Present at the termination

Several decades ago, I was present in an operating room during a second trimester pregnancy termination. The young mother, pregnant by a romantic relationship, was in good physical and mental health. She was accompanied to the waiting area by several supportive family members. The fetus had no known health issues or defects.

Abortion “rights” has become a prominent topic of conversation and commentary since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overruled Roe v. Wade and gave the issue to the individual states. A large percentage of voters named it as their primary determinant for casting their vote in the last election.

In order to complete the second term abortion that day, it was necessary to dismember the fetus and identify body parts. The gynecologist removed and identified one leg, then the other, and then, unexpectedly, a third. Twins.

A large part of my thirty-two year career in medicine was spent working in operating rooms. I have witnessed and participated in herculean efforts to save lives, an effort often rewarded by the joyful reaction of patient relatives when informed that their loved ones survived. I have also seen the heartbreaking reaction of patient relatives when these efforts failed.

In order to provide optimal care for patients in an operating room setting, one must become inured to blood loss, trauma, medical complications and the possibility of death. That day, however, I found myself not only mentally, but almost physically affected, a state admittedly heightened by the fact that I was actively trying to adopt.

I was well aware of how difficult it was, and to what lengths people would go to adopt one healthy baby, let alone two. I could imagine what the joyous reaction would have been of someone navigating the adoptive process to being handed two babies.

However, despite my years of experience in dealing with patients and their relatives, I had no concept of how anyone, including myself, would respond to the knowledge that two genetic descendants ceased to exist in an operating room not despite the efforts of all medical personnel involved to save a life, but because of his or her personal choice or contribution to a choice to end it.

Could this young woman and family not have devoted their love and time to the less than half a year of gestation that remained to what I knew to be the almost certain possibility of the choice of a family that desperately wanted to raise their children if they did not or could not?

They and I will never know, because instead of babies in a double stroller, these two offspring began and ended their time in the outside world as body parts in a surgical basin. The memory still haunts me.

I have been very fortunate to travel to many European countries. Even though, as of 2020, twenty- four of twenty- seven European countries do not allow elective abortions past fourteen weeks and twenty-two not beyond twelve weeks — much shorter limits than America until Dobbs — I still would not live anywhere other than America. I was happy to cast my vote in the last election.

A simple process, but still one that required coordinated limb movements, eye motion and the ability to move in my environment, all, ironically, physical acts which can be performed by a fetus in utero in the second trimester. I did so because I wanted to take advantage of one of the many opportunities I have been given in this life to help others, and to help prevent more healthy offspring of healthy mothers being denied existence halfway to the beginning of the fulfillment of theirs.

I received notification that my vote was received on my iPhone, an invention due in large part to Steve Jobs, given the gift of adoption by his unwed mother. Lucky man. Lucky world.