Abortion by pill
I didn't know what to expect. After taking my seat in a room full of young women, I looked through our handout, trying to find my place in the lecture. "Medical Abortions...up to 9 weeks...Mifepristone...Misoprostol...uterine contractions..."
At the front to the room stood Dr. O, MD, who runs a private practice, in Seattle. Dr. O commanded the attention of her audience with the kind of easy confidence and natural rapport found in the best of college professors. She shared the secrets of her trade with an infectious passion and expert precision.
Despite knowing the grizzly facts about her daily practice, the corruption of my "polite" humanity kicked-in: I wanted to like her, and I wanted her to like me.
The lecture continued with a description of a first trimester medical abortion. On day one, the woman is "brought to the back" of the clinic where Dr. O dispenses the first pill: "I watch her take her medicine".
The patient is then released with the second round of pills to be self-administered within 72 hours. Soon the contractions will begin, and the woman will wait while her womb turns against the very life inside it, culminating in a self-induced miscarriage.
You may feel a little pinching, poking...cramping
Dr. O moved on to the next topic: first trimester surgical abortions. "We numb the cervix...you may feel a little pinching, poking...cramping...the [tube] goes in...the bulge at the top is the pregnancy, you suction out...and that's it." It takes somewhere between 30 seconds and three minutes to complete the job. She then takes the contents of the tube to the lab to inspect the completeness of her work. "We take the [embryo], we float it and back-light it and...dispose of it the same way we would dispose of your tonsils."
When the pregnancy reaches the second trimester, "dilation and evacuation [D&E] is what we do most". This can be a one, two, or three-day process. As the pregnancy progresses to the later part of the second trimester, an additional step may be involved:
"People who are 19 weeks or above...will get an inter-fetal injection, meaning through the woman's abdomen, into the fetus. A heart medication...stops the fetal heart. OK? So that you do not have to worry about a fetus being born alive, and then do you resuscitate or not, and at some hospitals you can have an abortion later than the mandatory resuscitation requirements, so it gets complicated."
There is another reason for stopping the baby's heart: "In theory, on day two or day three, after the inter-fetal injection, after fetal death, the fetus gets softer” making it easier to extract during evacuation. Suction and forceps are then used to "grab parts of the fetus and parts of the placenta and bring it out.” The second trimester abortion is "a little more complicated”, explains Dr. O, “but in general, it probably takes between 15 minutes and half an hour.”
Numbed by routine
As Dr. O's description of medical and surgical abortions came to a close, I realized that had just listened to instructions on how to dispose of a child, and I did not flinch, I did not weep. It felt routine.
It is routine. In our nation it is estimated that by the age of 45, one in four women will have had at least one abortion. The perception of legitimacy had numbed me to the horror of reality. I wondered what would happen if I had been put in such a vulnerable situation: if this doctor could have made me feel OK, even for a moment, about being "brought to the back". A moment is all it takes.
