![]() You go here, you go there based on some line drawn between human and non-human. I’m convinced it’s like the train platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Once you start becoming callous to human lives, it becomes a calculus: put in the numbers. And that’s what happened that night when I tried to kill that baby. ![]() Well, why not try a little bit of supplementation or kelp or iodine? You have to look at the individual person and listen to her story. So in my practice, one of the ways I’ve done this just in medicine is if your TSH is above a two, it’s telling me that it’s working too hard. That’s the core of medicine.įor instance, the thyroid gland has a normal range, but that normal range is based on an aggregate, it’s not your range. JB: You always hate the disease, but you always love the patient. But as a doctor, how do you balance “These numbers tend to work overall,” and “I have a single patient in front of me I want to advocate for?” But once your numbers move by 0.1 on this scale, we’ll be able to treat you differently.” And I know that in some cases those numbers come out of a real place of care, of we have to make these decisions based on aggregate data. And these thresholds are particularly painful in the context of abortion, but they’re also problems in a lot of places in medicine.įor example, doctors might say: “Oh, you’re not quite sick enough for a transplant. I think of these arbitrary thresholds (five grams, one more week) as the things that mark the change from objects to persons. LS: I want to dive in on that shift in vision. But no: I later realized that if mom and dad give us the egg and sperm, it’s a human life. You think now it’s human, at one point it wasn’t. You go from the little ones that have no bones to the ones that have bones, and eventually you realize something’s not right here. I began to see my heart hardening as I was doing more and more abortions. Once you remove medicine from truth and justice and equality and equity and ecology, five grams-a sheet of paper or whatever the mom wants. And that was the measure of what made someone a person or not in the hospital. And it was five grams, you said, over the limit.Īnd so I looked up, what else is five grams? A sheet of paper. I went and looked up kind of what that critical threshold was for the baby. LS: I was really moved reading your story of that night and that delivery. The mother doesn’t want it, society doesn’t want it. But the dissonance is: no, call it a fetus, it’s not wanted. It made noise, it was obviously human, part of our family. This baby weighed about a pound and a quarter. Debbie Plum, she takes one look and says, “Hey John, you’re better than this. I threw the baby on the scale and lo and behold, 505 grams, I had to call the intensive care nursery. And usually when a baby’s born alive in an abortion, we suffocate it. She’s like, “No, just get rid of it.” And what did I do? I broke her water and pitted out the baby. ![]() We’re using medication and antibiotics, and she’s getting better. We have her in Trendelenberg, kind of tilted backwards. She’s praying, she’s begging, she’s imploring. So there I am in one room saving a 22-weeker because the mother desperately wanted it. Abortion on demand.Īnd that dissonance is becoming more and more tense for me. John Bruchalski: At that point, I’m working at a pregnancy center at night, but during the day, I am doing the full spectrum of OB/GYN, including aborting healthy children, sick children, just about for any reason at any time. I want to ask you a little bit about that choice and about what your new practice looks like, starting with one of those pivotal moments you described in your book when you went into the operating room for an abortion and were confronted by a baby. And that’s something you chose to walk away from. John Bruchalski, you’re an OB/GYN who used to practice what people would think of as the full spectrum of obstetrics and gynecology, including abortion. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sargeant is the creator of Other Feminisms, a substack focused on the dignity of mutual dependence. He is an OB/GYN based in Virginia, and the author of the recent memoir Two Patients: My Conversion from Abortion to Life-Affirming Medicine. In today’s interview, Leah Libresco Sargeant speaks to Dr.
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