t survive after birth for more than a few minutes. As long as the baby remained in her mother’s womb, however, she would live. I asked the physician what this woman’s options were. The answer was, not many. She could choose to continue the pregnancy, but then she might be waiting for almost 20 more weeks to give birth to a baby that would never take more than a few breaths on its own. She was past the point where she could legally terminate the pregnancy in Alabama. If she could get an appointment in Atlanta within the next week, she might be able to have the procedure there. Beyond that, there were only a few physicians in the nation who would perform an abortion in such a case.

I could hardly wrap my mind around the agony that this woman and her husband must have been facing. They needed a caring physician to help them through this dark moment, and if they chose not to continue the pregnancy, they also needed a physician who was both skilled enough and brave enough to provide them with the care they needed. They needed Dr. Tiller.

I can’t yet imagine doing the kind of work that he did. When I think about my future practice, I think about a doctor I met at a conference who spoke candidly about the harassment his children endured at school because of what their father did. I wonder what seventh grade might be like for my children if I choose to provide abortions.

I’m not the only one with questions. Once, after Medical Students for Choice co-hosted a panel discussion on reducing the number of abortions by providing better education on reproductive health, some of my classmates approached close friends of mine. They were puzzled that an abortion-rights group was talking about wanting to reduce abortions —- and that it viewed ending unwanted pregnancies as a tragedy. Mostly, though, they were confused about what I was doing there. “I know Roz goes to church every Sunday and that she’s a good person,” one classmate asked. “Why would she be involved in a group like this?”

I know my answer to that question. Someday I hope my classmates will understand, too.

Rozalyn Farmer Love is a third-year medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine.

No deal. First off you left off "SOME OF THE strongest.."

Second is that you've invoked one of the Christian heresies, though its name escapes me right now. (K?) Alternative to that, you're enticing me into false disbelief/action for purposes of proselytizing. Not OK.

Are you denying Saul as a credible witness to Christianity? Okay, he's better known as Paul, but... I find that in our nominally Christian culture many of our strongest proponents are converts -- they KNOW life elsewhere.

Such as a Christian (convert) friend who spent time in prison in a Middle-Eastern country for being caught smuggling much-desired Bibles into the country. The next time God intervened -- what a story he has to tell, with photos!

I’m guessing this brat wrote this garbage partly to humiliate her parents.

Me too. Students who were raised in a Christian home, but become brainwashed by leftist college professors, are among the most arrogant leftists around. They're far worse than kids who were raised as left-wingers. They go out of their way to humiliate their friends and relatives, rambling on and on about how backward and stupid they are, and how enlightened they themselves are for "growing" and rejecting their parents' beliefs.

You can pray for and hope for the conversion of any number of pro-abortion butchers, we are called on to do exactly that, no more and no less.

We are not expected to pray for, or wish such murderous souls long life, blessings and success in all of their ventures, nor are we to compromise and/or condone their wickedness.

God is good. Tiller is dead. I say ‘Good for God’.

The author seems naively unconcerned about mens’ part in abortion. The rate at which boyfriends and embarrassed parents pressure women to have an abortion makes reproductive freedom a joke in many cases. I heard a statistic awhile back about the largest cause of death among single pregnant women is murder (but don’t quote me because I can’t remember the specifics.) You are free to do what you want with your body as long as it’s not carrying the child to term and forcing the sperm donor to face fatherhood.

Also, the author is a chicken. She can talk about all sorts of serious stuff to complete strangers, but lacks the nerve to speak of it to her own parents. She dares not try to understand why they cling to their convictions, despite all the “enlightenment” that is available to them. What a fake. I’d be sick at heart to have a child like that.

They didn’t know about or couldn’t get the reproductive health care they needed because of barriers put up by their culture, their religion and their parents.

Reproductive health care can mean only one thing, i.e., enhancing the health and effectiveness of one's reproductive organs. Abortion and contraception do not achieve this. So they have absolutely nothing to do with reproductive health care. It would be so refreshing if these people would just be honest.

“It would be so refreshing if these people would just be honest.”

Yep. “choice”, “fetal tissue”, “terminate”, “reproductive health”. The web of euphemisms is evidence of how wrong it is. Lately, I’m pondering substituting “crush and flush” whenever I see “abortion” or “termination”.

I don’t like to resort to religious imagery when advocating on this issue because I think the case should be made for life on terms that are universal to believers and non-believers. But for me personally, it’s so easy to see the Father of Lies’ influence in obscuring and deflecting the truth about abortion, the abortion industry, and what really goes on with “choice”.

On a side note, if I were her mother, I would be having trouble with my relationship with her, too. Love unconditionally, yes, be proud of and supporting, no.

If I discovered my child was going to med school to become an abortionist, you can bet that they would not receive another penny from me, whether for school or for anything else. And that is just for starters. If this "womyns" parents continue to pay her way, they will be complicit in her murders.

I know what I’D do with those 20+ weeks - I’d love, rock, sing to, talk to, cuddle and feel a living, breathing child, knowing full well that all I had was those 20 weeks. But those 20 weeks would be shared with a healthy baby! Why would I WANT to shorten that time with my baby if that’s all I had left with them? Does a mother not do all of these things and more when their child is expected to be born healthy? So I’ll never see my child’s face until just before s/he dies, (except they say ultrasound is wicked good nowadays, so maybe I could anyway), I’ll still feel my child move, kick, hiccup, know s/he is sucking their thumb, laughing, doing somersaults, whatever. It’s 20+ weeks I won’t ever have again! Why should I kill him/her in the cruelest way possible when I already grieve that s/he will die anyway?? At least I’ll share 20 more weeks with my precious child and then live my life without the added burden of the trauma of knowing I killed my own child in the cruelest way possible! I’ll grieve either way, but I’ll have God to comfort my grief, as well as 20 weeks I wouldn’t have had otherwise and all the firm assurance that God stands WITH us, as we cradle our dying child, once truly born. Dead is dead. The manner of which is what one is left to deal with the rest of their lives. I’ll take God’s way, thank you very much.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.