While you're performing abortions, did you
also—did you ever come across pro-lifers,
and what was your perspective on pro-lifers?
People always ask that. Now, understand as
I tell people, I was not running an abortion
clinic. I was running a regular OB/GYN office
like most women have gone to. We did deliveries,
we did hysterectomies, abortion certainly
was a part of our practice. And it was during
those—those—the 3 years before I stopped
doing abortions in that private practice that
I arrived at my office one day and there were
picketers surrounding our building, praying,
holding their signs. They didn't have our
names on the signs, but we knew they were
there for us. And people frequently ask me,
“What are you thinking when we’re outside
picketing?” And I would tell them, what
we were thinking—what you're thinking when
you're in that situation—it gave us a siege
mentality. It was us against those kooks outside.
And you—when you saw folks outside,
where
did you get the stereotype that they were kooks?
Um, oh, everybody in the pro-abortion, you
know, every—every abortionist knows that
everyone, you know, involved in the pro-life
movement is a kook.
CNN tells me so, I would—they would never lie to me.
Do you remember any kind of, uh,
exchanges that you had, with pro-life advocates?
Oh, I remember very vividly an exchange, but
it didn't happen quite the way you might imagine.
Um, it was during that time when a woman came
to me as a new patient. Her name was Susan—didn't
even come up to my shoulders—came in for
a routine OB/GYN appointment, you know—OB/GYN
annual exam and a pap smear. Um, did her exam
and then at the end of the exam, she looked
at me and said, “Can I talk to you?” Now,
doctors know that many patients—I think
especially women—won't really tell you what's
on their mind until they've established some
level of trust. And so it wasn't all that
unusual that she did that. So, I—I sat down
in my office and looked at her and—professionally
looked at her—and said, “Ma’am how can
I help you?” and she absolutely blew me
away when she said, “I've been here—I've
been sent here to give you a message that
Jesus loves you, he cares about you. This
is not what he had intended for your life, to be an abortionist. Please stop.” Now,
I had a—one overwhelming thought when she
said that, and that was, “I've gotta hustle
this kook out of my office as fast as I could,”
and I did. A year later she showed up for
her routine annual exam and pap smear, and
when the exam was over she said, “Can I
talk to you?” And I went, “Oh, no!”
you know. Now, understand, it's not like I
never darkened the inside of a church before,
but people who were really demonstrative about
their faith really made me uncomfortable.
And she basically said the same message, more
or less, “I've been sent here to give you
a message of Jesus loves you, he cares about
you. This is not what he intended for your
life, to be an abortionist. Please stop.”
Now, believe me, I remembered what she had
said the year before, but in the intervening
year between those two visits, I received at
least three personal greeting cards sent to
the office to me marked confidential with
the message written on the card. One time,
during that intervening year, I arrived in
my office and there was a plate of brownies
sitting on my desk with the message tied to
the brownies. You know, it's—it’s funny
I—I wouldn't put a name or title to what
was had going on, but Joe Scheidler of the
Pro-Life Action League, who has written several
books, calls that adopting an abortionist.
Um, and that's exactly what this woman did.
Now it's really interesting. It was not till
much later that I realized—that I found
out, that she was one of the people picketing
my office. You know—and I have a message
for people, especially for women, you know,
“Dr. X does abortions. I would never go
to him.” Well, you know, you're never going
to change somebody's mind by—you can picket
all you want—you may or may not change somebody's
mind that way, but I will suggest to you that
most of the time, you won't. And you can yell
at someone and scream at them, but I can absolutely
tell you, you will not convince their mind
about anything that way. If you're going to
convince somebody that maybe the path they're
walking is wrong, you need a relationship
with that person of some sort to be able to
start that dialogue. This lady was very clever.
She became a patient. Believe me, doctors
listen to their patients.
That’s amazing, and a—and a—definitely
a message to women who are pro-life that maybe—maybe
that doctor that is performing abortions is
a—is one to go talk to.
Exactly.
I will no longer do any more abortions. When you finally figure out that killing a baby that big for money is wrong,
then it doesn't take you too long to figure out it doesn't matter if the baby is this big,
or this big, or this big, or maybe even this big— it's all the same.
