What Happens in an Abortion--a Clinical Worker Speaks

Last week, I was invited to a talk, sponsored by a Rutgers Medical School student group student group Vita et Veritas, on conscience rights. Their existence, like other pro-life student groups such as other big universities, is always a marvel to me. How I wished I had that faith and formation when I was younger. I had my own medical appointment that day (darn, these medical screenings are getting frequent with age) but I know the Lord will always fit what He would like done. So I came to the talk and was greeted by my prolifer friends, without whom I would not have known I was in the right room. But there, indeed, I was confirmed that I needed to be here, for these are the very people I had admired, no, praised and saluted, prayed for from a distance, and I can finally meet them--Filipina nurse Fe Vinuya (whose picture was on the front right) was the lead in the case; she was the one whose conscience was pricked when the nurse manager made it impossible for the same-day surgery team of 19 nurses to say "no" to assisting in, and then handling, and possibly even disposing the aborted remains, which apparently against all decency is not even handled as medical waste, but worse (but that is for another day). It was Fe who asked her pastor what she ought to do, and the pastor urged her to contact Alliance Defending Freedom, who brought in a local Catholic lawyer, Demetrius Stratis, who came first, informally, to the confounded hospital leaders, surprised at the nurses' defiance, then finally to a judge in a formal court hearing, giving essentially the same message, that conscience is protected by state and federal (Roe vs. Wade, believe it or not) law, that NO ONE SHOULD BE FORCED TO PARTICIPATE IN AN ABORTION.
There was a hushed silence in the room as Fe described that a rubella vaccination during her pregnancy made her OB Gynecologist submit her to an abortion without much dilly dally. But that decision haunted her, and, consider this, ladies, ths was done for supposedly medical reasons, for safety of baby, but there remains NO MEDICAL JUSTIFICATION FOR ABORTION AT ALL, because it all operates on fears--fears that the baby will be maimed by the vaccine, or Fe will be upset by whatever deformities should it happen. But the core reality is A BABY WILL DIE IN THE PROCESS.
This is what Fe never fully recovered from, and when she got pregnant again, she miscarried and always yearned for the babies that could have been. etc.

It is true God uses our negative life histories for the good, because He is a great and merciful God. In Fe's case, abortion just went against her grain so much, that when a nurse manager insisted that she be assigned to the D and C of a pregnant woman, she just recoiled and refused to participate. The other nurses--many Filipinas, praise God--felt the same way. They are long timers at this very busy hospital, good at their job, proud of the Bible--"my rule," one nurse proclaims, proudly raising the pocket bible she carries. Yet they are threatened to be transferred to a different unit/shift and ultimately destabilized into being fired, all for their conscience.

This is wonderful to see. I had handled abortuses far too many, many times. I had felt sad about them, seen their wonderful perfect limbs, perfect hearts and livers, their perfect pancreas and kidneys, the same microstructure in the adult, existing in the babies, when we proclaim them, after microscopic study: Unremarkable (then the litany of organs that we have sampled to show it is--damn!-- a human being there) LUNG, LIVER, GALL BLADDER, INTESTINE, STOMACH, MUSCLE, NERVE, EYE... I mean they all show up in the same form as the adult, because they are the same organism--duh! Did I have the gumption to tell my pathology superiors "no, I would not do it", or the Gynecology Pathology service, let another one do it? I could not even fathom it. It was, for lack of a better word, work. But there is one thing that these nurses have that I didn't at that time - Their conscience was alive.

Later, in the same hospital, Mount Sinai nurse Catherina Lorena Cenzon-DeCarlo sued when she was asked to perform a late-term abortion. Sued! Praise God! These women are outstanding. They know their rights. They know better than to follow a godless rule.
Fe later admitted she didn't even know that it was already in law, that they are actually protected, and should never be coerced to assist in such; it was only her gut that told her so. But the law is there too! I told her, "Your stand and the national coverage it received made it possible for workers like Abby Johnson to create a movement for abortion clinic workers to seek employment elsewhere." There are alternatives! I thank God that I was able to hear from the legal scholar's mouth that no hospital could force anybody to participate in such an objective evil like abortion (I wish the law iwere framed the same way in assisted suicide but it is not quite there yet.)

When medical student Christian Monsalve, the founder of Vita et Veritas asked, "Why would hospital administrators not readily support people who would act on their conscience?" The lawyer Dimitris, and Fe, shared their response, that it is about ignorance of the law, but I wanted to share that iit is something terrible in the culture, which is I think a big truth. People in healthcare act like they are their own gods. They are their own moral compasses, their own gurus and guides in their own little or big pond, until they face a bigger judge, in this case, a judge who told them outright: If you, University Hospital, do not respect the conscience of these nurses, would you like to lose your millions of federal funding?--shape up and give them respect! In short, many adnministrators are not God-fearing and make up their own laws. It bears well then, for workers in this setting, to have a super-firm foundation otherwise, like me, they will be at the behest of atheistic/agnostic, profit-minded pawns.

I ended with a story for Fe, who told me to share it with many. There was a retired Filipina OB Gynecologist in a Catholic Medical Association Meeting in Philadelphia who told us that, decades back, she was told by her Jewish boss that she would have to begin doing abortions or get fired. She said, "Fire me then". The boss was shocked and didn't do anything. He then did the same to another Filipino OB, a male, who caved in. After his first abortion, he committed suicide. Conscience is a precious thing to protect. It is ultimately who we are, and when that is violated it means we have let ourselves become the very thing we abhor.