Then, Selzer wrote, “I see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. Newer methods, including those called “partial birth abortion” and “dismemberment abortion,” more reliably ensure death.)Īfter injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. (This method isn’t used anymore, because too often the baby survived the procedure - chemically burned and disfigured, but clinging to life. (That is unusually late most abortions are done by the tenth or twelfth week.) The doctor performing the procedure inserted a syringe into the woman’s abdomen and injected her womb with a prostaglandin solution, which would bring on contractions and cause a miscarriage. Selzer described seeing the patient, 19 weeks pregnant, lying on her back on the table. So he asked a colleague whether, next time, he could go along. I was home from grad school, flipping through my dad’s copy, and came across an article titled “What I Saw at the Abortion.” The author, Richard Selzer, was a surgeon, and he was in favor of abortion, but he’d never seen one. I changed my opinion on abortion after I read an article in Esquire magazine, way back in 1976. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. But life stretches on after abortion, for months and years - for many long nights - and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made.
When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. Abortion can’t really “turn back the clock.” It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. People think, If she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine.īut that’s an illusion. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. A woman who determines instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly stubborn. We were fighting for that “last resort.” We had no idea how common the procedure would become today, one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion.Ī woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” For everyone around the pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. It’s a grim experience, going through an abortion, and we assumed a woman would choose one only as a last resort. We also thought, back then, that few abortions would ever be done. It would be another 15 years of so before pregnant couples could show off sonograms of their unborn babies, shocking us with the obvious humanity of the unborn. We consistently termed the fetus “a blob of tissue,” and that’s just how we pictured it - an undifferentiated mucous-like blob, not recognizable as human or even as alive. She should be able to choose abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.īut, at the time, we didn’t have much understanding of what abortion was. The Supreme Court should not meddle in what should be decided between the woman and her doctor. It didn’t go far enough, she said, because it allowed states to restrict abortion in the third trimester.
#When the world stopped making sense movie
The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the decision.