Pro-aborts incessantly claim the mantle of sound medicine, supposedly wanting nothing more than to ensure that the health professionals are free to apply their knowledge objectively without being shackled by ideology or religion. So why is it that when pro-abortion doctors speak, the results are predominantly emotionalism, not medical analysis?
The most striking example in a long time of this phenomenon comes from the Guardian, which has published what we’re meant to take as an educational account by an anonymous abortionist in the UK. Readers are promised a glimpse of the profound lessons Anon’s experience offing kids for a living has taught her “about life” (irony not among them):
[P]regnancy at the wrong time, with the wrong person, or in the wrong situation, can be a very lonely and unsympathetic place to be. One young woman confided in me that she’d rather take three buses home after her medical procedure and risk bleeding on the bus than have to ask a friend or family member for a lift, and therefore disclose her situation. I loaded her up with sanitary towels and silently hoped for the best.
Heart-rending though this may be, some questions about what Anon apparently didn’t learn from the encounter spring to mind. First, observing that pregnancy can be lonely or unsympathetic doesn’t address the reason those protestors are standing outside your clinic in the first place; surely someone capable of navigating medical school can decipher the source of their concern? (Hint: those “gruesome placards of foetal parts” you mentioned are kind of a big clue.)
Second, you write that your patient feared asking loved ones for a ride to the abortion, not talking with them about pregnancy generally. Did you ascertain how big a role their lack of support had to do with her decision to abort? If it was substantial, did it occur to you to help connect her with people in the community who would be more supportive?
I have performed 21 abortions today, ending pregnancies in women ageing from 16 to 44, who have travelled from as far as Northern Ireland to regain control over their own bodies. I have carefully sieved through aspirate to identify the tiny translucent jelly-fish-like gestation sac at five weeks. I have painstakingly removed a foetus part by part at 23 weeks and watched the ultrasound image of the uterus shrink back to size.
So you removed human body parts, yet apparently didn’t learn from the experience anything about the humanity of what you’re destroying. Dismembering humans and handling their corpses taught you neither that women’s “own bodies” aren’t in dispute nor to understand the perspective of the protesters you do “anything to avoid catching the eye of.”
Huh.
I have heard 21 stories of 21 difficult decisions, some agonising, others more straightforward, but not one of them taken lightly.
If they don’t take killing their sons and daughters lightly (which isn’t germane to the ethics of doing so anyway), then what’s your excuse for taking it lightly?
My training also serves to remind me that there is no one type of woman who experiences unwanted pregnancy.
No there isn’t, but the experiences that fuel motivations don’t change the permissibility of killing anyone after birth, so why should they make killing the preborn permissible?
I glance back at the pro-life contingent and I wonder whether I feel guilty, or whether I should. There is a stir as a wide-eyed woman leaves the entrance of the clinic; she flinches when she sees the crowd and bows as if to hide her face. As I walk away I know these protestors have inadvertently answered my question. As long as unplanned pregnancy exists, we need to help women in this unfortunate situation, not harass them. Abortion can improve life and prevent harm; pro-choice, to me, does not mean anti-life.
You’ll just have to take my word for it that pro-choice doesn’t mean anti-life, because I certainly haven’t bothered to consider the lives I end every day.
There’s not a single word in this editorial that couldn’t have been written (and hasn’t been, again and again and again and again) by any layman with only a casual familiarity with pro-choice talking points. Nowhere does Anon share any aspect of her medical training or firsthand experience with abortions that indicates they’re not ethically problematic, don’t unjustly end the lives of living human beings, or their deaths matter less than the women’s woes she describes. She doesn’t even mention objections to abortion, let alone discredit them!
File this one away as another bit of pro-abortion propaganda that promises the profound but doesn’t even deliver competent. After you’re done weeping for the violence the cult of choice does to innocent babies, shed a few more tears for the violence it’s done to analytical thought.
