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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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As
I begin, I want to tell you a little bit about myself.
I was born in Bolivar County, Mississippi in 1942.
My family moved to Arizona in 1955, where I attended
high school and college.
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entered the University of Tennessee College of Medicine
in 1965, and graduated in 1968. During my senior year
in medical school I enlisted in the Air Force. I interned
in Texas, and then went to Vietnam in 1970 where I served
as a flight surgeon. Upon coming back from Vietnam I
was sent to California where I began my training in
obstetrics and gynecology at David Grant U.S. Air Force
Medical Center. Upon completing my O.B. training, I
went to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. And from Arizona
to Wheat Ridge, Colorado where I currently practice.
This is how I got involved. I began my residency in
July 1971, and on July 7, 1971, one and one-half years
before Roe v. Wade, I went into the operating room where
my chief resident sat down on a stool, he performed
an abortion, and then he said that I could do the next
one, there were several lined up for that day. After
I performed my first abortion, these are the words I
dictated: The patient was prepped and draped in a sterile
fashion in the dorsal lithotomy position with an IV
with 15 units of pitocin and 1,000 ccs of dehydrogenase
lactate running. Under satisfactory general anesthesia,
the cervix was grasped with a thyroid clamp and dilated
to a #10 hanks dilator. After sounding to a depth of
4 inches, a #10 curved curette was introduced into the
uterine cavity and utilized to empty the uterine contents.
Five units of pitocin were given through IV at this
time. A large, sharp curette was then introduced into
the uterine cavity and the small amount of remaining
tissue was curetted from the anterior uterine wall.
The total fluid and tissue obtained was 125 ccs. Estimated
blood loss for the procedure was 50 ccs with 200 ccs
of dehydrogenase replacement. After insuring that there
was adequate hemostatsis on the cervix at the site of
the thyroid clamp application, the anesthesia was terminated
and the patient taken to the recovery room in satisfactory
condition. In about as little time as it took to read
this operative report, I had become a murderer. And
as I read years later, cursed. For Deuteronomy 27:25
clearly applied to me, Cursed is the man who accepts
a bribe to kill an innocent person. I did not consciously
select the words I used in dictating the operative report,
but my subconscious mind was obviously at work trying
to protect my conscience mind through denial. As you
were listening to what I said, you heard me say the
words "uterine contents," you heard me say
the word "tissue," "fluid and tissue,"
and "procedure." They are all words which
denied what really happened that day. The pathology
specimen that we sent down was labeled, "Products
of Conception." The operation performed was called
a vacuum curettage. But on the operation request and
report, under special circumstances, were found the
words "living fetus." The gymnastics which
my mind performed in dictating that report could not
totally erase the fact that something living was killed
that day. When I was in medical school, abortion was
illegal; it was criminal; it was regarded as murder.
I graduated from medical school in 1968, and we already
had in 1968, however, the beginnings of the erosion
of that Pro-Life ethic. In 1967, the state of Colorado
passed a law which made it legal to perform an abortion
under some circumstances. New York and California followed,
and since I was in California during my training, abortion
was legal under conditions which threatened the mother’s
health, metal health and her life. In our institution
there was actually some confusion about what steps we
should take to justify the abortions, since we clearly
had not come to the point of legally, at least, abortion
on demand. So we sent some patients to the psychiatrist
before they had the abortion; some we did not. But we
finally settled on the terminology which we put in the
chart, and it went something like this: Continuation
of this pregnancy would be detrimental to the physical
and emotional well being of this patient. In spite of
these words, it was clear that most, if not all, of
the abortions which we performed were done so that the
patient’s life would not be interrupted by the
pregnancy and delivery of a baby. Early in my training
I also had an experience in which I became acutely aware
of the fact that their were a lot of patients who came
in holding stuffed animals. I began to refer to this
as the "teddy bear sign." As these active-duty
officers, active-duty enlisted, dependent wives and
dependent daughters would arrive at our hospital, not
just a few of them, but many of them would be carrying
a stuffed animal with them. It was not difficult for
me to associate this with insecurity and immaturity
on the part of these patients. This was in sharp contrast
to the patients who were coming to the hospital for
other types of surgery. Another observation was that
many of them came back for their second and their third
abortions. I can stand here and tell you that during
my time in training I never did encounter a true therapeutic
abortion situation. I do recall a patient who had a
"therapeutic abortion" for kidney disease
at 32 weeks. The baby weighed over 3 lbs. and even in
that day would have had about a 70% chance for survival
if the labor had simply been induce and abortion not
performed. In my training program we really made no
attempt to counsel the patients concerning their abortions.
Most of them had spent many hours and, in some cases,
days being transported to the hospital. We limited our
discussion with them to the medical aspects of the abortion
procedure itself in order to obtain their consent. I
recall one patient, however, who decided against having
her abortion after she came. Somebody had talked her
into having the abortion, and as we got her into surgery
and the pentothal was injected, I was standing at the
end of the table, and she raised her arm as she was
going to sleep and waved it several times, and stated,
I protest! At that point I ripped my gloves off, walked
out of the room, and told them to wake her up. I wish
I could stand here today and tell you that I decided
to stop doing abortions in a single instant. But it
didn’t happen that way. As you will see, my decision
was, and perhaps still is, an evolving one. I did not
feel right about doing abortions, but I made no effort
to distinguish legal from moral at that time. My justification
was that it was legal, the patients wanted it done,
and they came from all over the world to Travis Air
Force Base in California to have it done. It was easy
for us to do the first trimester abortion because we
were using the same procedure that you use if you remove
the placental tissue after a woman has a miscarriage.
The vacuum machine is used, and the vacuum tubing empties
all of the products of conception into a tidy little
cheesecloth sack. We then sent those sacks down to pathology.
In my second year of residency I spent two months on
a pathology rotation, which is an interesting thing,
and I had to come face-to-face with the contents of
those sacks. We were studying the embryology of the
ovary. I personally had to search through the jumbled-up
mass of tissue. The jumbled-up mass of tissue was easily
identifiable as the torn and shredded body of a tiny
human being. Even though these discoveries made me uncomfortable,
I continued to do abortions. There were times when I
personally sat there and opened up containers, five,
six, seven at a time, and would stand there and look
at the contents inside them. There isn’t any way
that you can say that there isn’t a human body
inside of those containers when you can look and see
the little arms, feet, and faces. Travis Air Force Base
became the abortion capitol of the Air Force because
it was the only hospital in the Air Force system which
allowed abortions. We received patients from Vietnam,
the Philippines, Europe, and throughout the United States.
Many of these patients were more than 12 weeks pregnant.
At that time, we were using the technique of injection
of hypertonic saline when they were over 12 weeks. Actually,
we had to wait until they were 15 weeks to be able to
easily get into the amniotic sac. The gruesome technique
of D&E had not yet been perfected when I was in
my training. The patients that we cared for after injecting
the hypertonic saline, we actually took to the labor
and delivery unit. It was there that I had the beginnings
of what I call my emotional turmoil. It was there that
I treated patients in premature labor. We used medications
to try to stop the labor so that the pregnancy could
progress to term. Sometimes the aborted babies were
bigger than the premature ones which we took to the
nursery. It was at this point that I began to have nightmares.
This nightmare is a recurring nightmare and I’ll
share it with you. In my nightmares I would deliver
a healthy newborn baby and I would take that healthy
newborn baby and I would hold it up, and I would face
a jury of faceless people and ask them to tell me what
to do with this baby. They would go thumbs-up or thumbs-down
and if they made a thumbs-down indication then I was
to drop the baby into a bucket of water which was present.
I never did reach the point of dropping the baby into
the bucket because I’d always wake up at that point.
But it was clear to me that there was something subconsciously
going on in my mind. I actually stopped doing the second
trimester abortions at that time. There was no great
clamor about my refusing to do the abortions, but it
was interesting to me that there was a subtle understanding
that my actions were causing the other residents to
do more than their share. The number of abortions which
I performed was sharply reduced by two circumstances
which arose at this time. The first was the Supreme
Court ruling which we now know as Roe v. Wade. The United
States Supreme Court in one bold stroke made abortion
on demand a reality. The other circumstance accounting
for my doing fewer abortions was a temporal one. By
that time I was far enough along in my training that
the vacuum abortions were done by the junior residents.
However, after I completed my residency and moved to
Arizona, there were no junior residents around, and
so I once again began doing abortions. As a feeble protest
(and I say feeble), I started coding them out as voluntary
abortions which upset the medical record people because
there was no such code. There were codes for spontaneous
abortion or miscarriage, and for therapeutic abortion,
but none for voluntary abortion. Jeannie, my wife, was
uncomfortable with my doing abortions, so I eventually
stopped doing them in the Air Force, but I did refer
them to regional Air Force Training Centers, like Travis.
And when I began practice in Colorado I did not consider
doing abortions, but I did continue to refer patients
to those who did. After my salvation, I began to examine
my attitude about abortion. I suppose, for lack of better
term, I was a Christian but still pro-choice. Like many
physicians I know, I didn’t want to do them, but
it was still legal and it was a woman’s right,
and I encountered many patients in my practice who had
unplanned pregnancies and who requested them. I also
began to notice that about third of my patients had
had abortions and many of them expressed regret about
having had them. I discovered an interesting thing,
too, at that time because I would ask them for the year
of their abortion, and I discovered that when they gave
me the date that many of them did not give me merely
the year, they gave me the exact date of their abortions
as easily as most women recall the birthdates of their
babies. Though I understood that when I accepted Christ
I had been forgiven for all of my past sins, including
abortion, I began to wonder about the fate of the babies
that I’d aborted, and in a near panic one day I
asked our pastor where these babies were. He reassured
me that they were with Christ and that one day I would
be able to enjoy fellowship with them. This gave me
some comfort, but it also brought me under more conviction
that the evil of abortion had to be stopped, and I had
to do something to help that. At that time I had no
idea what that might be. But as time passed, the Lord
made it clear to me that my ministry would be one of
education. |
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