Albert Mohler is the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a brilliantly articulate pro-life advocate. I owe the following to a story from the Tampa Bay Times he discussed in detail Thursday on his daily briefing.
The story, written a wildly sympathetic Claire McNeill, is headlined, “Young doctors find a calling on abortion’s front lines: Florida providers seek training and work extra hours to give patients anything they might need.”
The opening three paragraphs tell you what this story is about—and really about:
TAMPA — Mimosas go for $2 to doctors, so early on a hot August Friday, the booths at Daily Eats filled with wired residents in powder blue scrubs, some double-fisting coffee after a long week of nights on labor and delivery.
Dr. Jewel Brown, a third year in obstetrics and gynecology, put in an order of take-home pancakes for her boyfriend. She had led interns through four deliveries overnight. She loves listening to women protest, “I can’t do it!” until they can.
She wants, one day, to be the kind of doctor a patient can trust with anything, whether it’s a prenatal checkup, a C-section — or an abortion.
Hard-working young resident who dreams of one day being the Swiss Knife of obstetrics and gynecology: deliver babies in one room; send them off to a bloody oblivion in the next room over. Six of one, half-dozen of the other. In either case she is “helping women.”
As Pastor Mohler notes, the subtext is the ongoing campaign by pro-abortionists and ACOG (which is hyper-pro-abortion) to persuade/induce/cajole young doctors in training to be willing to abort babies. After all, as McNeill notes, “The medical field largely treats abortion as a specialty, not an essential part of a doctor’s toolkit. And most ob-gyns don’t perform abortions.”
What to do? Well, create chapters of “Medical Students for Choice” for solidarity and networking.
Work out an agreement with your full-time employer to include “a clause saying she can also provide ‘full-spectrum reproductive health care’ — in other words, that she can moonlight as an abortion provider”—which she does a couple of Saturdays a month.
You could also give “a talk to fellow family doctors about how to discuss pregnancy plans” who, to your great disappointment, were not the least bit responsive.
Then, you can dig in big time, as apparently she did after having her own abortion. (“She stayed alert enough to remember the aftermath [the unborn baby’s remains], placed in a hazardous waste bin.”)
She has done hundreds of abortions now, and posts pro-choice links on Facebook. But fear lingers. She hasn’t yet told her mother what she really does on Saturdays.
“You feel like you’re a hero but you can’t reveal it, like it’s your secret identity,” she said.
But those are only stories of individuals. What to do when in 1993 “just 12 percent of ob-gyn residency programs were teaching abortion”?
Enter a decision by “the profession” that “ob-gyn residency programs had to include training or at least ‘access to training,’” McNeil wrote.
The University of California, San Francisco, helped multiply the number of highly trained providers through two programs: The Fellowship in Family Planning and the Ryan Residency Program. In just two decades, Ryan has built training into ob-gyn residency programs at nearly 100 institutions.
In family medicine, nearly 30 institutions now have “RHEDI” training, building in reproductive health education.
Now, the most likely ob-gyns to provide abortions are those under 35.
The story ends with McNeill returning us to Jewell Brown who is delivering one minute, “terminating” the next.
She’s comfortable with how the language shifts from moment to moment. She’ll talk to an expectant mom, look at a wiggly ultrasound and say, “Look, she’s dancing!” She’ll talk to a woman just as far along, look at the ultrasound and order a termination.
“It’s about the mom,” Brown says — that simple, even when it’s not.
Afterward, she must account for all “products of conception,” to make sure no fetal parts have been left behind. The work doesn’t shake her. If anything, it intensifies her calling, because she knows not all doctors can handle it.
There are many reasons “not all doctors can handle it,” not the least of which is they came into medicine to save lives, not end them. And, for all the additional residency programs now offering training or “access to training,” it is encouraging to remember that only around 14% of Ob-Gyns kill unborn babies.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
