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Truth
is powerful and inbodies those who seek it with an open mind. |
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EX-ABORTIONIST
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I
believe we all own and wear several different hats.
To name a few of mine I’m a husband, a father,
an OB/GYN, and a "cross-over" that’s
what we call an abortionist who’s made the conversion.
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want to describe the part of my life when I was wearing
the abortion hat. It happened after medical school as
I began my residency in OB/GYN. I can vividly remember
that day. I remember watching the resident doctor sitting
down and putting the tube in and removing the contents.
I saw the bloody material sucked down the plastic tube
and it went into a big jar. The first abortion I had
ever witnessed; I had no idea what to expect. It was
my job after the abortion had taken place to go see
what was inside of that big jar. It was kind of neat,
learning another procedure. I wasn’t a Christian;
I didn’t have any views on abortion; I was in a
training program; this was a brand-new experience. As
I opened the jar and took out the little piece of stockinette
the resident doctor said, "Now open it and put
it on that blue towel and check it out. We want to make
sure that we got it all." I thought; Oh, that will
be exciting—hands on experience, looking at tissue.
I opened the sock up and I put it on the towel and there
were the parts of a little person. I’d taken anatomy;
I was a medical student; I knew what I was looking at.
There was a little scapula and some ribs and then I
saw a little hand and the arms. It was terrible, it
was like somebody put a hot poker into me. I checked
it out and there were two arms, two legs, a head, etc.,
and I turned and said, "I guess you got it all."
That was a very hard experience for me to go through
emotionally. If I’d been a Christian it would have
been simple—I wouldn’t have been there. But
there I was— with no real convictions. So how did
I handle this abortion issue? I did what a lot of us
do throughout our lives, we don’t do anything.
I didn’t talk with anybody about it. I didn’t
talk with my folks about it. I didn’t think about
it. I did nothing. Do you know what happened next? I
got to see another abortion. And you know what? That
one hurt too. But I didn’t do anything again and
I kept seeing abortions. It hurt a little bit less every
time I saw one. And finally—I got to sit down and
do one. The first abortion that I did was kind of hard.
Again, I got the hot poker treatment. But after a while
it got to where that poker didn’t hurt a bit. I’m
reminded of a summer when I was fifteen-years old and
I decided to start my own lawn care business. My dad
had a lawn mower and the trimmers. I bought a sickle
and was ready to begin taking care of peoples’
yards. Once the business was up and running, I began
having second thoughts about the entire idea. It was
my hands—my hands were just covered and aching
with blisters. I was using tools that my hands were
not used to, all day, everyday. I decided, even though
my hands were in bad shape, to stick it out and you
know, after a few weeks, I got calluses on my hands!
I soon was relieved to find that I could work all day
pain-free. That’s what happened to my heart as
I saw the abortions and then began doing them. My heart
got callused. My heart was callused against the fact
that I was a murderer. Back to my residency. The doctors
began doing the saline abortions in the evenings, which
meant we (the residents) would have to take our weekly
turns of being on duty. Our responsibility was to take
care of the women who had trouble delivering the babies
or the afterbirths. One night, I remember a lady delivered
and I was called to come and see her. She was going
to pieces, she was uncontrollable, just screaming and
thrashing. When I walked into the room I saw her little
saline aborted baby. It had been born and it was kicking
and moving for a little while before it finally died
of those terrible burns. I remember another experience
as a resident when I had an opportunity to help one
of the partners. We were working with this lady that
was too far along for a suction D&C; we did not
have prostaglandins in those days; nor did we do D&E’s
very often. Since she was in the second trimester and
far enough along (four to five months), we decided she
was going to have a hysterotomy. That was kind of exciting
to me, to see a Caesarian on a baby that young. I remember
as we made the incision in the uterus, to see the baby
move underneath the sack of membranes as the Caesarian
incision was made before the doctor broke the water.
The thought came to me, my God, that’s a person!
At that instant he broke the water and I had that terrible
pain in my heart. He delivered the baby and I couldn’t
even touch it. I wasn’t much of an assistant; I
just stood there and the reality of what was going on
finally began to seep in to my callused brain and heart.
We simply took that little baby that was making little
sounds and was moving and kicking and set it on the
table in a cold stainless steel bowl. 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 that bowl. It kicked and moved less and less as time
went on. I can remember going over and looking at that
baby when we were done with surgery and the baby was
still alive. You could see the chest moving as the heart
beat and the baby would try and take a little breath.
What do we do when something really hurts us? We either
stand up to it or we run. I wasn’t equipped to
stand up, and so I ran. The way I ran was by putting
up barriers. In my mind I decided that life began when
a baby could survive outside the uterus. That was a
nice barrier wasn’t it? That meant that when I
did the suction abortions I wasn’t killing anything.
That meant that the hysterotomy that I helped on was
not an abortion because the baby couldn’t have
survived outside. After all, it sat in the dish and
died. So, for me, life began after 28 weeks and I continued
doing abortions. Then I saw more babies being born earlier
and earlier with the advances in our neonatal intensive
care units. As the technology increased, suddenly they
were having luck with babies that were 28 weeks old,
and then 27 weeks, and then 26 weeks. So my barriers
began to crumble, at first I said, well, abortion then
is after 27 weeks. Then I took that back and decided
it was after 26 weeks and so on. Then I got to thinking
maybe it’s 20 weeks. No wait, it’s a baby
when it’s all formed, so I began thinking after
12 weeks! All I was doing was avoiding the truth. When
I became a Christian I realized that life occurs at
conception. And once I made that startling discovery,
it was very simple for me to stop doing abortions. |
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