A small request, friends

Quit posting anti-abortionist pictures of fragmented babies on Facebook. You have a moral objection to abortion and want to share it with the world. Good for you. But trust me when I tell you that I already know what dead and fragmented babies look like. I wish I could tell you that the sum total of this knowledge was gained solely by gazing upon your useless, graphic, and ultimately Photoshopped Internet images but then I’d be a liar. I know what these little souls look like, but do you? Do you really know? I know what they look like because they are often a part of my daily job. I have reached into more formalin buckets and pulled out more fragmented baby parts than I really care to think about. I have prosected 16-week-old fetuses and watched as their organs are turned into a glass slide. My heart breaks for these tiny beings each and every single time, but this is my job. My job is sometimes messy and nightmare inducing, but it is also very intimate. I am a doctor and these are my patients. I am the last hand that will hold them and the last eye that will see them and the last doctor who will mourn them. So quit your Internet crusades, please. I see these images at work and I see them at night when I sleep and I see them when I look in the mirror in the morning. I’d rather not see them in front of me when I log into Facebook. I take enough work home with me as it is. Let these patients rest. Please give them some respect. Quit using them to further your own agenda. And on a related note:

Quit trying to legislate a woman’s right to choose. I believe in the beauty and the mystery and the miracle and the gift that is life, but I also believe strongly in the right of a woman to choose what happens to her own body. I have seen the abortion procedure, I have met women who have chosen to walk that long road, I have held the consequences of the procedure in my gloved hands, I have shuddered in despair and sadness over these tiny beings – and despite all of the horrors of each of these things, I will ALWAYS believe in the right to choose. I will always believe that what a woman does or does not do with her body and those that may dwell in its depths is solely between the woman and her God. It’s not between a woman and her pastor, her friends, the news media, or her political representatives. And it’s definitely not between an unknown, pregnant female and YOU. Knock. It. Off.