National Affairs Rory Leishman
On Nov. 23, The Washington Post published a remarkable profile entitled, “A hard choice: a young medical student tries to decide if she has what it takes to join the diminishing ranks of abortion providers.” The article focused on 24-year-old Lesley Wojcik, an activist with Medical Students for Choice who recently attended a conference for aspiring abortionists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Among the featured speakers was Carole Myers, a 51-year-old obstetrician and former medical director for Planned Parenthood, who has committed hundreds of abortions.
Myers posed some tough questions to her young audience: “How pro-choice are you? What does it mean for you? What’s your limit? Would you do an abortion at 28 weeks if the baby had a club foot? How about hemophilia?”
Myers avowed that while she loves her work, she has qualms that prevent her from committing some abortions. “The truth is,” she told Leslie and her fellow students, “that abortion is not a black-and-white issue, not for patients and not for doctors.”
Myers, of course, is plainly wrong. Killing babies in the womb is pre-eminently a black-and-white issue. She did not, and could not, offer any reasonable explanation for her refusal to abort a baby with a club foot at 28 weeks when she would have had no qualms about aborting that same baby, or any other unwanted baby, at less than 24 weeks.
All such moral considerations were lost on Lesley. Inspired by Myers, she elected to spend a few weeks as an intern at a local abortuary.
There, Lesley was appalled by the first abortion she witnessed. The wretched mother was not sedated properly, yet the unscrupulous abortionist proceeded with the operation. Here is The Washington Post account: “The patient was in obvious pain. Her screams gave Lesley the chills and she thought she might throw up. ‘I’m getting dizzy,’ she said aloud. The doctor told her to sit down. She backed away, found a bench and sat. She was hot and sweaty.”
Lesley, alas, quickly recovered. She committed the next abortion herself with the doctor’s hand covering and guiding hers as she wielded the surgical instruments. Later, Lesley witnessed the death by abortion of a baby at 20 weeks. She said the child looked “pretty real” to her and found it was “weird, even surreal” to take part in the killing of that baby after having served as an intern on an obstetrics ward a few weeks earlier when she had struggled to keep similar-sized babies alive.
In an online discussion of the profile in the Washington Post, a pro-life reader told Lesley: “I was shocked that you can get into medical school without acknowledging that a fertilized human egg is a human being. How do you explain that?” Lesley responded: “My thought is that yes, a fertilized egg is a living thing, but not a person.”
Note the equivocation. Lesley well knows, but cannot bring herself to acknowledge, that a fertilized human egg is not just any living thing, but a living human being.
Furthermore, while Leslie implies that only persons have a right to life, she offered no explanation as to when the supposedly magic transformation from living human being to person occurs. That’s typical of apologists for abortion. Myers seems to think that a baby with a club foot is a person at 28 weeks, but not earlier.
No abortionist or ethicist has yet come up with a rational and coherent argument for refuting the self-evident truth proclaimed in the United States Declaration of Independence that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with an inalienable right to life.
As for Lesley, even after her experience at an abortion site, she still maintains that legalized abortion is necessary to assure “a woman’s control over her body.” And she is still worried about the severe shortage of young doctors willing to replace the dwindling number of greying perpetrators of abortion in the United States.
Nonetheless, Lesley has decided to pursue a career as an anesthesiologist. Like so many others, she knows in her heart, but cannot bring herself to acknowledge, that abortion is an evil that can never be justified.
