NEWSSpecial Report (Abortionist Burnout) Print Post Approved - 33L385/00042
Pro-Life Victoria: Speaking Up for Humanity in the Nineties |
Abortionist
Burnout
By Anne-Marie Morgan |
Contents:
- Pro-Life News Editor's Note
- The Abortionist Deficit
- Dr Benjamin Kalish
- Dr John Szenes
- Dr Beverly McMillan
- Dr Anthony Levatino
- Dr Bernard Nathanson
- Dr David Brewer
- Justice Antonin Scalia
- The Pro-Life Action League of Chicago
- Dr C.Everett Koop
- Dr Matthew J.Bulfin
- Dr Curtis E.Harris
- Abortionist Burnout: Epilogue
Prolife literature and argument has traditionally focussed on the devastating effects of abortion on babies and women, and the struggle between pro-life and pro-abortion advocates. However, it is worth examining the other pasty of the issue, the abortionists. These men and women are not immune to having their consciences pricked by the immorality of abortion. The following article from the United States is probably the best up to date and most comprehensive article on abortion and abortionists.
A DISCOMFORTING PANIC has shaken the
celebratory sentiment of American pro-abortionists. Pro-abortionist advocates have talked
about the euphoria of having a President who thinks that abortion should be legal. Yet in
the midst of Mr Clinton’s exemplary performance in support of abortion and his
Supreme Court nomination of a pro Roe vs Wade judge, Justice Byron White, the public might
be forgiven for puzzling over the recent cries of alarm by pro-abortionists in the media.
The abortion proponents’ new anxiety is over the shortage of physicians in the United
States who are willing to perform abortions; an
abortionist deficit as it were. For three years, there have been numerous reports about
the lack of doctors and facilities for abortion, opines
abortionist Dr Warren Ream is a recent New York Times article.
Ream attributes the abortionist shortage to several factors: the scarcity of abortionist training facilities, determined harassment by pro-life protesters, service overhead costs, excessive insurance costs, security expense and fear of litigation. Significantly, Ream suggests another problem; there is a stigma attached to large scale abortionists. "Increasingly doctors are made to feel irrelevant. Feminist abortion clinics treat doctors like technicians and treat male doctors with distain. The status of doctors who perform abortions has plummeted lower than that of physicians who do insurance company examinations."
The May 1993 Journal of the American Medical Association adds to the list of reasons for the shortage: the effect of new laws such as abortion reporting requirements, and fully-informed consent laws that have been enacted by many states.
There is, to be sure, some truth to these assertions. Recent independent studies indicate that the pool of abortionists in the United States is dwindling. Family Planning World reported that a mere 8000 physicians performed most of the 1.6 million abortions in the US in 1991.
However, what has not been examined in regards to the issue is the doctors themselves and their reasons for turning away from the practice.
Long before the protests, before Operation Rescue ever existed, before a single Roe-moderating Supreme Court case was handed down, physicians began refusing to perform abortions. Sometimes quietly, sometimes publicly, for reasons scientific, ethical, religious, humanitarian, or personal, these doctors either refused from the outset to perform abortions or else became abortion providers and then discounted the practice as their consciences stirred. Soon after Roe, clues to the logic driving these doctors’ abortion abstentions began to emerge in medical journals and even in literature authored by committed abortion advocates.
FOR EXAMPLE, in her 1976 book, In Necessity and Sorrow, Dr Magda Denes, who supports abortion fights, quotes abortion-provider Dr Benjamin Kalish describing his performance of first-trimester abortions:
I do D & Cs here in vast quantities...... Now if you do suction, you put it in and it schooches out and you don’t really see it. When you do a D & C most of the tissue is removed by the Olden forceps or ring clamp and you actually get gross parts of the fetus out. So you can see a miniature person, so to speak, and so even now I occasionally feel a little peculiar about it, because as a physician I’m trained to conserve life and here I am destroying life. But overall, I’m happy about the law [lifting restrictions]
Kalis, obviously torn, then describes his experience with later-term abortions:
Well, the saline is even more gross and unpleasant...... When we do D & Cs it’s under general anaesthesia, so the patient comes in and the doctor does the dirty work. And she wakes up, and it’s his sin, and she’s cured. But with a saline she’s participating in this sin, because she’s awake...... But on a number of occasions with the needle, I have harpooned the fetus. I can feel the fetus move at the end of the needle just like you have a fish hooked on a line. This gives me an unpleasant, unhappy feeling because I know that the fetus is alive and responding to the needle stab...... You know that there is something alive in there that you’re killing.
DENES ALSO RECORDS the observations of New York abortionist Dr John Szenes: You have to become a bit schizophrenic. In one room you encourage the patient that the slight irregularity of the fetal heart is not important, everything is going well, she is going to have a nice baby, and then you shut the door and go into the next room and assure another patient on whom you just did a saline abortion, that it’s fine if the heart is already irregular, she has nothing to worry about, she is not going to have a little baby. I mean you definitely have to make a 180-degree turn, but somehow it evolved in my own mind gradually ......
IT WAS A GROWING ABHORRENCE for abortion that prompted Dr Beverly McMillan, founder of the first abortion clinic in Mississippi, to stop performing the procedure. McMillan decided in 1969 to be an abortionist to help provide women with safe abortions, and she subsequently performed a large number of them. After performing a D & C abortion, she would make sure that the abortion was completed. McMillan recounts how she would go to the suction bottle and remove the stockinette, take it to the sink, and "pick through it with a forceps and identify the four extremities, the spine, and the skull, and the placenta."
One day, "standing at that sink, I just started seeing these bodies for the first time. I don’t know what I did before that, I think I just counted, I was cool, blood didn’t make me sick". Shortly thereafter, she relates, when the office manager asked to watch this process at the sink following a 12-week abortion, "as I was showing her, I remembered very clearly seeing an arm and seeing the deltoid muscle, and it really struck me that day how beautiful that was. And the thought just flashed through my mind. What are you doing? Here is this beautiful piece of humanity, human flesh here. What are you doing?’ And that was one of the last ones I did."NEITHER POLITICS NOR HARASSMENT were the reasons that New York obstetrician/gynaecologist Anthony Levatino quit performing abortions after providing them for eight years. Levatino learned to do abortions as part of his training. "My discomfort came at that point because there was this tremendous conflict within me" as he did D & C abortions in his office and saline abortions at the hospital whenever he was on call. "Those were horrible, because you saw a whole, intact baby being born and sometimes they were alive, and that was very, very frightening. It was a very stomach-turning kind of existence." He and his wife were looking for a baby to adopt "and I’m throwing them in the garbage at a rate of nine and ten a week." The little girl the Levatinos adopted later was killed in a tragic accident. "When you lose a child, your child, life is very different," explains Levatino, Everything changes. All of a sudden the idea of a person’s life becomes very real. It’s not an embryology course anymore And the old discomforts came back in spades." He summarises his experience this way:
"I couldn’t even think about a D & E abortion anymore. No way. And you start to realise: This is somebody’s child. I lost my child. Someone who was very precious to us. And now I’m taking somebody’s child and I’m tearing them right out of their womb. I’m killing somebody’s child. That’s what it took to get me to change. My own sense of self esteem went down the tubes. I began to feel like a paid assassin It got to the point where it just wasn’t worth it, the money wasn’t worth it. "Pro-women" my butt. I don’t care. This is coming out of my hide. It’s costing me too much personally. All the money in the world wouldn’t have made any difference. So I quit."PERHAPS THE MOST renowned case of a physician who stopped performing abortions is that of Dr Bernard Nathanson, pre-eminent trailblazer of the abortion-legalisation movement. Now condemned as a turncoat by his former colleagues for publicly renouncing the practice of abortion, Nathanson had become "increasingly troubled by my own increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths." What persuaded him to change his mind was new scientific proof: "the development of a marvellous new technology which has served to define beyond reasonable challenge the nature of intrauterine life, the inarguably and specifically human quality of that life." In his retrospective book, The Abortion Papers, Nathan-son insists that scientific advancement alone was responsible for his awakening and subsequent defection from the ranks of fervent abortion providers: "The [post-Roe] flowering of fetology as a major medical discipline is especially important to me personally. The data and perceptions arising from fetology formed that hinge of my thinking on the abortion issue. I have repeatedly denied that my pro-life position stems from religious convictions. It sprang from nothing but hard, reproducible, scientific facts and the application of the Golden Rule to those facts.
DR DAVID BREWER ALSO BEGAN performing abortions during his medical training in New York. He assisted in his first abortion by counting abortion fetal parts: "I looked at the towel and there were parts in there of a person. I’d taken anatomy, I was a medical student, I knew what I was looking at." He continues, "There was a little scapula and an arm, some ribs and a chest, and I saw a tiny little head and I saw a piece of a leg and I saw a tiny hand and another arm and, you know, it was like somebody put a hot poker into me. I wasn’t a Christian but I had a conscience, and that hurt." Brewer felt the "hot poker" again when he performed his first abortion. "After a while, it got to where it didn’t hurt. My heart got calloused." Yet assisting in a hysterotomy abortion one day, he was traumatised by what followed. "My God, that’s a person," Brewer thought as he observed the infant move under the uterine incision. "The reality of what was going on was finally beginning to seep into my calloused brain and heart":
And they simply took that little baby that was making little sounds and moving and kicking over and set it on the table in a cold, stainless steel bowl. And every time I would look over while we were repairing the incision in the uterus, I would see that little person kicking and moving in the bowl. And it kicked and moved less and less as time went on. After the surgery, Brewer remembers "going over and looking at that baby, and the baby was still alive. You could see the chest moving as the heart beat and the baby would try to take a little breath. And it really hurt [me] inside. It began to educate me as to what abortion really was." (Brewer and his colleagues made no effort to save the infant’s life.)
THE DECISION by these physicians to stop doing all abortions, and not solely late-trimester abortions, mirrors the logic of the human life continuum argued by Justice Antonin Scalia in his Casey opinion:
The arbitrariness of the viability line is confined in the Court’s inability to offer any justification for it beyond the conclusory assertion that it is only at that point that the unborn child’s life "can in reason and all fairness" be thought to override the interests of the mother Precisely why is it that, at the magical second when machines currently in use are able to keep an unborn child alive apart from its mother, the creature is suddenly able (under our Constitution) to be protected by law, whereas before that magical second, it was not?
THE PRO-LIFE ACTION LEAGUE of Chicago periodically brings together former abortion-providers, such as those cited here, to provide the public with eyewitness accounts of the adverse effects of abortion on everyone involved - patients, physicians, nurses, and the community - not to mention the unborn. However, these stories of former abortionists represent only a fraction of doctors who refuse to do abortions. Since Roe, there also have been many doctors who, from the outset, were determined dissidents swimming against the legal abortion tide.
DR C. EVERETT KOOP, world-renowned for his path-breaking work as a pediatric surgeon, decried "the wanton slaughter of the unborn," he warned of rampant "personal cruelty," a slippery slope leading to infanticide, euthanasia to genocide, and an "uglier world" brought about by the reduction of the meaning of human life. He wrote: Our question to a pro-abortion doctor who would not kill a newborn baby is this: would you kill this infant sooner, before he was born, or a minute before that, or a minute before that? At what point in time can one consider life to be worthless and the next minute precious and worth saving? The fate of the unborn is a question of the fate of the human race. We are one human family.
AS EARLY AS 1973, Dr Matthew J. Bulfin had quietly founded the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. "The number-one help to the pro-life obstetrichins and gynaecologists is the ultrasound," says the Florida physician. Ultrasound provided the scientific proof of the humanity which Bulfin and his pro-life colleagues already recognised both rationally and intuitively. He indicates that probably 90 percent of abortionists who gave up performing abortions did so because they were "confronted with a womb with a view, a womb with windows in it."
"For the first time they were able to see a tiny baby jump away from the knife or the needle or whatever they were using to try to destroy it. This became more and more apparent as more abortions were being done. Burnout rate was high among abortionists even before ultrasound, but almost every former abortionist lave talked to makes the statement that there was no way that he could continue to destroy a life when the tiny victim was so apparent and visible on the ultrasound screen."
"For the first time they were able to see a tiny baby jump away from the knife or the needle or whatever they were using to try to destroy it. This became more and more apparent as more abortions were being done. Burnout rate was high among abortionists even before ultrasound, but almost every former abortionist lave talked to makes the statement that there was no way that he could continue to destroy a life when the tiny victim was so apparent and visible on the ultrasound screen."
Bulfin also maintains that most physicians do not want to promote abortion as birth control. "A lot of physicians who are also conscientious are realising that the more abortion is available, the more women are going to use it like birth control." He suggests that the enormous number of repeat abortions - at least 43 percent of all abortions - are evidence of this trend.
Bulfin believes that most doctors do not respect abortionists. "They don’t get any respect by killing off tiny little humans who are unable to defend themselves. I don’t think you grow in stature by doing that kind of work."
DR CURTIS E. HARRIS is an Oklahomha internal medicine endocrinologist and past-president of the American Academy of Medical Ethics (AAME), which he founded in 1987 with Dr Jack Wilike and Dr Bernard Nathanson.
He says that the use of euphemisms in the abortion movement influenced the general public’s acceptance of abortion, and that words regarding the facts of abortion had to be redefined because of their moral content. Without such obfuscation, and on a purely scientific level, doctors are trained to treat a pregnant woman with a prenatal child as two patients, both in the administration of drugs and in other procedures. "The real science, the gut level reaction is, yes, this is always a human life." Harris points out that the medical community clearly is divided over abortion, since "some will then say that this concern is overridden by the mother’s desires. Others will say that the concerns are more equal and the women should receive more intensive counselling. Still others will say no, it’s a human life. It’s not simply up to her."
Harris emphasises that, nevertheless, most doctors refuse to perform abortions themselves because "it is a contradiction to their normal medical
THE "ABORTIONIST DEFICIT" has led to speculation that political pressure might be brought to bear on Congress to rescind the conscience clauses in the US medical code. Or, alternately, if pending legislation passes to require all publicly funded hospitals to provide abortions.
Do doctors and nurses believe so strongly about this issue that they will quit working at hospitals rather than be forced to perform abortions? ‘Yes," replies Dr Harris. "There’s such tension right now. We’re all waiting to see what they’re going to do to us on health care. If they add this sudden change as well, I think you’re going to see revolution."
Primum Non Nocere, directed the pre-Roe Hippocratic oath, ("first, do no harm"). Taking that charge to heart, the conviction that it is wrong wilfully to destroy in a calculated method innocent and defenceless human lives has prompted tens of thousands of physicians to refuse to perform abortions or to condone the practice. Whether for humanitarian, rational, or religious reasons, the logic of their equation dictates that if prenatal life is human then they as doctors - as healers - must not act as agents of its destruction.
Condensed from an article that appeared in the American Crisis Magazine.
© The Official Newsletter of Pro-Life Victoria, Edited by Denise Cameron |