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Abortion and the side issues Wednesday, Jan 25, 2006 By David Sanders FAYETTEVILLE - "Now, you won't remember a thing. You think you will, but you won't," Dr. William Harrison told his patient as he administered a second sedative before her abortion. Minutes later the life that was inside her was gone. Harrison and I left the surgical suite and made our way up the narrow staircase back to his office. "Most of them who come in for abortions have either not been using anything for birth control or have been using it incorrectly," he said, commenting on his patients. Where were the tough cases? Of the 800 abortions Harrison said he performs a year, a fraction of them are performed for reasons other that what one could call clinical birth control. "We do probably half a dozen abortions a year for incest. We probably do 12 or 15 abortions a year for rape - maybe more than that. We do 10 a year because of severe anomalies. We'll do maybe one or two a year because of severe problems with a mother's health, but the vast majority of the abortions we do are just like this girl," he said as he pointed back to the room we had just left. She had not been using birth control. Harrison was once one of 13 doctors in Northwest Arkansas who performed abortions. Now, the 70-year-old Fayetteville doctor is the only one left in the area who will do the procedure. In the mid-1980s, Harrison's partner, Cliff Councille, was "born again" and had decided to stop performing abortions and urged Harrison to quit as well. "I told him that if God wanted me to stop performing abortions, he was going to have to tell me himself," he said. Councille eventually left the practice after Harrison bought him out. Shortly after we traded stories about the volume of mail he receives (he said he gets more "love mail" than "hate mail" these days) and his favorite television shows - Comedy Central's "Daily Show" and "South Park" - it was time for his next appointment. The 28-year-old mother of one appeared to have been crying, her eyes were red and her face was slightly swollen. Harrison asked how many times she had been pregnant. This was her third time. Last year, she and her husband were expecting their second child, but she suffered through a horrible miscarriage. She said the doctor on call at the hospital refused to give her a dilation and curettage. Harrison commented that the doctor who had treated her was known for being pro-life; he implied that was why he wouldn't do the D&C. This young lady trembled as she described her divorce that followed the miscarriage. The hopelessness in her words pierced my heart. She had been on birth control, but was also on antibiotics over the Thanksgiving holiday. The antibiotics rendered the birth control useless. She was pregnant and said she had no way to care for another child. She felt like abortion was her only option. Harrison's nurse scheduled her abortion early the next week. Noticing that I was shaken by the visit with his patient, Harrison tried to reassure me. He said if I came back for her two-week follow-up appointment after the abortion, I would see that the burden would be lifted off her shoulders. I appreciated his trying to help, but it didn't work. Harrison is sure that what he does is right, but he confessed to the enormous costs that come in his line of work. There were threats against his wife and children and staff. He commented that if he "had known" everything - the threats, the risks - that would take place over the years, he might not have decided to provide abortions. Some years ago, a 16-year-old daughter of a close friend of the family had gotten pregnant. "Their Baptist minister had advised her parents that she shouldn't have an abortion and that (if she did) she would regret it the rest of her life. But had I had the choice, at the time, I would have advised (the mother of the teenager) to have that child aborted," he said as he stared at his desktop. "Well, she had her baby. She's as smart as a whip," he said. Now, years later, that baby is grown and about to finish her doctorate at the University of California at San Francisco. I asked him if that sent chills up his spine. His response: "Absolutely." ------- David Sanders writes twice weekly for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is DavidJSanders@aol.com. |
