We Are Missing The Point.

I am unable to tolerate the violation of autonomy of any human being. As a nurse, as a human, as an American, that should be our most sacred value.

I was a labor and delivery nurse for eight years and profess to be a follower of Jesus Christ (the brown political dissident one, not the politicized Nazi captain one). I am thus often asked whether I “believe” in abortion, as though it is an ideal that is in any way dependent on whether I believe it exits, like God or Santa Claus or the lost city of Atlantis. I assume the real question anti-abortion zealots are asking is, “Do you believe women should be allowed to seek a medical procedure that terminates a pregnancy?” I use the term “allow” quite purposefully, because in fact the procedure does exist, is vastly safer from a medical perspective than childbirth itself (especially in the United States where our maternal mortality rate is the highest of any “developed” country), and it is sought and provided by medical professionals for 13.5 of every 1,000 women of childbearing age.

In the wake of the Roe “leak,” my friends and colleagues are all telling their stories. I am compelled to tell my own. But it would miss the point. 

I’ve read accounts of eleven year olds delivering and holding their stuffed animals, crying for their mothers. I’ve gone back in my own memory to delivering women so high on various drugs they had to be put in restraints so they wouldn’t hit us or bite us. I’ve conducted purely elective terminations and have nursed women through the loss of deeply desired infants, whether due to inexplicable intrauterine demise or a diagnosis incompatible with life.

We are missing the point.

The stories are gut-wrenching, as most medical decisions are. But it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a woman who has casual sex and utilizes abortion services every other month (I made that up), or whether we’re talking about a twelve year-old victim of incestual rape. It isn’t for us to arbitrate who can access healthcare.

I have yet to come across a politician or grandstander like Mike Parson or Ron DeSantis (or a priest, for that matter), who has ever been in the vicinity of delivering a baby with a terminal diagnosis. I would very much like to invite them into one, so they can witness exactly what they’re telling women is a gift from God, representing his love, mercy, and peace.

I don’t think anything incenses me more than evangelicals who think they’re on a mission to Save The Zygotes (But Not the Brown Ones!), after almost eleven years of watching non-viable fetuses struggle for breath and struggle to die because “the church” convinced the mother that termination was anything but merciful. If you’ve never seen this happen in real time, in your care, take several seats.

I have seen every “type” of woman in this situation. Eleven year olds conceive. Rape victims conceive. 55 year old women conceive. My dear friend with a large family whose marriage is hanging by a thread. An eighteen year old who partied too hard and doesn’t even remember the night. But we have fully lost the plot.

It doesn’t matter that Billy Graham thinks life begins at conception, or that Marjory Greene thinks a blastocyst is an autonomous human, or that I think they need biology lessons because a zygote is not an infant. I don’t expect Republican members of Congress to know the finer points of embryology because it's not their business to know. It’s a doctor’s business. Because it’s a doctor that counsels a patient on their termination choices, not Republican members of Congress.

The origin of your pregnancy doesn’t have any bearing on whether Amy Coney Barrett gets a vote in your gynecological care. We don’t get to evaluate each situation or case and say, from a conservative or liberal perspective “See, this is why this should be allowed; this is why this procedure is justified.” The origin of your pregnancy doesn’t change the legal, spiritual, or inarguable specifics of your autonomy. It doesn’t matter how the cells got there. You don’t have more or less autonomy or a less viable fetus because you were raped, you’re only eleven years old, you had a one night stand, your husband’s vasectomy failed and you’re 50. You are seeking a medical procedure. Period.

It doesn’t matter what the Bible says about abortion or when life begins. Somehow evangelical propaganda has extrapolated that “the Bible says” life begins at conception. Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish. The Talmud and the religious teaching that he would have preached in the synagogue was that a person gains their soul (nafesh) when the head emerges at birth. This is why in some Eastern cultures it’s very rude to touch someone’s head; it is the seat of their soul. The sacred texts refer to the fetus as “mere fluid” for 40 “days.” The fetus is, in religious tradition, part of the mother’s body. But what Jesus says about medical procedures doesn’t matter unless you are seeking an abortion yourself. So if your “belief” about termination of pregnancy is based on your interpretation of scripture, and your mental gymnastics make you think Jesus said abortion is murder, then don’t have a termination. Pretty simple. Unless we’re just going to be a full theocracy and adopt the entire old testament as penal code. You may not have facial hair or eat bacon, and if you don’t wear a veil you will be executed. Good luck with that. I feel the need to clarify to evangelicals that the Talmud is actually the Old Testament of their King James, by which they supposedly live their lives. You either believe the Old Testament or you don’t. Pick a lane.

Roe v. Wade is not about whether women have bodily autonomy, whether a blastocyst is an infant, or whether a ten week-old fetus can feel vacuum suction (it can’t). It didn’t decide whether electric impulses in cardiac tissue, or the beginnings of brain waves, constitute independent life. This is a sea of red herring. We have fully lost the plot. 

What Roe v. Wade is about, and what the fundamental question of abortion procedures is about, is whether a person has the fundamental right to privacy regarding healthcare decisions between her and her provider. Period. The due process clause of the 14th amendment names the right to privacy and the right to privacy without government restriction. Jane Doe’s ninth and fourteenth amendment rights were “overbroadly infringe(d)” upon by state or federal restriction. Neither the Supreme Court, Congress, the President, or Glenn Beck get to make judgment calls on your right to hospice or palliative care for your aging parent, your right to decline treatment for your child’s cancer, your right to keep or donate your organs upon your death, your right to donate your body to science upon your death, your right to seek gender reassignment surgery, your right to preemptively decline resuscitation in the event of your cardiopulmonary arrest, your right to seek in vitro fertilization, or your right to seek a colposcopy or a biopsy or a D&C. The termination of pregnancy is a medical procedure. Full stop. We don’t legislate hysterectomies, vasectomies, how we resuscitate newborns, we don’t legislate ECMO or bypass or how we keep you alive or not during a crash. We DO, by the way, consider the execution of fully viable and functioning adults to be legal and justifiable. So go figure that one.

Talking heads can bloviate on whether you do any of this until they are blue in the face. They are entitled to their opinion and I don’t begrudge it of them. But fundamentally, they do not get to violate me by imposing their opinion on my body and my life. You are endowed by your creator – whether you believe that creator is God, Artemis, or The Force – with inalienable rights to autonomy and privacy. There is absolutely no other medical procedure on which Congress, the Supreme Court, or the President register an opinion of validity. Government regulation of medical procedures across the entire gamut is for the sole purpose of ensuring consumer safety. That is the role of government in healthcare. Abortion is safe – exponentially safer than forced childbirth.

I’ve left the labor and delivery world. I am a nurse practitioner now in geriatrics, and am seeing the same challenges to bodily autonomy in them. Their right to die peacefully, to die with dignity, to appoint proxies and instill power of attorney to make decisions about their procedures and end of life care.

I am unable to tolerate the violation of autonomy of any human being. As a nurse, as a human, as an American, that should be our most sacred value.