PERCHANCE TO DREAM:

Cruel to be kind: In the twilight of his career, a late-term-abortion doctor tells all (REBECCA PALEY, 12/05/03, Boston Phoenix)

Technical difficulty, however, is not why many doctors don't want to do second-trimester abortions. What troubles them is that as a pregnancy progresses, the fetus increasingly resembles a baby. This is also what troubled Congress, which passed a ban on "partial-birth" abortions (a term left purposefully vague but that could be interpreted to comprise all D&Es, including the rarely used dilation-and-extraction method, in which the skull is collapsed in utero and the fetus removed intact). [DR. WILLIAM RASHBAUM, a New York City gynecologist and one of the pre-eminent and longest-practicing providers of second-trimester abortions in the United States], like many in his field, is furious about the law. "It is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of, outlawing a safe operation," he says. "The passage of this bill reflects the ridiculous extreme of conservatism as represented by our current administration and president." Since President Bush signed the legislation in early November, marking the first federal prohibition on abortion practice since Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure in 1973, three lawsuits filed by pro-choice organizations and physicians in San Francisco, New York City, and Nebraska have cropped up challenging the ban. All three courts granted temporary restraining orders to stop the enforcement of the law, but the Department of Justice is seeking to put it into effect as quickly as possible. Trials are expected to begin in all three cases next spring.

The procedure is gruesome, as anyone who has seen it, including Rashbaum, will attest. One of his former interns remembers watching Rashbaum do a D&E on well-developed twins one hot summer day. He intently leaned in closely and methodically pulled piece after piece of the fetuses out of the mother's uterus, ignoring the attending staff's whispers of horror -- "It's twins. Itís twins" -- to each other. The intern reacted violently, running home, throwing up, and asking herself, "Is this right?" Rashbaum pisses people off with his cranky, despotic ways, but the other doctors are relieved he's around to do a job they don't want. "A person who is more concerned with what people think of him than of doing the right thing wouldn't last," says a second-trimester-abortion provider who trained under Rashbaum. "He cares more about doing the right thing than what people think of his personality." [...]

In the beginning, Rashbaum had problems performing abortions. First, there were his father's objections. "Growing up, the worst thing my dad could say about another doctor was he did abortions," he says. Like the other board-certified doctors who were suddenly doing procedures previously relegated to back alleys, Rashbaum lacked training in the necessary medical techniques. "None of us knew what we were doing," he says. "The only people who knew how to do abortions were the criminals." Rashbaum and his colleagues practically taught themselves how to perform abortions and were limited by the crude instruments of those days -- Dixie cups attached to the suction machine by rubber bands. And although Rashbaum felt he was performing a necessary service, it weighed heavily on his conscience. He was troubled by a recurring dream of a fetus trying to hold onto the walls of a uterus by its tiny fingernails. Raised to believe that abortion was wrong, he reasons, "What kind of dreams do you think you are going to have?"

But in what began as a way to support two households, Rashbaum discovered a purpose and a mission. In the late 1970s, bored with his routine, he began doing second-trimester abortions and has since performed roughly 21,000. His work in late abortions has filled an important need, not only by providing services to desperate women, but also by training other physicians. He has trained close to 100 doctors to do D&Es, some of whom have gone on to train others.

Nice to know you can shut your conscience up if you just keep violating it often enough.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 8, 2003 7:29 AM