Los Angeles Times Promotes Abortion

The Los Angeles Times published a profile Tuesday of a few medical students whose goal is to become an abortion doctor.

Denver — FOURTH-year medical student Megan Lederer recently helped deliver a premature baby at barely six months gestation. The newborn was tiny, unimaginably fragile, but she survived.

Caught up in the moment, Lederer didn't think about the implication for her chosen career. Later, though, she wondered: Could I have aborted that pregnancy?< She could have, she decided. She would have felt an obligation.

Lederer does not know how she will handle such emotion; the closest she's come to performing an abortion was suctioning the seeds out of a papaya to learn a first-trimester technique. She may, in the end, restrict her practice to early abortions. But that's not an easy solution to accept. She can't see how she could ever justify taking one woman as a patient while turning away another because her pregnancy is a few weeks more advanced.

She also knows that the few doctors who perform late second- and third-trimester abortions are mostly in their 60s or 70s. "Who's going to do this when they leave? Someone has to," Lederer said. "I feel in my heart of hearts that it's the right thing to do."

Buried in the middle of the article is a bit of contrast offered, but it's countered by the inspirational opening and conclusion. Here is the starker side of abortion:

Medical Students for Choice had invited Dr. Warren Hern, a legend in the abortion rights movement, to give them encouragement [last fall]. He offered none.

None of you will be an abortion provider, he told the students. You don't have it in you."

Do something else. Fix broken legs," he often advises. "No reasonable person would do this."

Hern[, 68,] specializes in late second- and third-trimester abortions; his patients come to him from around the world, many with late diagnosis of fetal deformity. Though he feels certain he's doing right by the women, Hern still feels conflicted when he steps into his basement surgery.

He once wrote that "the sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current" — and after three decades, he is not inured to that feeling. "We are hard-wired as a species to protect small, young, helpless creatures," he said. "The fetus is not a baby, but it's close. Some are very close. It's difficult."

I would hope it's at the very least "difficult," because if it's not even that, then it means the doctor has stopped being human.

Each of these medical students, as well as Dr. Hern, believes he or she is doing what's right. For the women. But with a pregnancy, the woman isn't the only person involved.

Killing "small, young, helpless creatures" for a living is bound to take its toll on even the most inspired idealists. It's done just that to Dr. Hern. I pity these medical students who want to believe they can walk down the same road as Hern without suffering the same ill effects.

NOTE:
The photo is from Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside, one of the missions built in California during the Spanish Colonial period and now an active Catholic parish church. On the grounds is a small garden with this statue, placed by the Knights of Columbus with a heart similar to that of Rachel Ministries. This a group that helps women to heal emotionally from the aftermath of the abortions they've had. The Bible verse from which the group got its name reads:

This is what the LORD says: "A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because her children are no more." -- Jeremiah 31:15