I'm a little slow on catching up to current events, I realize, but in a late-November article in the L. A. Times, Stephanie Simon gives an incredibly revealing and insightful article on an abortion clinic in Arkansas: Offering Abortion, Rebirth (link requires free subscription). (See also Simon's commentary giving a behind the scenes account of the article here.)
After a brief biographical introduction to the abortionist (his own term for himself), Dr. Harrison, Ms. Simon gives an account of the days activities, the patients, and the views of the doctor and one of his nurses.
It is a few minutes before 11 a.m. when Harrison raps on the door of his operating room and walks in.His Fayetteville Women's Clinic occupies a once-elegant home dating to the 1940s; the first-floor surgery looks like it was a parlor. Thick blue curtains block the windows and paintings of butterflies and flowers hang on the walls. The radio is tuned to an easy-listening station.
An 18-year-old with braces on her teeth is on the operating table, her head on a plaid pillow, her feet up in stirrups, her arms strapped down at her sides. A pink blanket is draped over her stomach. She's 13 weeks pregnant, at the very end of the first trimester. She hasn't told her parents.
A nurse has already given her a local anesthetic, Valium and a drug to dilate her cervix; Harrison prepares to inject Versed, a sedative, in her intravenous line. The drug will wipe out her memory of everything that happens during the 20 minutes she's in the operating room. It's so effective that patients who return for a follow-up exam often don't recognize Harrison.
I find it telling that Versed is administered and that patients rarely have substantive recollections of the abortion. I'm not