The Hippocratic Oath means nothing to medical student Rozalyn Farmer Love. Not only did her June 7th op-ed in “The Washington Post” demonstrate the left's logically and morally flawed argument in favor of abortion, but it also raises concerns about those who are entering the medical field and the morals they feel free to ignore.
Love, who plans to become an obstetrician-gynecologist dreams “of delivering healthy babies, working with families and supporting midwifery,” but was writing in an attempt to justify her own support for abortion, even while she asserted that “When I advocate for reproductive rights, for choice, I don't claim that abortion is morally acceptable.”
A large part of the article was devoted to Love describing how she went from a family of pro-lifers to an active participant in the pro-choice movement. She presented her own case as a black sheep in a stifling family: “I began to feel as if I were leading a double life. At school, the choices I saw women struggling with were forcing me to question my old convictions. When I went home, I'd go to church with my parents but would find that my views contrasted starkly with those I heard in the sermons. It was a difficult time, because I felt that neither my family nor my church would welcome my questions or understand my struggle.”
Love painted her parents as the stereotypical close-minded conservatives, who misunderstood their enlightened daughter's beliefs (like living with her fiancée.) Apparently she, and her equally oppressed friends, grew up somewhere resembling Puritan Salem. She related how she was “shocked at how little many of my friends – women who were studying biology and planning to become doctors – knew about their own sexual health.”
It seems that Love equated not using birth control to lack of sexual knowledge. She claimed, “They didn't know about or couldn't get the reproductive health care they needed because of barriers put up by their culture, their religion and their parents, whose sole contribution to sex ed was generally an unspoken "Thou shalt not!"
Under the oppressive eyes of their Taliban parents, these unfortunate young women suffered the “barriers” of a traditional morality. How terrible.
When talking about a friend who needed to come up with an excuse to go on birth control, Love stated, “She was sexually active and didn't want to get pregnant.” The possibility that her friend should perhaps practice abstinence if she wanted to avoid a pregnancy does not seem to have ever crossed Love's mind.
But despite her switch to the pro-choice side of the abortion issue, Love claimed that she does not belief “that abortion is morally acceptable.” To justify this dichotomy in her belief system, Love used the age-old “it's personal” excuse, saying, “I think that it's a very private, intensely personal decision.”
Further, stories from the pre-Roe Vs. Wade days of women who suffered from “botched abortions” helped her reach her decision. She explained, “And I believe that it's immoral to let them die rather than provide them with safe, competent care.”
So to get it straight: Love does not think abortion is morally acceptable, yet she is willing to help women perform this non-morally acceptable act to protect them. It is worth mentioning that never in her article did Love claim that a fetus is not a human life. So in essence, she is willing to play God, actively choosing the life of the mother above the life of the baby.
There are other flaws in Love's argument. Although she admitted she has “never witnessed an actual abortion procedure,” she declared that descriptions of partial-birth abortion procedures (“when the baby's head emerges, the doctor jabs a pair of scissors into the back of its neck, severing the spinal cord” ) were “misleading and graphically politicized.” Not only was she incapable of backing this up with actual experience, but she did not offer any description in the place of the one she found so deceptive, nor did she give any reasoning or evidence for why it is so.
Love also presented an anecdote about a woman and husband whose baby had been diagnosed with a lethal congenital anomaly. If the woman waited and gave birth to the baby, “she might be waiting for almost 20 more weeks to give birth to a baby that would never take more than a few breaths on its own.” Love rightly asserts that carrying a baby that in “high likelihood” would not survive for very long would be a tragedy for the mother.
But a medical student should know that “high likelihood” is not guaranteed, and that many times babies are misdiagnosed in the womb But to Love, the certainty of a mother's emotional pain outweighs the uncertainty of giving the baby a chance for life.
Since in this particular case the pregnancy was so far along that most doctors would not perform an abortion, the woman's options were few. But Love knew what she needed: the newest martyr [1] of the pro-abortion culture. She stated dramatically, “They needed a caring and compassionate physician to help them through this dark moment, and if they chose not to continue the pregnancy, they also needed a physician who was both skilled enough and brave enough to provide them with the care they needed. They needed Dr. Tiller.”