Some Thoughts About Abortion

City Safari: A Sea Of Red Flags - Some Thoughts About Abortion

Thu, Sep 03, 2020
By Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor

Abortion, some say, is not an area where a man should have any say. At least that was the old feminist manifesto in the late 1970s and 1980s.

If I had to count the number of therapeutic abortions I’ve witnessed in my life that number would be in the hundreds. I observed most of these abortions in the 1970s when I worked in a Boston operating room in lieu of Vietnam War era military service.

Therapeutic abortions were very common in Massachusetts and Boston at that time. They called them ‘TA’s’ and they were as common as appendectomies and took about as long.

Most of the OR nurses at Tufts New England Medical Center were Irish Catholic. When it came to TA’s most of the nurses did what they had to do despite moral scruples. Unlike any other surgery, when a TA was being performed there was a degree of secrecy surrounding it, so much so that scrub nurses often taped sterile towels over the small windowpanes on the operating room door. It was not uncommon for the OR head nurse to tell everyone under her charge not to go into a certain OR room (where a TV was underway) unless requested to do so by the attending scrub nurse.

An OR orderly floated from operating room to room at the direction of the scrub nurses. A nurse in Room 2 might want you to hold a patient for a spinal tap, while a nurse in room 3 might need you for something else. TA nurses rarely needed you for anything except to give you a specimen jar that held the life that had been taken from the woman on the table. Very often the "remains” were full bodied and shockingly large.

The poor Catholic Irish nurses would sometimes give me a TA "specimen” while holding back a few tears. It was obvious to me then that these women were experiencing waves of guilt.

Only one scrub nurse publicly announced that she would not participate in a TA. She would blurt out quite frequently that TA’s were the taking of a human life. She was not Catholic but Russian Orthodox.

It’s been many years since I’ve worked in an operating room but whenever the abortion issues surfaces, I often think back to my time at Tufts New England Medical Center. I think of all those fetuses, large and small, in jars of thalidomide that I transported to the pathology department. From the pathology lab the jars were then placed inside a special medical dumpster near the hospital parking lot. The medical dumpster was not far from Boston’s Chinatown and a few ruckus Irish bars where the scrub nurses and few game residents would sometimes go for beer after their long shifts.

Today I am certain that both human infants and prenatal human children are actual persons, if only because they have a nature and potential that no other animal on earth possesses. For this reason, they deserve equal protection of the law with other human persons.

When I lived in Center City I would occasionally walk past the protests at Planned Parenthood. In those days I thought that the people protesting and praying publicly were just a bunch of crazy holy rollers fighting a losing battle. I’m not quite sure why, but at the time I viewed these protests as having a negative effect on gay civil rights, and so assumed that most of the protesters would be quick to judge and condemn gays and lesbians. The sight of so many rosaries in the crowd was also stupefying.

When State Rep Brian Sims berated a woman protester praying on the sidewalk in front of Planned Parenthood and told her that what she was doing was "disgusting” and "racist,” I knew that what Sims was feeling was what I used to feel about Planned Parenthood haters. If you’re anti-abortion, you’re surely anti-woman and (ultimately) probably anti-gay. I’m not sure how this sort of programming became a domino game in which one thing necessarily leads to another. Sims went off the wheels in his comments to the Planned Parenthood protester, probably thinking he was coming across as a social justice version of Joan of Arc and, in the end, voters would love him for it. That didn’t happen. Instead, he was criticized by many of his allies on the left. Sims smartly apologized, saying, "I can do better. I will do better, for the women of Pennsylvania.”

Sims, a Democrat, is basically in step with his Party on the abortion issue although Pro Life Democrats do exist. Pro Life Dems, however, find themselves in that awkward position of having to defend themselves to Party loyalists who take a dim view of members who drift on crucial issues. Not so long ago, Pro Life Dems might have been called ‘half-Democrats,’ but in today’s political climate (near total civil war, many say) Democrats who don’t adhere to the full A to Z Party platform are very likely to be condemned as "Trump loving Nazis.”

That’s how bad we’ve gotten as a society when it comes to politics.

Politics is also splitting the Catholic Church, especially when it comes to the issue of abortion.

In the Catholic world, the split between right and left is felt most intensely when the subject is abortion. James Martin, SJ, the editor of the liberal magazine, America,offered a prayer at the opening of the DNC. Martin is famously progressive in his views, which often puts him at odds with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The thin tightrope he has had to walk has made him the whipping boy for Catholic conservatives.
An activist nun who spoke at the DNC, Sister Simone Campbell, was also a speaker at the 2014 DNC. When Sister Campbell was asked if her social justice work included anti-abortion work, the good Sister said, "That is not our issue. That is not it. It’s above my pay grade.”

Discreet Obfuscation like this heralds a sea of small red flags!

One would at least expect a Catholic nun to then go on and say a few words about the sacredness of life, above her pay grade or not.

Conversely, at the RNC, Sister Deirdre ‘Dede’ Byrne, POSC, (in a full traditional habit, by the way, unlike Sister Campbell who was in full secular dress) spoke of the Catholic Church’s commitment to pro-life issues. She also got a bit political, which sent the Left Catholic world into a tailspin. One Villanova theology professor, a certain Massimo Faggioli, was so upset that he announced on social media that Sister ‘Dede’s’ speech made him sick to his stomach