Mostly nauseating, but with a few pithy moments

In their "health" section, of all places, the New York Times profiles abortionist Susan Wicklund and her book about how wonderful and rewarding it is to be an abortionist.

Why did she become an abortionist? Because she wasn't particularly impressed with her own liberating and empowering safe and legal abortion:

She became pregnant. She had an abortion. It was legal, but it was ghastly.

Her counseling, she recalls, was limited to instructions to pay in advance, in cash, and to go to the emergency room if she had a problem. During the procedure itself, her every question drew the same response: “Shut up!”

Determined that abortion at her hands would be, I dunno, a fulfilling and satisfying experience I guess, Wicklund took up the curette as soon as she could and never looked back. She wrote a new book to "encourage more open discussion of abortion and its prevalence."

As if it's not been talked to death. How many women are blogging their abortions? Proudly wearing the Planned Parenthood "I had an abortion" t-shirt. (Though, "Ask me about the one I killed" might be more to the point.)

Wicklund's denial, however, runs deep:

“We don’t talk about it,” she said in a telephone interview. “People say, ‘Nobody I know has ever had an abortion,’ and that is just not true. Their sisters, their mothers have had abortions.”

If your sister, your mother, jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? Is this a "jump on the bandwagon" approach to promoting abortion. Don't be left out! Everybody else has had an abortion! What's hindering you?

But Dr. Wicklund acknowledges that abortion is an issue fraught with dilemmas. In the book, she describes witnessing, as a medical student, the abortion of a 21-week fetus. She writes that at the sight of its tiny arm she decided she would perform abortions only in the first trimester of pregnancy. She says late-term abortions should be legal, but her decision means she occasionally sees desperate women she must refuse to help.

I thought if you refused to do an abortion, the woman would reflexively reach for a coathanger, ream herself out, and drop dead. Isn't that why it "needs" to be legal and readily available? What's the matter, Dr. Wicklund? Squeamish if you have to actually see the arms and legs, instead of packing them off to the pathology lab and letting somebody else confront the fruits of your labor?

Dr. Wicklund describes her horror when she aborted the pregnancy of a woman who had been raped, only to discover, by examining the removed tissue, that the pregnancy was further along than she or the woman had thought — and that she had destroyed an embryo the woman and her husband had conceived together.

But if all it was was tissue, what's the big deal? Her husband's tissue, the rapist's tissue, it's all just tissue, right? Unless it's not. And then why are you destroying it?

The closing notes that Wicklund loves abortion because “It is one of the few areas of medicine where you are not working with a sick person...."

God forbid a doctor work with sick people.

Not to mention I thought all these women were having abortions "in consultaion with their doctors". Ya know, for medical reasons. You mean abortion is something that healthy women are doing to healthy fetuses? I thought that was a lie put out by antichoicers.

There's something fundamentally wrong with finding destruction of human life so satisfying.

HT: JJ