Ezra pointed out an article in the Washington Post by Rozalyn Farmer Love, a young pro-life medical student in Alabama and her confrontation with the realities of abortion and those who seek abortion medical services.
My parents are conservative Christians who believe that abortion is wrong. Growing up, I naturally shared their view.
I’m a third-year medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I plan to become an obstetrician-gynecologist. I dream of delivering healthy babies, working with families and supporting midwifery. But as part of my practice, I also envision providing abortions to women who need them.
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But ultimately, we have more in common than they might think. I agree that ending an unwanted pregnancy is a tragedy. When I advocate for reproductive rights, for choice, I don’t claim that abortion is morally acceptable. I think that it’s a very private, intensely personal decision. But I was stunned when one of my professors, a pathologist and a Planned Parenthood supporter, told me that decades ago, entire wings of the university’s hospital were filled with women dying from infections caused by botched abortions.
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I could hardly wrap my mind around the agony that this woman and her husband must have been facing. They needed a caring and compassionate physician to help them through this dark moment, and if they chose not to continue the pregnancy, they also needed a physician who was both skilled enough and brave enough to provide them with the care they needed. They needed Dr. Tiller.
Read the whole thing. It gives some depth and much needed perspective. I give it an emphatic recommend.
Because Dr. Tiller’s family has decided to close his clinic in Kansas. Assassination has achieved its goal in Kansas. It won’t take long for a few more lone wolf types in the anti-abortion movement to try a similar tactic with their regional doctors.
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p>We need more people like Rozalyn Farmer Love, but she’ll need police protection.
Yglesias:
While the anti-abortion people try very hard to portray pro-choice people as heartless murderers, that is so far from the truth. This article conveys that pro-choice people do not like abortion either. It is not taken lightly.
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p>I still struggle with late term abortion though. Unless the mother’s life is at risk, I don’t see the point of a late term abortion, even for the sake of a baby who would be born that will only live a few minutes or hours. I think it is more appropriate to let the life (and by 6 or 7 months, it is a life) end naturally. But with that said, I have never had the experience of or know of anyone who carried a dying baby in their bodies. So who am I to determine whether it’s appropriate or not, and what kind of impact it is having on the mother carrying the baby. It seems the practice of late term abortion for this reason is relatively new, coming with the technology that allows diagnosis within the uterus.
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p>My goal in my support of the pro-choice movement is to keep abortion legal, but also to provide education and contraception to make it as rare as possible. That would
be the best possible outcome for everyone. Making abortion illegal will not prevent unwanted pregnancies. Education and contraception will.
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p>Thank You for this post. Whenever you try to do research on abortion or late term abortion, all you find are articles written by the anti-abortion extremists. It difficult and time consuming to try to wade through it all and find accurate information. It’s very frustrating.
Ugh! It’s amazing how life can change in just a few hours.
Can’t even imagine having to deal with this situation. I have been so incredibly lucky.
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p>My Late-Term Abortion
is very much worth reading. Thank you!
Certainly it’s hard to believe in a benevolent God when things like this seem to happen to good people. The only thing I can say about their decision is that I’m not sure that the child would have chosen death over a potentially short life marred by paralysis and incontinence. At least if allowed to be born the child would have had a chance to be embraced by its mother and father, to perhaps have experienced some of the good things in life along with what promised to be a lot of struggle and pain. Perhaps the child might have lived long enough for doctors to devise a way to significantly ameliorate the medical situation. The parents essentially decided for the child that the child’s life would not be worth living, which I’m not sure is morally appropriate.
It is hard to believe because it isn’t true. The world is not nice. Bad things happen to good people. That’s a fact of life. People will explain it various ways, but no one will state the obvious: God is not benevolent.
1.) God is benevolent, but He just works in ultra-complex, mysterious ways that we feeble humans can’t even begin to comprehend.
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p>2.) God is not benevolent.
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p>3.) There is no God.
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p>The Riddle of Epicurus:
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tblade, if you haven’t seen this, you definitely should:
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or fetus?
… to reading it. Echoing KBusch; compelling read.