I sat in the waiting room, my legs dangling to the floor, a thin cotton robe wrapped around me. The tech had swiftly left the room, and all I could think about was how silly I felt to see the doctor again when I still was unsure if I was wearing the robe forwards or backwards. It seemed like something an adult should know without having to ask, so I didn’t.
After awhile–these things always take quite awhile–a quick rap at the door let me know he was ready to enter.
He was one of many OBGYNs at this office, and I’d seen him for a regular checkup and measurement only an hour before. While I waited the first time, I opened the book I’d brought with me, The Cider House Rules.
Now, forgive a fool, but I am one. Without even a twinge of suspicion I had bought it for a dime from the thrift store only days before. In my defense–I can testify–I had not a clue what the book was about. Looking back on it now, I think I picked it up because in my hormonal pregnancy brain I thought it was a Steinbeck book. John Irving, John Steinbeck–pretty close, yes?
And there I was, two pages in, perched on the crinkly papered examination table when I met the doctor.
He was a stern older man who reminded me of my great-grandpa–thin and wiry, not apt to show his teeth. But my grandpa only ever wore blue overalls that I can remember. This doctor, with his starchy white coat surely lived a completely different life. Or did he? My grandpa pulled calves from their mothers, and this man did sort of the same thing. I watched his face soften as he turned his head to the side to see what I was reading.
I quickly closed the book, a little embarrassed he would be so bold to take interest in my reading habits.
“Cider House Rules!” he said, raising his eyebrows approvingly. “That’s one of my favorites. What do you think of it?”
Honestly, I didn’t know, but I was pretty sure my robe was on backwards, so I mumbled something about liking it so far. Maybe he wouldn’t think I was a complete idiot or sense how new I was to this pregnancy business. I made a mental note to do some Googling on John Irving when I had the opportunity.
“You know,” he said, “I do a bit of that kind of work.”
“Is that right?” I said, feigning interest. “Where?”
“Oh, over in town at the clinic. You know.”
I didn’t know, but I nodded.
I was twenty weeks along, about the time the ultrasound technicians ask if you’d like to know the sex of your baby. She didn’t have to tell me. I saw it for myself, a big thumbs up, the handle on a frying pan. I suppose it could have been any body part, but it seemed pretty obvious. Then again, if it wasn’t a boy, I didn’t need to know. I wouldn’t tell anyone anyway and it wouldn’t stop me from spending hours poring over baby names. If nothing else, I could pretend I didn’t know it was a boy and keep adding girl names to the list. No one ever said anything out loud, so to me it still counted as a secret.
But after she’d measured and clicked and printed a long strip of mostly undecipherable black and white baby pictures, she’d rushed off and told me to just sit still and wait.
When the doctor returned to the room, we’d obviously bonded over reading material. He leaned comfortably against the wall as he told me what they’d seen in the ultrasound.
“It looks like your baby has a two vessel cord,” he said. “Most babies have two arteries and one vein–yours doesn’t.” He explained the issue, and I asked him if this constituted a bigger problem. How worried should I be?
“We’ll just keep an eye on it,” he said. “If it looks like the baby–” he paused and looked down at a paper and then up at me, “boy or girl?”
I shook my head, “a secret.”
“We will check you twice a week for the last several weeks. If the baby looks like it is failing to thrive, we’ll deliver it then.”
He smiled matter-of-factly and shuffled the papers back into a folder.
“Let me know what you think of the rest of that book.”
I was full of baby, sitting in the middle of an airplane when I finally got around to finishing The Cider House Rules. I cried. It shook me. Infants were put to death, mothers were sent away empty handed, and a naive boy who once startled at the sight of a mangled corpse turned into a hardened man who performed abortions without blinking. Justified, satisfied, content with his work, a hero.
I thought of my doctor. I thought long and hard after I finished his favorite book, my two vessel cord baby stretching my belly into a watermelon.
I drove myself to the library and googled him. He wrote articles for the local paper in his spare time, expounding the benefits of population control to a town of 15,000 in southwest Colorado, folks hardly concerned with urban creep or the rest of the world. As long as you supported the local breweries and kept a three foot distance from the road bikers when driving, you might well live and let live. But this was my doctor’s cross he bore for the sake of humanity–he himself sounded the warning that our lives take up too much space, and something ought to be done about it.
My first baby was born healthy. He never failed to thrive. After my second baby, I switched from an OBGYN delivery to midwives. I tripled the size of my family, added four more to the population sign on the outskirts of town. Would the doctor have tried to discourage me from keeping each subsequent pregnancy? I don’t know. Maybe he kept his clinic work, his pro bono deeds, separate from his paying job.
His website touts two grown children and a vasectomy–what a shining example. He performed abortions as his civil duty, only a mile from the pregnancy resource center where my friend Valerie encourages women to not be afraid to keep their babies. He pulled infants unwillingly from the womb, scrapes them from their mothers. The next day he delivered the wanted ones, swaddled this time, and placed on their mother’s chest. He writes and publishes articles that favor the wise, the thoughtful planners, stable incomes, secondary education-minded. His concern is for the earth, for humanity, yet I cannot comprehend anything more inhumane than silencing a life that cannot physically cry out for mercy.
Here we have a responsible moral particularist, atheistic in his beliefs but deeply convicted of his life purpose. From where does he derive some greater calling? What made him think he has the authority to deem one life worthwhile and another worthless? Was it pure luck that his mother birthed him into the arms of a doctor who had enough compassion to unwrap the umbilical cord from around his neck?
This man who has an intimate, front row seat to the rhythm of life refuses to acknowledge there is a God who designed such an intricate being. He denies God himself, whose heart beats out a rhythmic love song for people. He denies a Creator who knits each of us in our mothers’ wombs, who made each one of us in His image. In Him we live and move and have our being. Not one is an accident or mistake, not one life is without purpose or identity, not one is born or dies without His eye fully upon them. We, the born and unborn, are precious to Him–even my abortion-performing, overpopulation-wary doctor. Oh, if that man only knew. If people only knew how much He loves them.
I have tried to consider his reasoning, the idea that there are unwanted children, people the world would be better off without. Usually this attitude is scrubbed up and repainted as a quality-of-life social issue. I once read an acceptance speech for a prestigious award. In their speech, the recipient said,
“Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally, they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain.
There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.
What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.”
In 1966, Planned Parenthood presented this particular Margaret Sanger Award to one Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (read the rest of the speech here). I nearly choked on his comparison between his battle for equal rights and Margaret Sanger’s struggle to provide illegal abortions in the slums in the early 1900s. Nevermind the desperation of poverty–when the question becomes when to abort instead of whether–we have quite drifted out of our zone of authority.
The same man who raised a generation of civil rights activists was not exempt from the lofty self-righteousness that comes with worldly wisdom. In all his work, in all of his trials that brought forth equality and victory, his convictions became muddy.
Friends, no matter how well meaning we are, no matter how noble our intentions–we are not afforded the liberty to take another’s life. Our job will never be to curb population growth because God, in the beginning, instructed humans to fill the earth. One life equals one life; significance, worthiness–isn’t a sliding scale. Sin is what brings about death, not good intentions. We get old and die. Natural disasters occur. Car accidents, murders, neglect. This all happens because we are a sin-tainted world.
My dear doctor is among many misguided, well-meaning folk. But God–He is a lover of life. His wisdom is foolishness to the world (1 Cor.3:19). Our world is thirsty for this truth.
We are held to a higher moral standard. Life isn’t negotiable. It blows my mind that in a country where we think we have a decent handle on equal rights, there exist folks who think this world would be nicer without people in it.
Jesus said, “Be careful that you do not look down on one of these little ones. For I tell you, their angels in Heaven always see the face of my Father in Heaven.” (Matt.18:10)
Sanctity of life is a holy matter, and it sits right in the presence of God. Lord, forgive us when we step out of bounds.
My old doctor was hit by a car as he crossed the road downtown one day. He didn’t die, but he was hurt pretty bad. Recovery was rough. Years later, he survived a terrible car accident. Again, it made the paper. I read it. I began to wonder if God was trying to get his attention.
Wouldn’t a God who loves us try to get our attention? Yes, I think He would.
When Jesus walked upon the earth
Along the shores of Galilee
He said to His disciples,
“Let the little children come to me.”
I wonder if up in Heaven
Do you suppose we will see
Little children asking,
“What was I supposed to be?”
Was I to be a prophet,
Used in the ministry?
A doctor, used to find a cure
For some terrible disease?
Even if I’d been born imperfect,
Why couldn’t my parents see
I’d have been made perfect
When You came back for me.
Oh, Jesus
What was I supposed to be?
“What was I supposed to be?
What were my eyes supposed to see?
Why did I taste of death
Before I even drew a breath
Or laid my head at my mother’s breast
To sleep
Oh, Jesus
What was I supposed to be?”
Keith Lancaster, Acapella (1987)
