A Hard Choice

[MountainLaurel]

Interesting piece about the decision-making process of med students regarding abortion:

The kind of doctor Lesley Wojick aspired to be stood at a lectern at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, issuing tough challenges to the young medical students who had gathered to hear her on a cold Saturday.

You think you are pro-choice, Carole Meyers was saying. But, really, "how pro-choice are you? What does it mean for you? What's your limit? Will you do an abortion on a woman who is 12 weeks pregnant? Twenty-four weeks pregnant?"

What's your limit with birth defects? she asked. "Would you do an abortion at 28 weeks if the baby had a club foot? How about hemophilia?"

Meyers, a 51-year-old obstetrician and genetics expert, has performed hundreds of abortions over the course of her career and, until earlier this year, served as the medical director of Planned Parenthood of Maryland. She loves her work -- it's very rewarding, she said, and women always thank her -- but she doesn't shrink from examining abortion's ethical dilemmas or from setting her own limits. The truth, she told Lesley and the other medical students, is that abortion is not a black-and-white issue, not for patients and not for doctors.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/14/AR2008111401698.html?hpid=topnews

[murielm99]

1. I am pro-choice, and a Planned Parenthood member.

But I have never considered it a black and white issue. I just want the choice to be there for all women.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. That is exactly what all of us pro-choicers say.. It is not an easy decision.

We would all opt for fewer and fewer abortions, better sex education, contraception, even morning after pills. It is the fanatics who are against any sort of choice who tend to see this issue as black and white; good vs evil. These folks whose main concern is the life and soul of the "unborn child", are the same ones who refuse to provide them or their mother with pre-natal or post-natal health care. They are not at all concerned with the quality of the education these children get. They are not concerned with the kind of life they have when there is war all around them. And then finally, when their lives are really screwed up and they have done something against the law, these same people are for the death penalty that would deprive these very same children of the life that they fought so "valiantly" to preserve.
Once that baby has seen the daylight, their life is no longer the concern of those same so-called "pro-life" people. There has never been a more deceptive name for any group of people than those who call themselves "pro-life". They are anything but that.

[WildClarySage]

3. I have to disagree with you on one point...

their main concern has nothing to do with the "life and soul of the 'unborn child'" but has everything to do with the behaviors and sexual expression of women.

[ismnotwasm]

4. That's their selling point

They may actually believe it. In a projection/displacement kind of way.

This "pro-life" (Forced birth, anti-woman, anti-life) perpetual media circus by these spiritually challenged, if not plain "evil" people is one of the strongest expression of outright misogyny that manages to disguise itself as some sort of "moral" issue. And people buy right into it, like these doctors.

A hard choice it may be for the careers of these young doctors, but to obtain an abortion a should be a personal, private one.