Spectacle on the House Floor

After we say Grace at dinner, my husband takes the television off  mute to hear the news.  Dinner just happened to coincide with the start of ABC's broadcast of national news, and the network chose to lead into their program with the revelation by Rep. Jackie Speier that she had underwent an abortion.  Her speech followed that of Rep. Chris Smith.  However, after reading further about this stunning moment on the House floor, the story isn't quite what you might think.  Sadly for Rep. Speier, she lost a pregnancy at 17 weeks because of what sounds like an incompetent cervix, which is a cervix which cannot withstand the weight of the growing baby and opens suddenly, causing the woman to miscarry.   What she underwent to remove an already-dead baby is a hell of a lot different than what other women "endure" when they decide to abort an already fully formed baby.

The congresswoman was perturbed because she felt that Rep. Smith intimated that women undergo these procedures "cavalierly".  In fact, that's not what I got from his speech.  He was talking about those who perform these procedures.  I worked at a hospital that permitted late-term abortions.  Thankfully for me, I never participated or witnessed what went on, but I talked to enough other people who initially agreed to participate, but quickly changed their minds because of what they saw.  Tiny body parts flying all over the room, including on the doctor's surgical attire, as though the developing child was a tumor that deserved to be hacked to bits.  Some of the babies were aborted because of what's cleverly termed "dysgenetics", but more often than not, they were aborted because their mothers decided they didn't want them and were persuaded that "getting rid" of a pregnancy, no matter how late-term, could be handled as easily as taking out the trash.

When I was pregnant with my son, a friend who was an aspiring midwife lent me two books. One was The Midwife's Story by Penny Armstrong.  Penny became a midwife whose practice almost solely encompassed the Amish in Lancaster County, PA.  I highly recommend it. The other book was called Spiritual Midwifery.  It's about a project that started sometime in the 70's by a group who decided to leave society and form their own church and their own community, which they called The Farm.  To this day, I couldn't tell you what their religious beliefs were. I know they weren't Catholic.   I don't think they'd necessarily be insulted if anyone called them hippies.  Until their community was established, they lived in school buses.  Women came to them from all over the country to experience their method of gentle and natural childbirth.  At the end of the book, the midwives devote several chapters to prenatal advice and information on how to sterilize instruments, etc.  But what interested me most were the stories of pregnancies and childbirth that did not go as hoped for. 

It was the practice in medicine some years ago to describe anencephalic babies as monsters because of their grotesque appearance.  As you may know, anencephalic babies do not survive  long after childbirth, if at all, because of a catastrophic malformation of the neural tube, from which the brain, skull, etc arise.  The midwives delivered one such baby.  His parents named him, and he surprised everyone by  clinging to life for a couple of days.  The midwives put a hat on his head to cover his deformity, and for short time that he lived, his parents loved him and cared for him as they would have had he been perfectly formed.  He was alive, and everyone involved recognized how precious a thing that was, that despite the overwhelming odds stacked against him, he not only survived childbirth but stayed in the world long enough to allow his parents time to absorb what happened and to grieve appropriately.

A nurse that I know who once participated in abortions but has since repented and reformed told me of the time an anencephalic baby was delivered at what had been scheduled as an extended D & E, which is just a medically misleading and clever way to describe a late-term abortion.  She had been told the woman was five months pregnant.  She delivered what appeared to be a full-term anencephalic baby.  The staff thought he was breathing and wanted to call the nursery to send the neonatologist.   The doctor quickly wrapped the baby in a drape and attempted to whisk him out of the room. When the nurses objected, he told them the woman knew the baby was deformed, she wanted it aborted, and the child wasn't going to live anyway, and he took the baby from the room.  Quite a stark contrast from the story recounted in Spiritual Midwifery.


The Farm midwives made it abundantly clear that they would not perform abortions, nor would they refer women to practitioners who did .  If this band of so-called hippies, living without indoor plumbing and camping out in buses, could get it right, what's wrong with the rest of society?

My sympathy goes out to Rep. Speier or any woman who loses a baby.  But her speech was misleading and no one should allow the emotions she intended to provoke to blind us to the reality of what PP is all about.