“Aspiring” abortion doctors

Ms. Green reminded me of this story from the L.A. Times, so I thought I’d comment on parts of it.

Aspiring abortion doctors drawn to embattled field

Medical students cite defiance and conscience as a reason to choose the career. ‘It doesn’t matter what you believe if you don’t back it up with action,’ one says.

Denver – FOURTH-year medical student Megan Lederer recently helped deliver a premature baby at barely six months gestation. The newborn was tiny, unimaginably fragile, but she survived.

Caught up in the moment, Lederer didn’t think about the implication for her chosen career. Later, though, she wondered: Could I have aborted that pregnancy?

She could have, she decided. She would have felt an obligation.

Please pause here for a moment.  She delivered a live baby and says she would have felt obligated to abort her had the mother not wanted the child.  Everybody got that?  No twisted philosophical reasoning about when the unborn become human, just a plain, old choice of whether to kill a viable human being or let her live. 

Lederer, 30, can’t relate to the images that drew an older generation of physicians into abortion work. She can barely picture it when they talk about life before legal abortion: the blood-spattered apartments, the women racked with infection from stabbing sticks into their wombs.

This emotional ploy still seems to work.  The truth is that most pre-Roe v Wade abortions were done in doctors’ offices (”Uh, you’re late this month . . .  better do a D&C to get things back on track.”)  And note how she can “barely picture” those gruesome images but ignores the gruesome images of abortions noted below.

But she and other young doctors-in-training have found their own motivation to enter a field that they know will put them at risk of isolation, harassment and hatred. For them, doing abortions is an act of defiance – a way of pushing back against mounting restrictions on a right they’ve taken for granted all their lives.

“It’s like when your big brother says you can’t do something,” Lederer said. “That just makes you want to do it even more.”

Your big brother says not to kill innocent human beings, so it makes you want to do it more.  Check.

Rebellion is alive and well in the human heart.

Abortion is one of the most common surgical procedures in the U.S., terminating about one in four pregnancies, not counting miscarriages. Yet the number of providers has fallen steadily for decades, dropping 37% between 1982 and 2000, the last year a census was taken. (During the same period, the number of abortions fell 17%.)

Antiabortion activists attribute the drop to a growing aversion to killing fetuses. “It’s corrosive to the soul,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for National Right to Life.

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NEARLY one-third of metropolitan areas and 97% of rural counties have no abortion providers, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group affiliated with Planned Parenthood. One in four patients must travel at least 50 miles to end a pregnancy.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers, which are primarily funded by donations, outnumber abortion clinics.  Maybe the pro-legalized abortionists need to donate more money?

Guttmacher researchers are working on updated statistics, but as of 2000, they reported that the United States had about 1,800 abortion providers – many of them near, or past, retirement age. By comparison, the American Medical Assn. reported that the same year, there were about 6,200 plastic surgeons, 9,700 dermatologists and 10,600 gastroenterologists.

Each spring, the advocacy group Medical Students for Choice brings several hundred students – nearly 90% of them women – to a weekend convention to nudge them into considering abortion work. One of the most effective tools: introducing them to veteran providers.

“It was amazing to see all these people who have made this [a career] … and it works for them,” Lederer said.

That upbeat message was a marked contrast from the lecture Lederer and her friends heard last fall at the University of Colorado’s medical school in downtown Denver. Medical Students for Choice had invited Dr. Warren Hern, a legend in the abortion rights movement, to give them encouragement. He offered none.

None of you will be an abortion provider, he told the students. You don’t have it in you.

“Do something else. Fix broken legs,” he often advises. “No reasonable person would do this.”

Hern, 68, practices in Boulder, Colo., a liberal college town. Still, he’s afraid to open his blinds at night for fear of a sniper hidden in the bushes. His clinic is protected by a fence and four layers of bulletproof glass.

Abortion is so stigmatized, Hern said, that his fellow physicians shun him. Even his patients often regard him with disgust: “They’ve absorbed so much antiabortion rhetoric, they feel a sense of revulsion that they have to come into my office and seek treatment.”

It is curious that he blames antiabortion rhetoric.  As late as the mid-60’s Planned Parenthood was still “antiabortion.” The original Hippocratic Oath and virtually every modification of it until just recently specifically condemned abortion.  The sense of revulsion has been in place for a long, long time.  It was only recently that some people lost that sense.

Hern specializes in late second- and third-trimester abortions; his patients come to him from around the world, many with late diagnosis of fetal deformity. Though he feels certain he’s doing right by the women, Hern still feels conflicted when he steps into his basement surgery.

He once wrote that “the sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current” – and after three decades, he is not inured to that feeling. “We are hard-wired as a species to protect small, young, helpless creatures,” he said. “The fetus is not a baby, but it’s close. Some are very close. It’s difficult.”

A baby is not a toddler, but it’s close. Some are very close. But that doesn’t mean you can kill the baby. The fetus is a human being at a particular stage of development. That doesn’t mean they are fair game for destruction.

Lederer does not know how she will handle such emotion; the closest she’s come to performing an abortion was suctioning the seeds out of a papaya to learn a first-trimester technique. She may, in the end, restrict her practice to early abortions. But that’s not an easy solution to accept. She can’t see how she could ever justify taking one woman as a patient while turning away another because her pregnancy is a few weeks more advanced.

Why doesn’t she consider the alternative view?  How can she justify doing an abortion just because the unborn is a few weeks less advanced?

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She was surprised that the clinic’s patients included women of all income, ages and education levels. Lederer helped out a bit, sterilizing instruments, but spent most of her time observing these women as they ended pregnancies that, for one reason or another, they felt they could not handle.

“This was something tangible you could do for people,” she said. “You could make a difference in these women’s lives.”

It makes a difference for the unborn as well.  How about volunteering at a Crisis Pregnancy Center or with adoptions so she could help mother and child?

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EXTREME violence is always a threat. A Texas man was indicted this month on charges of planting a bomb filled with nails outside an abortion clinic in Austin. The National Abortion Federation is so fearful of attack that officials don’t announce the dates of the annual conference, much less the location.

But the violence has subsided greatly since the mid-1990s, when seven doctors and clinic workers in the U.S. and Canada were killed and dozens of clinics were targeted with bombings, arsons and acid attacks. Doctors today are more likely to face pickets and pray-ins.

Lederer encountered such a demonstration recently at the national convention of Medical Students for Choice. A truck covered with grisly photos of fetal parts was parked outside. One demonstrator appeared to be taking pictures of the students’ name badges as they walked in and out of the hotel.

Far from being intimidated, Lederer found the protest exhilarating. “Everyone sat up even taller,” she said. “The general vibe was very empowering.”

Yeah, stick it to the man . . . or the baby.  Grisly images of a small percentage of women who have abortions make them want legal abortion on demand up to and including infanticide (i.e., “partial-birth abortion”), but grisly images of what takes place 4,000 times per day in the U.S. doesn’t make them want to protect the unborn.