Ethics, Abortion, and Real Life (preaching to the choir?)
Reading pharyngula, i came across this essay relating a doctors personal reasons for providing abortions. A quote, the same one as PZ uses because it’s the best:
“By 1967 I was a third year medical student, still with no visible means of support, and we were pregnant with our third child. It was the spring of that year and I was ending my rotation in the Ob-Gyn Service clinic. I was assigned a 40 plus year old, poverty stricken mother of several children. I think she was unmarried but I am not sure of that now. This care worn mother-of-several had a large abdominal mass that I rapidly determined to be a well advanced pregnancy. I asked my resident to come and break the news to this woman; it was very obvious to me that she was not going to be happy about the news of another pregnancy. When told that she – already unable to adequately feed and clothe her family – was again pregnant, she looked up at me and the resident. There we stood, two white males, well clothed, well feed young men with superior educations. We were, in her eyes, stunningly blessed and obviously going places in the world. She began to weep silently. She must have assumed, for good reason, that there was no way that we would understand her problems; she knew also that there was nothing that we could or would do to relieve her lacerating misery.”
“Oh God, doctor,” she said quietly, “I was hoping it was cancer.”
The whole thing is worth reading. Abortion is not an easy moral decision, but that doesn’t mean that it should be taken out of the hands of the people whose lives it affects.
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