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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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Dr.
Beverly McMillan was not a reluctant participant in
abortion. She was a radical feminist who was all in
favor of it. She grew up in a conservative Christian
home in East Tennessee.
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she prepared for medical school she abandoned her conservative
upbringing, and adopted the values of the anti-Christian
world around her. Dr. McMillan eventually went on to
open the largest abortion mill in the state of Mississippi.
She stopped doing abortions in 1978 and she and her
husband are both very active in the pro-life movement.
I knew pretty early that I wanted to be a physician
and when I was 18 I left my little town in East Tennessee
to go off to the U of T in Knoxville to begin my pre-medical
training. I thought I was ready to take on the world!
I soon found out, however, that the world I had just
entered was a lot different than what I’d grown
up in. It was a very ant-Christian atmosphere and I
knew I was going to have to make a decision about what
I was going to do with my life. Was I going to live
by the rules I was brought up with, or was I going to
live with the NOW generation? Like a lot of young college
people, I looked around and the world surrounding me
seemed a lot more real and a lot more fun than what
was going on back home. I made a decision as a 19-year-old
sophomore that I was going to live the way of the world.
I remember going to church one last time and my parting
prayer was, God, if you’re real, I hope you come
back and get me some day. So long. And I didn’t
step foot inside a church for another 14 years. Upon
completing medical school and my internship, I decided
to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. Now this
was in the late 1960’s, and I had not encountered
abortion at all in my medical school training or my
internship. It wasn’t until I went off to do my
residency at Cook County Hospital, that I came face-to-face
with abortion. I’m afraid that I made my decision
to be an abortionist way back in 1969 in Chicago. I
had to spend six weeks of my six months on a ward called
the Infected OB Ward. I had this idea in my mind that
we would probably be taking care of women coming from
the surgery wards where my fellow residents had maybe
done C-Sections and they had messed them up. But that
first night on call, I found out where my patients were
really coming from. As soon as the sun went down, the
elevator started coming up from the Emergency Room depositing
women on our doorstep. All these women had very similar
situations. They were all bleeding, running a fever,
and had a tender enlarged uterus. I was puzzled, but
kept working. I just basically tried to shuffle through
to get them in bed and stabilized and keep up with the
elevator. About halfway through that evening it finally
hit me that these women were coming from the back alley
abortion mills in Chicago. The year, as I said, was
1969, four years before abortion was legalized. Every
night I was on call some 15 to 25 women would come in
and we would take these women back, one at a time, to
a little treatment room where, without any anesthesia
at all, we would have to do another D&C and we would
have to scrape out whatever infected tissue the abortionist
had left in. It was a pretty brutal situation. I remember
that at the end of the six weeks, I was very angry.
It occurred to me that if women were so desperate about
an unwanted pregnancy that they were willing to go to
some back alley and put their life on the line, I was
ready for the medical profession to start offering a
little real help to these women and show a little social
responsibility. In 1973, when the Roe v. Wade decision
was handed down, I had finished my residency training
and went into private practice with another physician
in a little town just outside of Lexington. We went
out and bought a suction abortion machine and we started
doing first trimester abortions in our office. In 1974,
after being in private practice about two years, my
husband presented me with the news that we were moving
to Jackson, Mississippi. I got re-organized and opened
up my private practice of obstetrics and gynecology
in January 1975. Business was very slow. I didn’t
know anybody in town; the referrals were few and far
between. In that entire year, I think I delivered six
babies. Needless to say, it was a real difficult year
for me until that Spring. In the Spring of 1975 I met
a group of concerned citizens and clergy who had banded
together for the express purpose of opening up the first
abortion clinic in the City of Jackson, not only would
it be the first abortion clinic in Jackson but for the
entire state of Mississippi. Women in Mississippi were
having to travel to Alabama, Tennessee or Louisiana
to get an abortion. This group had done their homework
well. They had lined up a place, nurses, counselors,
and equipment, but they could not find anyone willing
to be called the local abortionist. So here was somebody
new in town. They came to me and asked me if I would
consider it. Initially I said, no, thank you. But as
time went on it really started to bother me because
I knew that the reason I had turned them down was because
I was just afraid. I really did think that legal abortion
was a good thing for women. So I did finally accept
their offer, and in the fall of 1975, I gained the dubious
distinction of opening up that first abortion clinic
in Jackson, Mississippi. By 1976, things looked like
they were going pretty well for me. My private office
was busy enough that I was operating in the black and
the abortion clinic was so busy that I couldn’t
do all the procedures myself; I had to get some other
folks to help me out and do the operations. I had a
nice car, a nice house, I had three healthy little boys,
and all the clothes I could want. In fact, I realized
that everything that I ever wanted to accomplish when
I left eastern Tennessee I had pretty much accomplished.
The confounding part to me at that point was that if
my life was going so well, if it were such a bowl of
cherries, why was I in the pits, as Erma Bombeck says.
I was so depressed that by January, I couldn’t
stand it. I didn’t know what was wrong, thoughts
of suicide were beginning to cross my mind and that
had never happened before. So being an intellectual
type, I decided I just needed something to get my head
straightened out. I went out to a secular book store
and stumbled across the book entitled The Power of Positive
Thinking, by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. I thought, this
sounds like a good book. I’ve got a lot of things
to be positive about, I just need to get my attitude
right. So I bought the book and I took it home and started
reading it. I read the introduction and the preface
and the table of contents, and it sounded pretty good.
I read chapter one, and it was about people just like
me; they didn’t want to get up in the morning;
they didn’t know what the meaning of life was;
they were depressed all the time. I thought, yes, this
is the right book. At the end of the chapter Dr. Peale
had a list of ten things to do to start getting your
positive attitude in shape. I was going down the list
and reached #7, and it said: Affirm ten times a day,
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Well, I choked. I thought, what kind of trash did I
pick up in this bookstore? Well I was able to do everything
on that list of ten, except that #7. I carried that
book around with me for a week and a-half trying to
find something to substitute for that verse, just something
that would be acceptable to my heart. One miserable
Monday morning I was driving to work (and for those
of you who don’t know about Mississippi in February,
it’s the monsoon season and it’s always cold,
gray, and rainy) and wouldn’t you know it, that
Norman Vincent Peale book was sitting on the car seat
right beside me. There I was, I was pulling into the
doctors’ parking lot at Baptist Hospital and I
finally just gave up and said, "I can do all things
through Christ who strengthens me." I was unprepared
for what happened next. I’m kind of a cool person,
and don’t have a lot of emotional ups and downs.
God usually doesn’t deal with me through emotional
blitzes, but this was a big emotional blitz. I was not
alone in that car. I felt the presence of someone coming
up over the back seat of my car and grasping my right
shoulder, the hand of heaven. He was just right there
in the car with me and, oh, my goodness! Well, I got
the car parked (that was a major accomplishment), and
put my makeup back on because I was crying out of joy.
I must have said that verse a hundred times that day,
not just ten times. I finished reading the book. And
at the end of it, Dr. Peale had two other suggestions:
He suggested reading the Bible every day and to engage
in some Christian fellowship. So I went out and bought
a Bible and started reading the New Testament. As for
the Christian fellowship, I thought back over my friends
and acquaintances and realized there was only one person
that I knew was a Christian. So I decided to spend more
time with my friend, Barbara. Well, I began noticing
that something strange was happening during my nights
on call at the abortion facility. What had been very
easy for me to do up till this time started to become
harder and harder to do. I didn’t understand why
because nothing that I was reading in the New Testament
said Thou Shalt Not Commit Abortions. But it was the
Holy Spirit starting to work on me. I’ve heard
other people talk about their experiences in coming
out of the abortion situations and my situation seems
to be very similar. It doesn’t happen all at once.
There’s a miracle recorded in the Gospel of Mark
where Jesus heals a blind man. When the man is brought
to the Lord, he’s absolutely stone blind; doesn’t
see a thing. I think that was me before the experience
in the car. After Jesus met the man, He took some spit,
touched his eyes, and asked him what he saw. And he
said I see men walking around but they look like trees.
He was seeing something but he wasn’t seeing very
clearly. It took a second touch from the Lord before
that man was able to see well. One of the things that
was starting to bother me was, after I would do the
suction D&C procedure, I would then go over to the
suction bottle and go outside the room to a sink where
I would personally pick through it with a forceps. I
would have to identify the four extremities, the spine,
the skull and the placenta. If I didn’t find that,
I would have to go back and scrape and suction some
more, or else my patients would be showing up in 48
or 72 hours, just like those women at Cook County with
an infected incomplete abortion. Standing at that sink,
I guess I just started seeing these bodies for the first
time. I don’t know what I did before that. I think
I just counted. Blood didn’t make me sick. I could
handle all the guts and gore of medicine. But I started
seeing this for the first time and it started bothering
me. I remember one afternoon in particular, a very attractive
young woman who was the day-today manager of the clinic
came up to the sink one day while I was getting ready
to go through my little procedure, and she said, would
you let me see? I’ve never really seen what you
look at in the sink. I said, sure, and I started showing
her what happened to be about a twelve-week abortion.
That day as I was showing her, I remember very clearly
seeing an arm and seeing the deltoid muscle, and it
struck me how beautiful this was. The thought just engorged
my mind: Here is this beautiful piece of human flesh,
what are you doing? So for a number of months I just
directed medicine. I eventually started going to church
and, sitting under the preaching of the Gospel and really
hearing it for the first time, God began impressing
me with a number of things, one of which was that He
wanted me to get baptized as a believer and publicly
identify with what He had done in my life. God was just
impressing on my heart that I was not to come into the
church and bring the abortion clinic with me and sully
the holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ. So in the fall
of 1978, by the grace of God, I got baptized in my church
and I resigned from the abortion clinic. It wasn’t
until 1980 that I got my second touch from the Lord.
This was four years after my conversion experience.
I got invited to a Pro-Life meeting where Dr. Paul Fowler
from Reformed Theological Center was organizing Jackson’s
first Right-to-Life group. He needed a group of physicians
to give some moral support, knowledge and expertise
to the Right-to-Life group and I was invited to a brown
bag luncheonette just to rap about abortion. It was
there in that meeting with fellow believers, fellow
physicians, who knew much more about the Scripture than
I did, that I had my eyes opened up to what God thought
about unborn human life. My medical knowledge also began
to be filtered through the Scriptures. One of the things
I left that meeting with that day was a conviction about
IUDs. A family practice doctor told me (the expert,
the gynecologist) that IUDs were mini-abortions. Conception
takes place in the fallopian tube and implantation inside
the uterus and that an IUD certainly doesn’t stop
fertilization. He was right! And I tell you, it was
harder for me to quit putting in IUDs than it was to
quit doing abortions. When you quit doing abortions
you get lots of pats on the back; people say, nice kid!
You’re cleaning up your act. When you stop putting
in IUDs people aren’t so receptive and say you’re
a "kook." In addition to working with the
Right-to-Life, I started sharing my story locally and
wherever the Lord opened doors about how I had been
lead out of the abortion business. My pastor, a very
wise man, has said very wisely that private sins require
private confession and repentance. Public sins require
public confession and repentance. So I don’t mind
sharing about the sin of abortion in my life. |
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