Diatribune

This letter grew out of my frustration, generally, as a supporter and provider of legal, professional abortion care, in countering the massive body of fraudulent claims about abortion care in wide popular circulation through the efforts of anti-abortion propagandists. It stems from my repulsion at the sorry spectacle of misinformed and prejudiced laypersons in Congress and in state legislatures and running for office endeavoring to micromanage a specialized field of medical practice about which they obviously know and understand little, neither of its medical nor of its sociological dimensions, and to force their narrow religious views upon everyone under the cynical lie of “protecting women.” The morality of bearing true witness is of paramount importance to me. The essay that accompanies this letter, Abortion Rights 101, is a distillation of facts (and some well-founded opinion) concerning the most basic foundations of understanding the abortion controversy, thus its title. There is much more to it from all angles, but this “course 101” seems to me to be a good starting place. As a colleague of mine once said, "Everyone in America over the age of eleven has a great deal of information about abortion, and almost all of it is wrong."

My professional service to my patients is just as sincere as that of any other caring and ethical physician, and I take great satisfaction from providing the best care that I can to them in a non-judgmental setting. I deeply believe that I am benefiting humanity and that the Judeo-Christian God would be pleased with my work. There is an abundance of truthful fact and valid scientific evidence and analysis to support this belief. There is absolutely nothing in the Bible to contradict it.

I recently received a brusque reply to statements I have made from a prominent Roman Catholic "Pro-Lifer," a priest, with whom I have conducted an on-again-off-again correspondence for several years.

Within that reply was the following:

"As you keep ripping the babies apart, I'll keep coming to OSA events . . . Yours are the same explanations I talk about all the time to those who wonder how doctors can kill babies when they know it's a baby as well as we do.

"And, of course, you think it's all about ‘belief.’ It's always that way for those who justify killing others, isn't it?"

I replied:

"What a childish, simplistic view! And from one (you) who celebrates the murderous regime of George W.. Bush! How you can reconcile that is beyond me. It must take a ton of denial!

"That phrase, ‘ripping the babies apart,’ seems to be the only arrow in your quiver - like a mantra repeated over and over until it assumes a hypnotic power over you. Like a Goebbelsinesque lie that is repeated over and over until it is at last believed.

"It's just a crying shame that you won't channel all this boundless, zealous energy of yours into a constructive, positive direction instead of striving to force the dictates of your narrow, uncompromising religious cult, large in size though it is, onto women and teenage girls, our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and their families and friends. It is just so chillingly tragic that I am moved to wonder whether you have a heart at all. Your efforts really reflect, more than anything, heartless, punitive cruelty seeking acceptability by masquerading as phony and misguided ‘compassion’ for insentient embryonic organizations of cells that are not ‘babies’ no matter how often or how stridently you call them that.

"As a psychiatrist before training in ObGyn one thing I did for several years was the required psychiatric assessments of candidates for the priesthood for a Protestant Episcopal bishop. It has long been my observation that making so constricting a choice so early in life, as have most of those who become priests, in many cases arrests intellectual, emotional, and psychological development at an immature stage when all is viewed in rigid, simplistic black or white dichotomies like the ‘good guys’ vs. the ‘bad guys.’ You seem to fall right into this mold.

"We grownups know that there are very many very ‘bad’ cowboys and very many very ‘good’ Indians. Shades of grey. Context. Nuance. Truth. You don't seem to have advanced near that far.

"Try this honest and poignant story - just one of multitudes of similar stories I see daily that could be told. Is your heart really so utterly hardened and your understanding so constricted that you cannot empathize with this courageous human being's story and millions upon millions similar to it?

"Your self-imposed ignorance persists as in pristine cowardice you continue to acknowledge only anything, however unlikely or demonstrably only imaginary, that confirms what you so fiercely want to believe and to seal your mind off from any unequivocal factual reality that however slightly runs counter to your nothing-but-belief - which is exactly what I have described to you as the result of prematurely closing your mind at an age of childish, simplistic false-certainty so that only your constricted point of view is valid to you and must be imposed upon everybody in the world - of course, of course, of course nothing-but-belief! What else could it possibly be? Either that or you are a psychopathic liar and manipulator of epic stature who, aware of your own dishonesty and contempt, and not believing it yourself, commits your pitiless atrocities knowing full well how much misery, suffering, and death you encourage through your single-minded and extreme opposition to human freedom - caring only about your own ego, pleasing your ecclesiastical ‘bosses’ to advance your vainglorious career, and the superstitious ambition of winning a ticket to 'heaven' by doing what you believe, completely without evidence to establish it as anything but belief, is the bidding of a monstrously unbending and punitive tyrant in the sky somewhere. Does your eternal ‘paradise,’ as does another version we've heard a lot about in recent years, come with a believed promise of 72 virgins lusting after you once you get there? (If so, I wouldn't expect their virginity to last long when confronted with all the dammed up, raw sexual energy that must accompany a middle-aged man who has practiced the quaint perversion of celibacy all his life.)

"In this I urge you to see the underlying psychology of such seemingly diverse phenomena as the crucifixion of Christ (basically for defying dogmatic orthodoxy by teaching the ancient ‘sins’ of freedom, equality, acceptance, kindness, peace, and love), the Crusades, the Holy Inquisition, the genocide sanctioned and blessed by your ecclesiastical forebears of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean islands and of Central and South America, the attacks on this country by religious zealots on 9/11, and the justifications given for the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq. Sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same. I refer you again to my article on DKos:

"The Inquisition lives. Ask a woman with an unwanted pregnancy.

"But I understand the pickle you're in. Even if you ever were to somehow summon up the courage and integrity to face the fact of the living complex of unfounded beliefs, lies, and callousness you are.

"Tolstoy said it well:

" 'I know that most men...can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their lives.'

"I guess you would just be left to flap and twist in the breeze. What would you do? How would you survive? Heavy stuff! I sincerely empathize!

"But remember my motto:

" 'No matter how fervently you believe that you know what you merely believe, you merely believe it, and you might be wrong - very wrong.'

"Like, e.g., that weird belief that keeps cropping up about a zygote being a ‘baby’ that has ‘God-given’ status and rights that supercede the status and rights of pregnant woen and teenage girls, or that unfounded belief (or deliberate lie?) that safe, legal, professional abortion care ‘hurts women,’ or that favorite belief of yours that it is appropriate or right that you strive to impose your religious mythology (belief) on the whole world by zealously striving to impose rigidly coercive and punitive law and by threat of violence and inciting others to violence - you know, like ‘Fr.’ Osama bin Laden and his Holy Inquisition - (excuse me, I meant al-Qaeda). I guess poor old ‘Fr.’ Osama, too, was influenced to shut down his ‘God-given’ mind at an early, immature (i.e., childish and simplistic) stage. After all, that's the problem with all religionists. No?

"Yes.

"Faith? As Mark Twain said, 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so.'

"You must know that a human mind, unless stifled by fear and shame, continues to grow and develop long after the period of prenatal gestation. Indeed, what I am writing about is the abortion of the life process of intellectual, psychological, and emotional development so essential to the full flowering of the human potential, which is the kind of abortion you are trained to provide.

"And don't forget the run-on sentence I sent you a couple of emails ago:

"About 70,000 thinking, feeling, often desperate women and teenage girls die every year from illegal attempts to abort unwanted pregnancies, which is more than one every 10 minutes dead because they are prohibited by law from accessing safe, legal, professional abortion care, and many times that number are seriously injured and maimed for life, not to mention that in addition, every minute, night and day, no holidays or weekends off, around the world one woman dies of complications of pregnancy and childbirth (every minute), ten teenage girls undergo unsafe illegal abortions (every minute), thirteen infants under twelve months old die (every minute), fifty seven people contract an STD (every minute), eleven people are infected with HIV (every minute), and the already-burgeoned-beyond-the-planet's-capacity-to-sustain human population increases by one hundred fifty more people (every minute), all sanctioned, encouraged, and even enforced by our callous right-wing-dominated government through international interference with and withholding of funding from worldwide reproductive health and sex education programs, all with the vigorous encouragement, support, and reinforcement of your beloved Roman Catholic Church.

"And that is what you are doing, based upon your beliefs - and we aren't talking about insentient embryos, but mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, all thinking, feeling, unequivocal persons. Your callousness and meanness makes my flesh crawl. Your ostensible superhero, Jesus, the 'Prince of Peace,' was an opposite to you and your ilk. The Roman Catholic Church resembles more than anything a crime syndicate with creeps like you the capos, the ‘wise guys’ and ‘made men’ (forgetting, denigrating, and ignoring women as always since its inception), spreading mayhem, misery, suffering, and death around the world. But your version of Cosa Nostra has royally outdone the Mafia by cloaking itself in the supernaturalism of hideously punitive religious belief against which gullible (and cradle-to-grave indoctrinated) people have no adequate defense.

"A wolf in sheep's clothing.

"Are you the teeniest bit introspective?

"My hope for you is that you will somehow reopen your mind, come to your senses, discover your potential for rational thought, and shun your ego so that you can turn all that zealous energy of yours into something real and constructive.

"I guess I might as well take that wish and a ten dollar bill to Starbucks for a cuppa coffee?

"Pity. In the meantime people are suffering and dying all over the globe due to the efforts of you and your ilk.

"Arrivederci per ora.

"Say ‘Hi’ for me to your buddies in the Holy Cosa Nostra."

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