Fourth-year medical student Megan Lederer recently helped deliver a premature baby at barely six months gestation. The newborn was tiny, unimaginably fragile, but she survived.
Caught up in the moment, Lederer didn't think about the implication for her chosen career. Later, though, she wondered: Could I have aborted that pregnancy?
She could have, she decided. She would have felt an obligation.
Lederer, 30, can't relate to the images that drew an older generation of physicians into abortion work. She can barely picture it when they talk about life before legal abortion: the blood-spattered apartments, the women racked with infection from stabbing sticks into their wombs.
But she and other young doctors-in-training have found their own motivation to enter a field that they know will put them at risk of isolation, harassment and hatred. For them, doing abortions is an act of defiance — a way of pushing back against mounting restrictions on a right they've taken for granted all their lives.
"It's like when your big brother says you can't do something," Lederer said. "That just makes you want to do it even more."...
Get it? It's not about justice. It's not about compassion. It's not about a woman's health or medical ethics or providing the best care to all patients. It's about a bellicose, barbaric lust for power.
Read the rest of this appalling LA Times "news story" here.
