Some stories

[kate_schaefer]

Some time in the early nineties, I was unable to get to my doctor's office because its waiting room was completely occupied by protesters from Operation Rescue. I don't remember the details of how this affected me; my need to see my doctor that day was routine and easily rescheduled, whatever it was. I do remember that my doctor and her staff took refuge in the office of my dentist, a few floors below, and that my dentist and her entire staff wore NARAL buttons on their lapels for many months thereafter; that my doctor later told me that among the patients she was unable to see that day was a pregnant woman with preeclampsia who very much wanted to have her baby and who suffered a dangerous delay in getting care because of the sit-in (she and her baby survived; I know nothing else about them); and that one of the protesters arrested and released in her office that day was Shelley Shannon, who a few months later shot Dr. George Tiller, wounding him badly but not killing him.

I remember asking my doctor, some time before, why she did so many abortions. Didn't those patients have regular doctors? Yes, she said, but their regular doctors were afraid to perform abortions because of the harassment. And yes, she had performed abortions on women who regularly protest against legal abortion; she recognized them from walking past them to get to her office, and they knew where they could go when they needed an abortion because they spent so much time standing there. They'd ask her not to tell anyone, and she'd remind them that she could not reveal that information about any of her patients, but she'd appreciate it if they would not picket her office any more. Some of them stopped picketing; some of them didn't.

My doctor retired from practice shortly thereafter. The doctor who bought her practice continued to have a general family practice with an emphasis on reproductive care, which included all aspects of obstetrics and gynecology. A few years later, she decided to cut back her hours and dropped the general practice to concentrate on providing birth control and abortion, because even fewer general practitioners would perform abortions by then and the need was so great.

Let's just look at that sentence, shall we? The need was so great. Why is the need so great? Because people make mistakes. Because birth control doesn't always work, even when used properly. Because some people don't pay attention in sex education classes. Because some people don't think sex education classes should be taught. Because some people believe that women and girls are property that needs to be controlled. Because some women and girls are raped. Because some women and girls make different choices after they get pregnant than they think they would make beforehand. Because some wanted pregnancies turn out to be dangerous for the would-be mother. Because people make mistakes.

In my youth, I at first believed that abortion should be a private choice of the woman involved. Later, I came to believe that abortion was wrong in every circumstance. Later still, I came to believe that it is always a tragedy, always a very sad choice, but that for the woman making that very sad choice, it may be the right choice, right then, and that she is the only one in a position to be able to make that choice. The role of the rest of society -- all of us who happen not to be pregnant with that particular fetus at that particular time -- is to make sure that the woman has all the support she needs to be able to make that choice: to carry to term, or to abort safely, where safely means that only one life is lost.

I do mourn for every aborted child, as I mourn for every dead person in any time (which is to say, this is a somewhat abstracted mourning, folks, but real nevertheless). I do not use the word "tragedy" lightly in this or any other case. I hope for a time when abortion is much more rare than it is now, rare because women are able to choose when and whether to have intercourse as well as when and whether to try to conceive. In the meantime, knowing that the choices women make when they find themselves pregnant are different from the choices they think they would make -- and knowing women who got badly hurt getting illegal abortions in the seventies as well as women who were able to pay a lot of money to have safe illegal abortions in the forties -- I support a woman's right to choose and a doctor's right to perform abortions in a safe, sterile environment.

And I mourn Dr. Tiller.

Comments

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Kate, you have expressed very eloquently my feelings on abortion. I often feel awkward because while I do not "believe" in abortion, I support choice. I support late term abortion because it is a medical issue. I also support realistic sex education and freely available (not necessarily free) birth control. I am just old enough to remember knowing my contemporaries who had illegal abortions or (the better choice) went to Mexico or Canada for a semi-illegal abortion.

I would like to see emotional and financial support for the women who think their lives are over because the fashion magazine view of sex sometimes results in pregnancy. I would like society to approve of adoption and government to have better policies. I would like to have safe abandonment of the infant or child at any age. I'd like people to know that most all babies look dead when they are born.

Thank you for the touching post.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Marilyn. Yeah, I find the idea of believing in abortion hard to understand; it's a way of framing the issue that has no perfinence to people's lives.

Do most babies look dead when they are born? What a startling idea. Is that a major contributor to very young and frightened mothers abandoning their newborns? I've only been present at one birth, and that baby most certainly did not look dead when she was born, but then we were all expecting and hoping that she'd be just fine.

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Yes, for all practical purposes, newborns are a blue or purple color before the placenta is removed from the mouth and nose and they are held upside down and patted, not thwacked, on the back until breathing starts. If that does not happen, then the airway needs to be checked for blockage, probably part of the placenta, and breath breathed into them. A baby born who is rosy or red is suffering from oxygen deprivation and needs more oxygen immediately. We gain our healthy skin color in a few minutes. This is why, I am told, that doctors get between the camera and the baby at the time of birth, but they don't always succeed. It color of a newborn is startling in those pictures. Not having given birth, or attended one, all I know is second hand.

First hand, I know that cattle will nudge the newborn calf functionally massaging it, link out the nose and mouth, even sucking on it, and breathing into its nose/mouth. More than once, we went to move what we thought was a dead calf and simply flexing it started breathing.

[jackwilliambell.livejournal.com]

Well said! And I agree completely: Abortion is *always* a tragedy. It is also sometimes necessary. These two things create a tension difficult to overcome for many people and point out the need for counseling as part of the treatment.

Imagine being someone who protests against abortion and then needing one badly enough to go to the doctor you protest against for it! The cognitive dissonance must be overwhelming, unless you can compartmentalize like a psychopath.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Jack. I think all humans can compartmentalize almost as well as a psychopath; it's a powerful protectant against having to understand everything around us, which is just too hard for most of us to have to do. The thing I found incredible at first was returning to protest against that same doctor after getting the abortion, until I realized that of course the woman would have to do that, to keep from having her fellow protesters find out what she had done.

[lintninja.livejournal.com]

You have summed it up perfectly.ALthough I have never been in the position to need an abortion(for which I am very thankful),I want it to be available to those who need it. It should be a hard decision to make, but it should be one that can be made.
I had a room mate in the early 90's who used abortions as birth control. I found this repugnant. Especially since she as one of those preachy "christian" right-to-life types. She had three while I shared that appartment with her. Always because she had gotten toodrunk to care about birth controll when the time came.That's the kind of attitude that gives people who believe in birth control and abortiona bad name.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Lauryn. I think what you describe is the kind of thing that gives people who don't believe in birth control a bad name: they don't believe in it, so they don't practice it, and then they avail themselves of the privilege they would deny to others, getting an abortion.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

This.

I wish I could find the article I read a couple of years ago, but I can't seem to. So, from memory, it was written by a woman who had been pregnant with a baby she very much wanted, only the baby died, in utero. The heart beat stopped late in the pregnancy, and then the corpse and amniotic fluid began to go septic. The mother began to bleed, but she didn't miscarry, she just kept bleeding. And kept bleeding. Naturally, she went to her doctor. But her doctor wouldn't perform surgery to remove the corpse, because she was far enough along that the only sensible procedure to use was dilation and extraction. So-called "partial birth" abortion, in other words. And her doctor was worried about the legal ramifications of the procedure, even though the baby was dead. Her doctor told her to go to an emergency room instead. At the emergency room, they told her there was nothing they could do unless she were not merely bleeding, but hemorrhaging. They told her to go home, and come back when the bleeding became more severe.

I don't remember how she finally got treated, but obviously she lived to tell the tale. But it's the story I think of whenever anyone tries to tell me that there are never medical reasons sufficient for late term abortion, that the health of the mother is a red herring, or that dilation and extraction should always be illegal. Saving a woman's life should not require extraordinary professional courage when the procedure to do it is safe and well-known. So I too mourn Dr. Tiller -- a man of extraordinary professional courage, in a land that still needs people like him.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I remember reading a story like that. I just went looking for it again.
Is this the one you were thinking of?
http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2004/womanandherdoctor.asp

One thing I found significant was that her regular doctor couldn't do the surgery. It's not just that she didn't want to. She didn't know how. A medical procedure eventually stops being "safe and well-known" when medical schools and hospitals stop teaching it, stop allowing it to be done in their facilities.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes that's the one. I knew I wasn't remembering all the details right, but in many ways it's much scarier than I remember, because as you say, D&Es are rapidly becoming a lost art and when they are, only less safe options for ending a still-birth pregnancy will remain.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I keep thinking about that story. It's rare; it's not unique. Doctors need to know how to do this, because it happens.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this, Kate. Needless to say, I agree with you.

I call myself a Christian, and I am ashamed that people who call themselves the same do things like this. The Christ that I follow was all about forgiveness and love. I don't know this person those other people follow.

Ulrika, I shuddered, reading the story you told. My father-in-law is a retired OB-GYN, and before he moved to Britain, he would sometimes write letters to the newspapers detailing how, in the days when abortion was illegal, he was called in to care for a woman who had tried to self-abort or gone to a quack. All too often, by the time he saw the woman, it was too late to save her. Abortion may be a sin, but living people have the capacity to repent (and maybe go on later to have healthy babies they want); this choice has been taken away from the dead.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I sometimes wonder whether more doctors simply did abortions in the thirties and forties than talked about it. Yes, it was illegal, but they were taught D & C procedures for other reasons, and that same procedure can be used for first trimester abortions. My great-aunt's father-in-law in Illinois performed abortions in the forties. I know of a doctor in Portland who performed abortions from the thirties through the sixties (and who had delivered three generations of babies in one family, as well as performing abortions for two generations of that family). A friend of my grandmother's had an abortion performed by a doctor in Cleveland in the thirties.

One of my frustrations in talking about abortion is that it is not talked about, so that people think it doesn't touch them. When I talk about it, I am constrained in what I say, because the women I know who have had abortions don't want to be identified and stigmatized. I had a roommate who had an abortion; another roommate in a different time and a different city asked me never to say that, because perhaps someone would misunderstand and think that she had been the roommate who had an abortion. That's more editorial control than I'm willing to let anyone have over what I write and say.

My own abortion story is actually a morning-after pill story. I was always -- almost always -- conscientious about birth control. The condom broke. My Catholic boyfriend and I discussed what we should do, and in the morning I went to the clinic and asked for the morning-after pill, as we had agreed. The nurse practitioner told me that if I took it and it didn't work, I'd have to have an abortion, because the fetus would be damaged. I thought about it, took the prescription, and went to talk with my boyfriend about it. He agreed that I should go ahead. That was the turning point for me, although I didn't recognize it as such for some time: my boydriend and I had agreed to an abortion if preventing implantation did not work, having already tried to prevent the possibility of conception by using a condom. If we thought it would be all right for us to make that decision in those circumstances, how could we ask to have the power over other people to keep them from making such a decision in their own lives?

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

I have a very few political litmus tests, since things are rarely that simple.
However, I believe that if someone is "anti-abortion" (in quotes, since I can't believe that there is a significant number of people who are actually "pro-abortion") AND is anti-sex education and anti-contraception, then their issue is not abortion, but their own problems with sexuality, an entirely different thing.

As the saying goes, when the question of abortion arises, the tragedy has already occurred.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, things are rarely that simple. I've encountered such a huge range of opinions on the other side politically. I've never met any of the anti-sex education people (I have meet some anti-contraception people), but I know they're out there. I know the folks who adopt and foster are out there, too.

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

I'm a guy, so I can't believe that I can say what is right or wrong in this case. I can say that you've summed up precisely what my currently feelings are, though. It's a tough choice, and it should remain a choice. Even when you're given that choice, it will still be a tough one.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, always tough, no matter what. Anyone for whom it isn't a difficult decision probably doesn't have the moral depth to be a reasonable human being on any other issue, either.