Doing Life Together

Abortion…I was there in the beginning. Part 1 by Betty L. Arthurs

Over the years, many people have distanced themselves from the abortion debate until recently they learned of Planned Parenthood’s selling of body parts from pre-born babies.
Undercover videos revealed the scope of the heartless attitude of executives talking about their gruesome enterprise like they were dissecting fetal pigs in a college biology class.
For years abortion providers have told pregnant women it’s just a blob of tissue, let us help you take care of your problem. A fetal heart saved from the crushing of an abortionist is a tiny bit of flesh?

I was there from the beginning when abortion was made legal in the state of New York…before Roe v Wade.

In the early 1970s my husband and I moved to a college town in the Finger Lakes region of the state of New York so he could attend graduate school. I worked an evening shift, 3PM to 11PM, at a small hospital as an RN. This shift worked well for us since John could watch our toddler daughter, Julie, after his classes were done.

My nursing tasks were routine pre-op and post-op care on a surgical floor. All accident victims came to us from the ER since most would need surgery. Giving out medications, checking surgical dressings, comforting those laid up in traction, checking on cancer patients, making rounds with doctors…as nurses we kept busy, depending on our nurse’s aides and orderlies for help.

Back then I never paid much attention to the news so it was a shock when my co-workers talked about the new doctor, I’ll call him Dr. S., (I will never forget his real name) and how he was using the operating rooms to perform abortions. Up until then I had lead a very sheltered life. Obstetric textbooks taught us about miscarriages or spontaneous abortions where a grieving mother and father lost their baby, but not intentional abortions.

The nursing staff was in an uproar. Operating room nurses ran out, crying and threatening to quit, “some of the babies were born alive.” Other doctors were also horrified. But the hospital by now was making a lot of money off abortions since the women had to pay cash up front…no way would they stop these procedures. New nurses were hired with stronger stomachs to help the doctor of death.

Soon the overflow of women waiting for abortions came to our surgical floor. The doctor had advertised in newspapers and magazines. The women poured in from states where abortion was illegal. A thirteen year-old girl from Ohio told my nurse’s aide, “I have a boyfriend,” when her parents said she had been raped.

In a room with six beds, one woman would be recovering from a mastectomy, another had had gall bladder surgery, but one bed held a woman with a huge stomach undergoing a saline abortion. Hours earlier, Dr. S., huge syringe in hand, plunged the needle into her uterus and gave her baby a few hours to be poisoned and burned alive. Then in the operating room he would remove her “problem.” In the coming years, saline abortions would stop since so many babies survived the procedure, giving way to late term abortions where the abortionists carved up the baby to remove it.

After their procedures, the women would come back to us for a few hours and we would monitor their blood pressures and check for excessive bleeding. They looked half dead, not much of a medical term, but that’s what I observed. Soon they were discharged.

I never saw any poor women. There were college students, women who said, “I already have three children and my husband and I don’t want anymore,” teenagers whose parents didn’t want the shame of an unwanted pregnancy; older women and very young from all walks of life came to our Dr. S. In case you’re wondering, birth control in all forms was cheap and available at this time.

Now, 45 years later I know, this was how mixed-up American culture would help the poor, give sexual freedom, control the population, give the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, the superior race of intellectual white people she craved. It’s true what the Bible says: “ For wherever there is jealousy (envy) and contention (rivalry and selfish ambition), there will also be confusion (unrest, disharmony, rebellion) and all sorts of evil and vile practices.” James 3:16 (AMP)

I remember those months as being a time when the hospital exchanged its call of giving and sustaining life for a spirit of death. It was a time when I prayed for God’s help just to get me through each shift. My co-workers and I were locked into our jobs since there were no other hospitals in the area. The women were our patients and needed care and I knew God loved them more than they could understand.

And I was six months pregnant. Part 2 tomorrow, August 1, continues my story.