"If God does not want us to perform abortions, why did he put me in a situation where I would have to do one?"
 | By Eleanor Barkhorn Editor at Large, Opinion |
Dr. Matthew Loftus has opposed abortion for as long as he can remember. |
"My mother taught me that abortion was wrong because it was a desecration — it destroyed something precious," he writes in a guest essay today. |
Dr. Loftus' beliefs about abortion are connected to his beliefs about many other things: the goodness of God, of bodies, of sex, of family. In his essay, he describes a day six years ago when these beliefs collided, and he found himself performing a lifesaving abortion. |
He was the doctor on call at a mission hospital in South Sudan, and a woman in her late 20s came in, bleeding. She was pregnant, about 18 weeks along, and had lost nearly half her blood volume. As Dr. Loftus writes, "Without immediate action, she would have continued to bleed until she and her baby died." |
Dr. Loftus knows that abortion was the right thing to do for his patient. He writes that with Roe v. Wade likely to be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, any new restrictions passed by states must include exceptions for abortions that are necessary to save the life of the mother. |
Nevertheless, performing the abortion troubled him deeply. "It shook my faith and tore apart my simplistic ethical ideals," he writes. "If God does not want us to perform abortions, why did he put me in a situation where I would have to do one?" |
This is a difficult essay to read. It includes detailed descriptions of the abortion. Still, it illuminates and complicates one of the most challenging political and moral issues of our day. |
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