Opinion | When a Professional-Life Physician Performs an Abortion

Later, relieved that our patient was slowly recovering, I went up to the labor ward. I had checked one mother earlier and now, hours later, she had not made much progress and would be unlikely to deliver on her own. I gathered my colleagues again and we did a C-section, delivering a healthy baby to a happy (if somewhat ketamine-drunk) mother who might not have lived if we hadn’t done the surgery.

I went home and read nothing in particular on the internet for a few hours. I wanted to sleep, but didn’t want to lie down and be still. When I did, I kept hearing a rhythmic pounding from outside my window — at least I thought it was coming from outside my window. Was it the distant sound of the fetal monitor from the hospital? My own heart? Drums from a spiritual ceremony in a nearby village? A demonic hallucination?

I kept praying and remembering. I closed my eyes, but I saw the picture of the skull on the ultrasound machine. I finally fell asleep at 4 a.m. and awoke a few hours later to more deliveries and seeing sick children.

I view my work as a physician as part of a battle against brokenness in the physical health of my patients, a battle whose tide was turned when Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The Bible teaches that our physical bodies will one day be resurrected as Christ’s was, mysteriously transformed but somehow also continuous with our present flesh and blood — like a seed is transformed into a plant. I teach and work alongside local health professionals so that we can care holistically for people in need, following in the footsteps of Jesus, the healer.

By caring for others now, Christian doctors seek to honor the goodness of our bodies and anticipate this future resurrection. Occasionally we have to amputate, give toxic chemotherapy or otherwise tear apart the body for the sake of healing. This power shouldn’t be used lightly, and in the case of a living human person in the womb it should be only the most extreme circumstances that permit its use. But the power is there, and sometimes we must use it in an irreversible, life-ending way.

Before I performed an abortion, I had thought about questions of theodicy — the struggle to reconcile God’s goodness with the presence of evil in our world — in a passive sense, wondering why or how God allows suffering to happen to people. Now I think about why God would force someone to make a choice like I did. By 18 weeks, the rough age of my patient’s child, bone gives enough resistance to the surgical instruments to make its humanity known. Here, I think the exception proves the rule: Ending a child’s life before birth is so wrong that only saving another life could be worth it.

As a missionary doctor, I was willing to sacrifice the comforts of home to care for others, but I didn’t realize that this vocation would also require me to make many moral decisions where all courses of action were heart-rending in one way or another. I was familiar with the idea that becoming a doctor would take a toll on my body, as sleepless nights and strained muscles get introduced very early in training, but I have learned that the power to kill and heal leaves a different sort of mark over time.