Today was quite an interesting day. I had my MS class this morning, and it was actually enjoyable. The same statistician that I really liked last summer gave the first half of the class, and one of the statisticians I had worked with over the summer for my research gave the other half.
Last week, one of my classmates had invited all of the CCLCM students to visit Preterm, which is an abortion clinic about ten minutes away from CCF in Shaker Square. There is a student group for choice at Case, and a bunch of Case students went today, along with about half a dozen of us from CCLCM. Visiting an abortion clinic was both a disturbing and informative experience, and it's probably something that every medical student nationwide ought to do.
The clinic staff began by giving us an orientation to the clinic and what services are provided there. (They provide counseling services and birth control as well as abortions.) We were also given statistics about abortions, abortion access, and political efforts to keep abortion legal versus outlaw it. One thing I hadn't realized is that Ohio has a pretty extreme, staunchly anti-choice state legislature. One representative apparently introduced a bill that would outlaw all abortions, even if it was necessary to save the life of the woman. They also passed around a pro-choice petition for people to sign. I am not registered to vote in Ohio, so it wasn't an issue for me to decide if I even wanted to support pro-choice legislation, but I'm not sure I would have signed regardless. That is mainly because I felt the orientation was a bit overly proselytistic and defensive. But I suppose it's understandable that it would be, considering that the clinic employees have rude protesters outside their place of work shouting nasty things at them and their clients every day.
The more interesting part was when the staff demonstrated how the abortions were done. I didn't know very much about abortion procedures before visiting the clinic, and the surgery procedure in particular was nothing like what I expected. Most women get abortions during their first trimester using vacuum aspiration. The abortion is performed by first dilating their cervix, and then inserting the vacuum cannula and suctioning the embryo out of there. It only takes a few minutes to do the suctioning from start to finish, and no further surgery is required. They had models of a woman's cervix and manual vacuum pumps that were basically like giant syringes so that we could see what it was like to perform the procedure ourselves. It was surprisingly easy to do once I got the hang of using the vacuum pump.
Alternatively, the patient can be given a medical abortion using drugs that interfere with progesterone activity and prostaglandins, which stimulate uterine contraction. (Progesterone is the hormone that maintains the uterine lining during pregnancy.) She takes one pill at the clinic and then a second one at home the following day. This method of abortion actually has a higher rate of complication versus the first method.
If the woman is past her first trimester, other methods like dilation and evacuation (D & E) have to be used. These are the infamous "partial birth" abortions, where the woman's cervix is dilated, and then the fetus is partially delivered, disassembled and pulled out of the uterus piece by piece. The physician described the procedure to us, and it was pretty graphic and gruesome. He explained that although Congress tried to outlaw D & E a few years ago, it is still performed in this country. The main difference is that they apparently used to do it on a living fetus, and now they are required to kill the fetus first before removing it from the woman's uterus.
I can't agree with what I view as Preterm's completely amoral stance about abortion. As a person who is devoting my life to "doing no harm," I do consider abortion to be a "necessary evil," and I do not agree that abortion is just another form of birth control. Unplanned pregnancies are tragic, and so are the abortions themselves. If that makes me "judgmental," then I suppose I am guilty as charged.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
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7 comments:
Hey I just read your post... I am also a medical student at a med school in Ohio... I study abortion alot so I thought I would say a few words... I personally think abortion is an atrocity... It is so similar to genocide that it is appalling... I dont know if you have read the supreme court case Gonzales V. Carhart which was the case that eventually banned Intact Dilation and Evacuation on living fetuses but it is a very informative case. One nurse described how during the procedure the baby was opening and closing its hands and kicking its feet, and then the doctor sucked out its brain and it went limp... I noticed you referred to dismemberment D&E as disassembling the fetus... Really, dismemberment is a better term... the procedure actually involves tearing the fetus limb from limb, and probably crushing its skull to remove it from the uterus... Please visit www.AbortionNO.org to see some footage of abortion procedures... www.abort73.com also has some images of aborted fetuses... its really sad that we cannot declare the annual loss of 1/4 of americans pregnancies/children to physicians a moral wrong... Physicians actually have played a significant role in mass murder in the past tho... I mean who do you think designed the gas chambers? Who selected the Jews for death during the Holocaust? Who murdered the first German victim of the Nazi Euthanasie policy who was a newborn infant born blind without an arm and a leg? It was in fact German Doctors... and the German medical establishment and the German public went along with all this... It is always a dangerous thing when healers become killers... The Supreme Court declared that science tells us that a fetus is a living being. It is a human living being... and abortion kills that living being... let us not be so calloused towards murder... There are 53 million abortions annually!
I would also recommend watching the video HardTruth, or ChoiceBlues... in these videos you can see how abortion affects a child... this is an evil but hardly necessary... if your going to have sex, you had better be willing to give birth to the child that will potentially be conceived... It is incredibly selfish to murder a child for ones sexual freedom or ten minutes of pleasure... In reality, abortion is a matter of selfishness and convenience... You should also study Nazi Physicians... they used some of the same arguments to justify "mercy killing" that the pro-choice movement uses to justify "preborn killing"... Even Bernard Nathanson, an influential early pro-choice physician admitted that he made up artificial and exagerrated statistics about back-alley abortions... Margaret Sanger, an ex president of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist who welcomed a Nazi who believed in "breeding out" the poor... Abortion is also a gaping wound to the reputation of medicine... Physicians wont only go down in history for administrating and performing the Holocaust, but also for mercilessly murdering millions and millions of unborn children in the name of greed... The annual death toll of abortion is over twice the largest estimated 10 year death toll of the holocaust... I hope you have the courage to approve this post... and I hope it gets read...
I can't promise that your comments will be read by anyone but me, but as long as you keep them civil, I don't mind posting them. I agree with you that treating abortion as just another form of birth control for an inconvenient or unwanted pregnancy is morally wrong. What makes the situation more ethically difficult for me is that many pro-life advocates don't seem to care about the mother's health and well-being. I have a real problem with the argument that a first-trimester fetus has a higher "right" to life than the mother. Regardless of our beliefs concerning when life begins, I think we can all agree that the mother is a human being, and that we are ethically obligated as physicians to save her life if it is in our power to do so. This is why I believe that if the mother's life or health is endangered by her pregnancy, abortion is a necessary evil in certain cases.
I don't know if you're in close proximity to Cleveland, but you probably would have found the eugenics display at the Maltz Museum last year interesting. I went twice to see it (described in a couple of my other posts if you're interested). Thanks for stopping by and commenting, and good luck with school.
Well, hey at least someone read it... I actually used to do research at the Lerner Research Institute...
I wish that women and unborn children had the same rights of personhood... I think it is easiest just to see them as two lives that are affected. Modern medicine is really contradictory on this issue. Fore example, if a mother wants her fetus, then it is a legally protected person. If she doesnt, then its nothing and you can easily get rid of it. Interestingly, Williams Obstetrics states that "therapeutic abortion to save the life of the women is rarely necessary or definable," (p. 869 2001). The choicers would have you think something different. Probably 98% of abortions solely elective in nature. Ectopic pregnancy is the only situation i know of where a womans life is endangered by a pregnancy. And very few would debate aborting in that situation. Miracles aside, both the mother and fetus will perish in an ectopic pregnancy. Additionally, if pro-abortion advocates are so concerned about the health of the women; how come there is a history of denial of the side effects of induced abortion procedures? Even the American Psychiatric Association denied for years abortion had psychiatric side effects. That is simply not true.
It is now known that abortion has psychiatric side effects, including risk of suicide, drug abuse, depression, etc... Abortion also has long term physical consequences such as subsequent pre-term births, placenta previa, and an associated risk of breast cancer. Some will deny the breast cancer association; however, full term pregnancy typically has a protective effect against breast cancer, which is lost with abortion. Induced abortion as an independent risk-factor for Br Ca is debated. The other is not.
Do you know of any cases in which a fetuses life is endangering the life of the mother? Interestingly, the research article from 1895 that supported Nazi "mercy-killing" used that same argument to support mercy-killing which led to the holocaust. I wouldnt mind sending you an article I just wrote via email. I entitled it "Last phone call from an unborn child" and it is a unborn childs perspective on Dismemberment D & E. I wish there was a videotape of such a procedure. There would be no debate then. A pro-life OB does that procedure on dead fetuses and stated she is disgusted that certain docs do that on viable fetuses. She said she gets sick everytime she does it, because she knows they are doing it on healthy babies.
I have not read up on the legal aspects of this subject anywhere close to as much as you have, so I can't really comment on a lot of these legal cases you're mentioning. I agree with you that the laws regarding the status of fetuses are inconsistent. All I can say is that there is a very good reason that I'm going into medicine and not law!
Do you really think that a video of D & E would make that much difference? Even if they were willing to watch it, many people on both sides of the argument are so entrenched in their beliefs that it probably wouldn't sway too many of them. Trying to shock people is not a very effective tactic to get them to change their behavior. It tends to make them resistant to even listening to what you have to say. I can tell you that shock tactics don't work very well on noncompliant diabetics either. ;-)
Yeh, people are pretty entrenched... but how many people can look at a baby having scissors stuck in the back of its head, and subsequently having its brains sucked out, and then say I am pro-choice? or I think that was good? How many people could look at a babies/fetuses limb ripped off with bones hanging out or a skull crushed with brain matter oozing out, and then say, "that is a woman's right"? I think that footage would indeed be shocking, but it is not my intent to shock... But just to offer... to offer the information... I think americans have a right to know what is going on in their country... and for too long, it has remained hidden... I just want objective footage, no commentary, just detailed video images of numerous procedures... Not only the ones that "go according to procedure" but those that do not as well... the ones where a little baby was not completely killed, where it gripped onto life for minutes, maybe hours, or perhaps struggled to die, because the doctor didn't kill it right... I want to see/know and I want others to see/know... the cost of choice. These are the things choicers arent going to tell you about.
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