“A portion of your training on the gynecology service,” the chief resident told the third year medical students, “will be spent in the University of Wisconsin Hospital abortion clinic. You will be expected to work on that service for one week unless you elect to refuse to do so for conscientious considerations.”
As I had always stood for pro-life ideals, I assumed I would be one of the students who would request absentia from the abortion rotation. However, as I considered my options, I decided to work at the abortion clinic for the required week in order to benefit from behind-the-scenes experience. The students were not allowed to actually be present at the abortion procedures but we interviewed the patients and performed the admission physical exams.
There were several unwed teenage girls who came in each day, but I did not expect the number of married women who were scheduled for an abortion. In fact, I was shocked to hear some say, "We don't want the baby this year, maybe in a year or so." I thought to myself, "It won't be this baby whom you are now murdering. It will be another child whom you allow to come to birth."
One day the resident came back from performing an abortion under staff supervision. He stated that the woman who was undergoing the surgery had bled so profusely that they had been forced to perform an emergency hysterectomy. As I was a mother of five children, I empathized with that patient and was stunned to hear the resident pass the situation off lightly with the remark. "Oh well, she's already got a kid!" He certainly displayed his ignorance concerning a woman's desire for children.
This one week's experience on the abortion service taught me several lessons:If you are one who believes abortion is a good or necessary woman's "right," think over the following questions:
Medical students were always told to observe and learn from every patient and every procedure. The fact that we were not allowed to actually attend an abortion points out the barbaric nature of the process. Abortion was being abused as a means of contraception. Abortion in a university hospital clinic can be as dangerous as the proverbial coat-hanger. Performing this inhumane procedure had the effect of causing the involved doctor to become callous to women and their pain, whether emotional or physical. Abortion is an attack not only on the unborn child who will never get her chance for life, but is also an attack on the woman who undergoes the invasive procedure.In the three minutes it has taken you to read this article, sixteen more babies' lives have been cruelly snuffed out, 40,000,000 since Roe v. Wade; more than four times the number murdered during the Holocaust; more than the number of soldiers killed in all the wars our country has fought. This continues to be a veritable slaughter of the innocents. Which is more important, a woman's right to abortion or her child's right to life? What about responsibility? Did you know abortion is legal up until birth? Did you know the ban on partial-birth abortion has been signed into law, but activist judges may overrule the will of the people? Did you know partial-birth abortion is legal infanticide? Think about your children or grandchildren. Perhaps some of them have already been aborted. Were not those lives as precious as the ones now living? Could not the vast sums of money charged by unscrupulous doctors and clinics be better spent to help the women faced with "problem pregnancies?" What about the millions of loving couples who could have given these babies good adoptive homes?
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Dr. Marjorie Bass: "One week's experience"
Marjorie Bass is a member of the Madison Seventh Day Baptist Church and a medical doctor. In this article, originally published in her local paper, she remembers a part of her medical training: