Since the murder of Dr. Tiller in May, I've had more and more conversations with friends about abortion providers' motives. Some believe the anti-abortion advocates' carefully-crafted narrative of an immoral, money-hungry doctor, performing abortions for any reason at any stage of pregnancy; many friends were simply baffled as to why male doctors, like George Tiller, would literally risk their lives to perform this service for women. Viewing abortion providers as motivated by greed never made much sense to me because as doctors, they could have made a great living no matter what they specialized in and when you factor in the constant physical and legal threats, it just doesn't seem worth it. Plus, since 1973, the cost of abortion ">has remained almost the same when adjusting for inflation; this is not true for most other medical procedures. It makes more sense to see these people as genuinely motivated by a concern for woman's health and reproductive freedom. Countless testimonials from Dr. Tiller's former patients and a new Esquire article profiling another late abortion specialist, Dr. Warren Hern, seem to support this.
The long, sad Esquire article attempts to humanize someone whom others have worked very hard to dehumanize. We learn that Dr. Hern has a wife, mother and life outside his clinic just like any other doctor in America except most don't work in a heavily guarded facility and most don't have to worry about their mother receiving threatening phone calls. It's strange that late abortion providers are the most reviled abortion providers yet they do the abortions that many identifying as pro-life would actually agree are unfortunate but necessary. It's illegal in Colorado for Dr. Hern to perform a late abortion unless the woman's health is at risk or there is a catastrophic fetal anomaly.
In the strangest part of the article, Richardson reveals that Dr. Hern sometimes gets treated with "contempt and disgust" by patients who are ardently against abortion in any circumstance except their own. You'd think these women, knowing the difficulty of a catastrophic pregnancy, would at least support similarly-situated women having a CHOICE and some control over what happens to their body. Up against such hatred , he explains:
You never get used to this. You can't. I think we're hardwired, biologically, to protect small, vulnerable creatures, especially babies. The fetuses may not be babies, but some of them are pretty close.Dr. Hern is fully aware of the emotional complexity of his job, and it seems people like Bill O'Reilly have seized upon this complexity and used misinformation and public ambivalence toward late abortion to portray Dr. Hern and his colleagues as greedy, heartless monsters. But after a bit of research, I've found that just isn't true.
Reading this article made me want to do something to change the public's perception of late abortion providers, which if accomplished, would also encourage more doctors to perform the procedure. I'm not sure what can be done, but forwarding the Esquire article or others like it to friends and family members who believe the anti-choice movement's portrayal of abortion providers would be a start. They probably won't be convinced to identify as pro-choice, but they might see that these doctors are actually the heroes performing abortions in circumstances where most Americans agree abortion should be legal.
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ReplyDeleteIn defense of my own bafflement, I was wondering why a man would endure such miserble conditions in service of what is generally seen as a "women's issue" that is subject to so much moral uncertainty (emphasis on the last eight words). Great post, nonetheless. I guess it is a little queer that I don't feel perplexed about the motives of, say, a suicide bomber (though I loathe him) but completely fail to understand those of a late-term abortion provider (toward whom I am basically indifferent).
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