God religion and patriotism.
Mar 12, 1997 02:31 a.m. EST: She was once employed at the same Massachusetts abortion clinic as the poor young woman who became John Salvi's first victim that sad afternoon when madness consumed a pathetic gunman and sent him careening down a Brookline street leaving, two dead in his wake. She began work there as a secretary while she attended nursing school and after gaining a degree, she went from handling a typewriter to handling actual human tissue.
"I'm ashamed To Tell Anybody today what I did," she says now.
She is now employed as a school nurse.She is mother of three.A woman of memory, conscience and deep regret that, combined with an eyewitness's logic, cause her to wonder what wounds a culture suffers when it allows abortion to be obtained as easily as a flu shot. "I worked in the autoclave room. That is where they sterilize the trays and the instruments after the procedure," she recalled the other day.
"When the doctors finished, they would bring in a small metal tray. There would be a plastic container as well as the instruments used to perform the abortion on the tray. "The instruments are called dilators. They are long metal sticks that are wider toward the end. Obviously, they are used to dilate the women.
"My job was to sterilize the instruments. Then I would take the plastic container, which was filled with formaldehyde along with what they refer to as 'the product of conception,' and label it before sending it out to some lab. "After each abortion, the doctor would bring the tray to me, wrapped in sterilization paper, to be washed and labeled. I would clean the trays and utensils for the next procedure.
"We were not supposed to perform abortions past 12 weeks. But it would, and did, happen that some women were aborted at 16 to 20 weeks. "When that would happen, I would find that the tray contained blood, tissue and bone. That happened quite a lot and anyone who says it doesn't is lying.
"What would you do?" she was asked. "With the tissue, bone and blood?" she wanted to know. "Right," she was told.
She responded with a sigh
"I'd dump it in the sink, Just like it was a disposal."
All this was on her mind because of several events of the past few weeks involving a procedure some call partial-birth abortion, a topic due to hit the Congress and probably divide the nation again this week. However, the term "partial-birth" is quite enough, all by itself, to lead many to believe it is both immoral as well as dangerous.
Abortion is legal in America.
It has also become so loosely and casually available that too many regard it as no more of a nuisance than root canal work. Unfortunately, the issue has been infected by politicians working both sides of the aisle, attempting to lure support of one interest group or another by increasing the venom in their argument. And it has been marginalized by rabid advocates who arrogantly call themselves "pro-choice" or "pro-life" and figure they have an absolute lock on truth.
Yet the real truth is probably uglier than either side figures: There is no doubt that some women today make a decision to abort based on lifestyle rather than health. That is one of the inevitable consequences of a culture that sometimes seems dedicated to the corruption of older, established values like family,
God religion and patriotism.
"Tissue, bone and blood,"
the woman remembered. "The first time I saw it, I said, 'Oh my God!' And then I washed it away down the sink.
"I'm ashamed I actually did that. I still think about it today.
It is why I QUIT!
"Tissue, bone and blood," she repeated. "That's not life?" Of course it's life. But one side won't be happy until abortion is available up until delivery day while the other won't rest so long as a single women in America is able to obtain one, no matter her reason. It seems that consensus might be impossible because, in the end, conscience endures.
Mike Barnicle is a columnist for the Boston Globe.
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