Posted on 01/03/2005 6:54:54 AM PST by madprof98
Ten years after the bloody Brookline clinic attacks, one doctor explains why she still performs abortions.
Ten years ago this month, John Salvi sprayed bullets into two Brookline abortion clinics, killing two people and wounding five. Since then, the number of doctors willing to perform abortions has dwindled, increasing the workload for those remaining. One local obstetrician and gynecologist, whose clinic asked that she withhold her name for safety reasons, now performs as many as 10 abortions a day, twice a week.
One morning years ago, when I was working as a resident, a nurse brought me in to talk to a pregnant girl. When I walked into the room, there was this child -- an 11-year-old. She had come in for a procedure, and it soon became obvious that she had no understanding of sex -- she didn't really understand that she'd even had it, or that it had any connection to her pregnancy. We literally had to teach this girl about what it means to have sex -- about STDS, abstinence, and pregnancy. I remember thinking: In a world where people don't want kids to learn about these things, how can you not give them the choice to terminate a pregnancy? Even if she had chosen to continue the pregnancy and opt for adoption, what would that have done to her own childhood? How can we not provide a child with any education about sex, then force her to become a parent long before she's ready?
When I started medical school in upstate New York, I didn't want to do terminations of pregnancies at all. My mom is Catholic and my dad is Jewish, and the church we went to had a pretty strong stance on it: The message I got was that abortion was wrong. As a first-year medical student, I took an ethics class and we talked about abortion. I wrote a paper about how I believed in the right, but would never perform an abortion myself, because it was against the way I was brought up.
That all changed later on, when I had a crush on this guy who was a leader of Medical Students for Choice. At the time, I thought abortion was strictly a women's issue. But he convinced me that abortion is a civil rights issue, that if you have injustice for some members of your population, your whole population has injustice. I remember thinking that was really profound. Still, I told him that I didn't feel comfortable doing abortions, but I was pro-choice. So he gave me these two films to watch, and they changed my life. They were about different providers and patients, men and women, who talked about what life was like before abortion was legal. They really changed my views -- I suddenly thought, Yeah, I have to do that.
Today, though, there are so few providers who will perform terminations that the people who do agree to provide them end up taking the bulk of procedures. It can be hard. I'm a generalist -- I like a lot of different things about being an OB-GYN. But because sometimes I'm the only person around, I end up doing a lot of terminations.
Doing them over and over and over again can be really taxing. All of us who provide abortions believe in what we're doing and think it's a good thing and a right that needs to be available. But when you're in the clinic and in that group of people doing it, it can be tough, and you can get really tired. I don't think it'll ever make me stop doing terminations, but it can move people to tears. And it's not just me -- it extends to the nurses and the people who help us in the operating room. It's not unusual that you'll have only a couple of nurses who will help you out with it. There are nurses that will say, "No, I won't help you take care of this patient." I even know people who feel they can't tell their families what they do; their families think they work on labor and delivery.
It really frustrates me that there are so few providers. I've asked my friends who are doctors if they do abortions. Some women I knew were providers in residency, but they don't provide now because their current medical practice doesn't. It's upsetting that some friends don't fight harder to provide it. But I've also had friends who've stepped up and said, "I'm going to do medical abortions; would you teach me how?"
As providers, we give all options, including adoption and carrying the child to term. I always ask a patient "Are you sure about this?" I've had people change their minds, which is totally okay. We want that. Or sometimes we'll advise them that they have more time to decide what to do. I would feel worse terminating a wanted child than not being able to terminate at all. It's very important that a woman knows what she wants to do either way. I have no problem with a woman walking out. I always find those are good days -- when a woman walks out and says, "No, I'm keeping it."
I have the utmost respect for life; I appreciate that life starts early in the womb, but also believe that I'm ending it for good reasons. Often I'm saving the woman, or I'm improving the lives of the other children in the family. I also believe that women have a life they have to consider. If a woman is working full-time, has one child already, and is barely getting by, having another child that would financially push her to go on public assistance is going to lessen the quality of her life. And it's also an issue for the child, if it would not have had a good life. Life's hard enough when you're wanted and everything's prepared for. So yes, I end life, but even when it's hard, it's for a good reason.
Because of all the threats these days, doctors who have been doing this longer than I have are a lot more hesitant about things that I don't even usually think about. Things like, "Who is sponsoring this conference I've been invited to? Did this interview request come from a referral I trust?" They warn me to be more leery. I wasn't in Boston 10 years ago, during the Salvi shootings, but I recently talked with someone who had been around at that time, and she told me the incident essentially put her whole career on hold. That scares me.
What happens if something like that occurs again? Would I still be able to show up for work? It's unfair and depressing. I'm older now, but there was a time when I was going to sacrifice everything for the cause. But would I really sacrifice the well-being of my family? There are providers who have been shot at, who have been shot and still show up for work and still do their job, which is amazing.
Maybe I live in an idealistic world, but I believe in people being good and in trying to understand their opinion. I don't think I'm going to be easily swayed. Obviously, the threat of violence is something that's always in the back of my mind, that it could happen, but I feel like I'm doing something so right. How could people think it's wrong?
I had a crush on this guy who was a leader of Medical Students for Choice...So he gave me these two films to watch, and they changed my life.
Of all the folks I know, men and women, its the women I know that are pro-abortion. I only know one man who is pro-abortion and he is a screeching zealot lib in Ann Arbor (the Berkeley of the Mitten).
Saving the woman from what?
And if improving the quality of life for other children in the family requires one less child, why not advocate post-utero child killing. Hey, there are welfare moms with six+ kids out there. Kill all but two and bathe in the glory that the survivors' lives will be better for it.
< /sarchasm >
< /disgust >
Gee, she forgot to mention the word 'coat-hanger'.
Look lady, abortion is plain murder. How hard is that to understand? As a descendant of Christians and Jews, have you every heard of what happens to people like you who "harms these little ones?" Try reading a great Rabbi's teachings in the New Testament. You won't find the teachings in your OB's medical book.
I agree. That is the danger of using unnamed sources. It is easy to lie and attribute it to some unnamed source. This sounds more like it was written by a touchy-feely female staffer of Boston Magazine rather that a trained doctor.
Yes, except that you know that abortionists must do some gymnastics like this, to live with themselves, to sleep with that much innocent blood on their hands. They know as much as you and I, more. They know they're killing a person, an incredible creation, a child. But they do some compartmentalizing, some rationalizations, some denial. Very much like Hitler's "researchers," I would imagine.
Dan
A tenet of moral theology that seems to be lost these days is that bad acts create bad character. One takes on the attributes of the act ie one who commits theft becomes a thief
Speculations on "fundamental option", proportionalism and consequentialism theories have led people to believe they can do bad acts and still somehow retain a good character. These theories are specifically refuted in Veritatis splendor
65. The heightened concern for freedom in our own day has led many students of the behavioural and the theological sciences to develop a more penetrating analysis of its nature and of its dynamics. It has been rightly pointed out that freedom is not only the choice for one or another particular action; it is also, within that choice, a decision about oneself and a setting of one's own life for or against the Good, for or against the Truth, and ultimately for or against God. Emphasis has rightly been placed on the importance of certain choices which "shape" a person's entire moral life, and which serve as bounds within which other particular everyday choices can be situated and allowed to develop.
Some authors, however, have proposed an even more radical revision of the relationship between person and acts. They speak of a "fundamental freedom", deeper than and different from freedom of choice, which needs to be considered if human actions are to be correctly understood and evaluated. According to these authors, the key role in the moral life is to be attributed to a "fundamental option", brought about by that fundamental freedom whereby the person makes an overall self-determination, not through a specific and conscious decision on the level of reflection, but in a "transcendental" and "athematic" way. Particular acts which flow from this option would constitute only partial and never definitive attempts to give it expression; they would only be its "signs" or symptoms. The immediate object of such acts would not be absolute Good (before which the freedom of the person would be expressed on a transcendental level), but particular (also termed "categorical" ) goods. In the opinion of some theologians, none of these goods, which by their nature are partial, could determine the freedom of man as a person in his totality, even though it is only by bringing them about or refusing to do so that man is able to express his own fundamental option.
A distinction thus comes to be introduced between the fundamental option and deliberate choices of a concrete kind of behaviour. In some authors this division tends to become a separation, when they expressly limit moral "good" and "evil" to the transcendental dimension proper to the fundamental option, and describe as "right" or "wrong" the choices of particular "innerworldly" kinds of behaviour: those, in other words, concerning man's relationship with himself, with others and with the material world. There thus appears to be established within human acting a clear disjunction between two levels of morality: on the one hand the order of good and evil, which is dependent on the will, and on the other hand specific kinds of behaviour, which are judged to be morally right or wrong only on the basis of a technical calculation of the proportion between the "premoral" or "physical" goods and evils which actually result from the action. This is pushed to the point where a concrete kind of behaviour, even one freely chosen, comes to be considered as a merely physical process, and not according to the criteria proper to a human act. The conclusion to which this eventually leads is that the properly moral assessment of the person is reserved to his fundamental option, prescinding in whole or in part from his choice of particular actions, of concrete kinds of behaviour.
67. These tendencies are therefore contrary to the teaching of Scripture itself, which sees the fundamental option as a genuine choice of freedom and links that choice profoundly to particular acts. By his fundamental choice, man is capable of giving his life direction and of progressing, with the help of grace, towards his end, following God's call. But this capacity is actually exercised in the particular choices of specific actions, through which man deliberately conforms himself to God's will, wisdom and law. It thus needs to be stated that the so-called fundamental option, to the extent that it is distinct from a generic intention and hence one not yet determined in such a way that freedom is obligated, is always brought into play through conscious and free decisions. Precisely for this reason, it is revoked when man engages his freedom in conscious decisions to the contrary, with regard to morally grave matter.
To separate the fundamental option from concrete kinds of behaviour means to contradict the substantial integrity or personal unity of the moral agent in his body and in his soul. A fundamental option understood without explicit consideration of the potentialities which it puts into effect and the determinations which express it does not do justice to the rational finality immanent in man's acting and in each of his deliberate decisions. In point of fact, the morality of human acts is not deduced only from one's intention, orientation or fundamental option, understood as an intention devoid of a clearly determined binding content or as an intention with no corresponding positive effort to fulfil the different obligations of the moral life. Judgments about morality cannot be made without taking into consideration whether or not the deliberate choice of a specific kind of behaviour is in conformity with the dignity and integral vocation of the human person. Every choice always implies a reference by the deliberate will to the goods and evils indicated by the natural law as goods to be pursued and evils to be avoided. In the case of the positive moral precepts, prudence always has the task of verifying that they apply in a specific situation, for example, in view of other duties which may be more important or urgent. But the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behaviour as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the "creativity" of any contrary determination whatsoever. Once the moral species of an action prohibited by a universal rule is concretely recognized, the only morally good act is that of obeying the moral law and of refraining from the action which it forbids.
John Paul II, 1993
Once again, I agree. I think there is only one reason a doctor would perform an abortion - lots of money in it. Then they do the mental gymnastic you describe to justify it. Many, like Hitler, can justify doing away with a whole class of people for the lamest of reasons, yet make those reasons sound high-minded to those not in that class.
Liberals, at least those in the know, support abortion for one reason - to minimize the sanctity of life in order to make government (them) control more acceptable and their actions seem reasonable, regardless of the lack of morality and logic. Then they sell the ideas to the young and the useful idiots to gain wider support.
Power and control is the bottom line for them.
So many red herrings, so little time to answer.
I'm going to share the sex ed I got from my mom the first day of school.
Don't let anyone touch you down there.Btw, that's the sex ed I gave my daughter when she entered school this year. It still works.If anyone tries to touch you down there, you should kick, bite and scream as hard as you can.
A real deep thinker.
Sigh. How would you explain "profound" sophistry to one whose conscience is seared?
If she had mastered "thinking" in the first place, she'd realize what a massive self-contradiction she's embracing. If she doesn't recognize that killing 42 million kids before they have the chance to see the sun shine is a massive injustice that causes our "whole population" to "have injustice" ... she's been made stupid by her sins.
Deep down, this woman absolutely knows what she's doing is wrong. Otherwise, she wouldn't confess to being happy when her potential maternal victims (I refuse to call them "patients") decide not to kill their children.
Pray for her. There is yet time for her to repent, but it will take some serious grace.
Anyone notice that she seems not to care that this 11 yo girl is the victim of statutory rape?
This bimbo is either real dumb or deep down inside she gets off killing the babies. Also I think it might be a satitre because no beee-atch can be so stupid. Yet I have know some real whacked out liberal / leftist females...save the whales and baby seals but vacumm the babies out of the womb.
My fantasy for abortion luvvers is putting them back into their mother's womb and telling them that this is how safe and beautiful it feels like to be living inside mom but now mommy is going to TERMINATE you via a barbaric painful procedure - do you choose abortion now, huh missy? Are you pro choice now that you are the one going to be under the knife and die? I don't think any but the real hardcore wacko feminazis would choose death.
I think Margaret Sanger was an idiot Nazi.
I wonder if this murderer has had a chance to speak with some of her "patients" a couple of years after she's helped kill their children.
Has she saved them from the frequent nightmares? Has she saved them from the guilt? Increased incidence of suicide? Has she saved them from infertility? Has she saved them from their increased susceptibility to breast cancer?
Has she saved their souls?
So if somebody fixes her up with a nice pro-life guy, will she change her principles again to fit that relationship?
At the time, I thought abortion was strictly a women's issue. But he convinced me that abortion is a civil rights issue, that if you have injustice for some members of your population, your whole population has injustice. I remember thinking that was really profound.
In the sense that 'profound' = 'deep', yeah, that's profound.
Somewhat off-topic, but I notice that she's yet another product of a religious 'mixed marriage', adhering to the principles of neither. I've realized that this is the norm, but are there any exceptions? I'm concerned for my god-daughter & her sibling.
If Rod Serliner were alive, and were as passionality pro-life as he was other things, he could make a literally unforgettable Twilight Zone out of that scenario.
Might never be broadcast, and might be the last thing he ever did in Hollywood... but wow!
Dan
I have the utmost respect for life; I appreciate that life starts early in the womb, but also believe that I'm ending it for good reasons.
I'll have to remember this logic.
Do you think it will get me off the hook when I'm arrested for blowing away a guy who broke into my house and was burgling me?
I can see it now - "I have the utmonst respect for life, your honor, but I also believe that I ended it for good reasons."
What do you think my chances would be?
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