Scientific American has published a brutally honest “invited” editorial that attempts to reconcile the ethical and socially conscious practice of medicine with the practice of abortion.
Samyukta Mullangi, a third year medical student at Harvard University writes of finding a “little arm” and “a little thigh” and the horror that she felt “putting them together like little puzzle pieces” after participating in an abortion at the “secret annex” of the Harvard Medical School “family planning clinic.”
Inside the hidden recess of this prestigious abortion facility, along with the horror of dismembering human beings, Ms. Mullangi found the solidarity of women who “were in their teens and in unsafe relationships, others were women who already had children and felt that they did not have the kind of financial and social support they needed to raise another baby in their homes …”
Ms. Mullangi states that it is not as simple as “mother vs. baby.” But how does she reconcile her disgust at seeing dismembered babies with the desire to help distraught mothers? She doesn’t; instead she suppresses the emotional feelings of disgust after the dismemberment of a child in the womb as she would in other bloody medical procedures where she witnessed “necks splayed and muscles parted to the very last tendons in radical lymph node dissections, searching for cancer” and literally smelled “AIDS on a patient with medication non-compliance … in delirium and sepsis.”
Tellingly, Scientific American is not inviting guest editorials on the moral dilemmas associated with invasive surgeries to treat diseases, because there is no moral dilemma. Disgust, yes, moral dilemma, no. All of the examples that Ms. Mullangi gives to compare the feelings of disgust at dismembering a human being lack any moral or ethical dimension.
Ms. Mullangi states that “at first pass (the title of the article)” the abortion was “horrific.” But she concludes that “what differentiates those in medicine form the rest of society is our determination to plough through those initial feelings of distaste in our mission to help.”
This is where Ms. Mullangi’s logic goes terribly wrong. The pangs of overriding her conscience are not unique to the medical profession; they are universal to those who try to reconcile the irreconcilable. Like the soldier who murders an innocent civilian in a war, the prosecutor who uses the law as a political weapon to destroy political opponents, or the clergyman who extorts old widows to inflate the church’s building fund, the doctor who intentionally rips apart a little innocent human being for a perceived benefit is violating his or her conscience by “ploughing over it.”
The governing ethical standard for the medical profession can not be to “plough through those initial feelings of distaste in our mission to help.”
Membership in the hyper exclusive circle of Harvard Medical school or any other medical school, does not give one license to take the life of innocent human beings in order to solve what are almost exclusively social problems.
Ms. Mullangi and other students at Harvard Medical School should spend some time at crisis pregnancy centers and learn how a compassionate approach to caring for women in crisis pregnancies and a medical practice that refuses intentional killing can and do coexist. We are confident that Ms. Mullangi will not have to plough over any feelings of horror, and neither will the mothers.
