By choosing Sarah Palin as his VP running mate, John McCain has placed Abortion squarely on this fall's Presidential election table. Now that it is on the table, we who are supportive of safe legal need to make certain that this gets served to the American voter in the most attractive way possible. What follows are two letters I wrote in respomse to two questions I received, one written as an essay.
This is a letter I wrote to Medical Students For Choice after an eight vessel cardiac bypass surgery on 8/31/99 after which I had a cardiac tamponade and nearly died. wfh
Jan 22, 2000
A Letter to Medical Students for Choice,
I write this now because I grow older and recently have been granted a glimpse of my mortality. Like you, I don't know when or where I will die, but I suspect that I run a little greater risk of meeting a violent death than most Americans, for I have dared to ride the tiger. This tiger is ignorance, intolerance and hatred incarnated in some of the anti-abortion Religious Right which now almost totally controls the Republican Party and the political right wing in this country. And I have chosen to ride this tiger unquietly, raking its sides with verbal spurs, swinging my hat and whooping like a cowboy for the past 15 years.
Does riding this tiger in this way rather than silently going about my business - and avoiding at least as much as I can attracting its attention - mean that I love my family less than those Pro-Choice physicians, especially Ob/Gyns, who silence the voices of their consciences and creep away from the controversy for fear of social, economic or personal consequences if they do what they know to be right? Though many might disagree, I don't think so. I believe that after loving and supporting the mother of his children, that the greatest gift a father can give his family, or a brother might give his siblings and their children, or a child his parents, a citizen his country, or we frail human beings the world, is to act rightly and openly to do justice as we are given to know what is right and just.
The greater the cost and risk of doing this, the greater is the necessity one should so do.
In our democracy, when those who know that they should advocate, advance and act on a particularly humane and rational public policy, such as Roe v. Wade, remain silent and still from fear of shrill and hate-filled voices, from fear of the very real slings and arrows, bullets and bombs of some whom they might offend - giving way to those who would dictate bad public policy based on narrow sectarian beliefs or fraudulent propaganda with no regard for the terrible consequences which face millions of people every year - then our free society threatens to degenerate into a totalitarian theocracy or a dictatorship. And dignity and freedom will be inexorably crushed.
When we dedicate our lives to worthy causes, causes greater than our own petty dreams and fears, we play the same role as have those who have gone before us and pledged or given their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in the quest for freedom and dignity. Most who advance the cause of human dignity and freedom are not called to give their all in the noise and strife of the battlefield or at the scene of some great disaster. But all of us are auditioned and everyone of us constantly tested in other theatres in this human drama, in arenas which mandate a different kind of courage. Most of these roles don't require the sudden adrenalin-propelled acts of nearly superhuman bravery displayed in war and disasters, but call for a more mundane day-in, day-out effort to stand up to our own fear and to unrelenting public criticism, sometimes to threats of violence, often with little or no obvious support. (Though, sooner or later, support will come if one is right.)
Quite by chance, I found my place in the age-old conflict between reason and unreason, freedom and bondage, dignity and indignity - between good and evil, if you will - while practicing my specialty, Ob/Gyn, and providing safe, affordable abortion care as just one aspect of my professional duties.
I hope that each of you and your medical school classmates may find in your lives a part so fit, a cause so worthy.
A few days ago I got a question from a Christian Pro-Life acquaintance.
"I understand fully that you see your work as saving women from an unwanted pregnancy that might, if illegal, lead them to dangerous "back alley abortions," doing them great harm or perhaps even killing them. I, as a prolife Christian, don’t want to see them hurt or killed. On the other hand, by doing an abortion, you are taking a life – an innocent one that has no say in the decision. I rarely hear prochoicers lament that decision, the loss of the unborn.
"Do you ever regret that part of the decision? How do you come to terms with that, or do you not see the fetus as a life or a person? I don’t want to see either one die, and would do my best to save both. But your work on the other hand, seeks the end of one of these lives. How do you justify that decision?"
Here is my answer: Anyone who has delivered as many babies as I have, and has seen hundreds of living and dead embryos and fetuses being spontaneously aborted as have I, knows exactly what we are doing when we provide an elective abortion for our patient. We are ending the life of an embryo or a fetus. Not the life of a person, but certainly a creature that might have become a person under other circumstances. When I am asked this question, I always go back to two of the most insightful and beautiful verses of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
Oh, if the world were but to recreate
That we might catch ere closed the Book of Fate
And make the Writer on a fairer leaf
Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.
Better, oh better, cancel from the Scroll
Of Universe one luckless Human Soul
Than drop by drop enlarge the Flood that roars
Hoarser with Anguish as the ages roll!
When Omar wrote his treasured poem over a thousand years ago, mankind had no way of safely canceling "from the scroll of universe one luckless human soul" whose numbers make up that flood of howling anguish; at least, no way of canceling it without risking also the life of the woman carrying it. In this day of medical marvels and, hopefully, ever increasing social justice, we possess such a way.
Embryos and fetuses spontaneously aborted - most, but not all of those "canceled" by "God" - are just such luckless human souls. But many spontaneous abortions occur in desired pregnancies with no discernable abnormalities. For those girls and women and their families whose circumstances would make their babies "luckless human souls," I "cancel from Universe" these luckless souls before they become babies.
Physicians who save wanted babies from being spontaneously aborted (and we can save a few now that "God" once would have seemed determined to abort), and we who cancel the "luckless human souls" not destined to spontaneously abort, are doing God’s work.
Want to increase Omar’s flood of anguish? Just vote to put John McCain in the White House and Pro-Lifers in your legislatures and the U.S. Congress .