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" I SAW MY FIRST ABORTION about six months ago, in the summer. It was in a clinic that didn&amp;#039;t look like a clinic--an old white clapboard on a busy street in a city about an hour from where I live. You&amp;#039;d think it was a regular home, except for the intercom and tiny video camera on the front porch. You say your name into the intercom and then hold a picture ID up to the camera for proof, and then you&amp;#039;re buzzed in. Inside, there&amp;#039;s a wide staircase and big couches for the women to sit on; there&amp;#039;s fresh coffee and soft rugs on the floor. Outside, there are protesters. Five or six people in lawn chairs, mostly older men who look quite at home. All that&amp;#039;s missing is a hibachi and their wives.  The doctor I was with kind of chuckled about them. He&amp;#039;d look out the window and say, &amp;quot;Oh, we got Bob here today&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Looks like Roger&amp;#039;s back.&amp;quot; The doctor didn&amp;#039;t wear a bulletproof vest or anything, though I noticed he parked his car way down the street instead of in front of the clinic. I had to walk past the protesters only once myself, and they didn&amp;#039;t say a thing to me--I&amp;#039;m not sure why. One of them waved a leaflet, but I ignored it. It was intimidating just to have them there. I remember thinking, Could I really do this every day? Aren&amp;#039;t these the kind of people who&amp;#039;d want to kill me?  The first woman having an abortion that day was a college student, a sophomore or so, blond and nervous and not very different from the person I used to be seven years ago. Right now, I&amp;#039;m in my fourth year of medical school, and next year I&amp;#039;ll start my residency in OB/GYN. In three and a half years of school, I have watched doctors replace heart valves and kidneys. I&amp;#039;ve seen ruptured aortic aneurysms and hemorrhaging livers and colons riddled with cancer. I&amp;#039;ve been bled on, vomited on, peed on. I&amp;#039;ve spent time with a six-year-old who&amp;#039;d attempted suicide, an emphysema patient trying to sneak out for a smoke, a car-crash victim whom I had to stitch up after he&amp;#039;d already died. I&amp;#039;ve seen uteruses come out and feet get amputated, and, once, I helped remove an infected tumor that was big and bloody and nearly the size of my head. Through all of this, though, in three and a half years of textbooks and hospital rounds, before that day last summer, I had never seen an abortion. This wasn&amp;#039;t my choice. It&amp;#039;s simply how it is. Abortion, despite being one of the most common surgical procedures among women in this country, is not talked about, not taught, not even debated in most medical schools. I could give you the statistics. I could explain that we have sixty million women of childbearing age in the U. S. and yet only about two thousand providers willing to do abortions; many of the practitioners are gray haired and ready to retire. I could note that nine out of ten OB/GYN residencies don&amp;#039;t require abortion training, and half of the chief residents in the field have never even performed one. I could recite some of the legislation Congress has passed to make abortions harder to come by. I could name the doctors who&amp;#039;ve been shot--Dr. Gunn, Dr. Britton, Dr. Slepian--or tell some of the stories I&amp;#039;ve heard about protesters loosening the lug nuts on doctors&amp;#039; car tires or taping up wanted signs with doctors&amp;#039; faces on them.  I could tell you that there are very good reasons to become a doctor who provides abortions and that there are more reasons to become a doctor who doesn&amp;#039;t.  That morning in the clinic, I hadn&amp;#039;t really decided yet which direction I was headed. This may sound funny, but I was excited to be there. I hoped that being there would help me make up my mind--not about abortion but about me and abortion, about what kind of doctor I&amp;#039;ll be. I&amp;#039;d signed up to spend a day at the clinic with this doctor, a gray-haired, soft-spoken man who leaves his private practice once a weekto come here, sometimes to perform fifteen or twenty abortions in a day. The women who arrive for their appointments do their paperwork before meeting with a counselor and seeing a short video on the procedure. Then they change into long nightshirts, putting their clothes in a little basket. They&amp;#039;re allowed to keep their underwear on until they get upstairs. Everything else goes in the basket, which they carry with them.  I felt nervous for the sophomore, or maybe I felt kind of sorry for her. She came into the procedure room, took off her underwear, and put it in her basket. She was emotional but acting brave. Her boyfriend was sitting down in the waiting room. Her parents, she said, didn&amp;#039;t know. The doctor listened to her heart and lungs. He asked me to size her uterus, to measure how far along in the pregnancy she was. She was at about eleven weeks. Had she been a week more pregnant, we would&amp;#039;ve had to turn her away and send her to the nearest hospital that does second-trimester abortions--a two-hour drive and another week&amp;#039;s wait for an appointment. Next, the doctor gave her two shots of lidocaine, a local anesthetic, one on either side of the cervix. Then he used dilators--long, thin surgical tools of increasing width--to coax open what&amp;#039;s called the cervical os, the doorway to the uterus.  There were five of us in the room: me, the doc, his technician, and one of the staff counselors, who was holding the patient&amp;#039;s hand and saying encouraging things. The patient was lying on the examining table, her feet in stirrups. The doctor sat at her feet with a tray of instruments on his lap, a bright lamp to his left, and, on the other side, the vacuum machine, a two-foot-by-two-foot box covered, not very discreetly, with a green surgical cloth.  They say the noise is the worst part, and I suppose that&amp;#039;s true. The doctor inserted the vacuum tube--called the cannula--and turned on the machine. First, it just hummed, and then the doctor lifted his thumb from a valve on the tube to start the suction. Have you ever had a dentist suction the saliva out of your mouth? The noise was like that--not loud, not particularly ugly, just . . . suction. And in thirty seconds, maybe forty-five, it was over. The machine was off, the cannula came out, the doctor did one last check with a curette--a tool used to scrape clean the uterine walls--and the sophomore started to breathe more deeply. It was time to inspect the products.  In medicine, they&amp;#039;re called the products of conception. They get evacuated into a large glass beaker, and the technician goes into a screened-off area in the procedure room and strains out the liquid, and then you have to look--to make sure it all came out. I went behind the screen with the doctor, and I looked down at the beaker. I don&amp;#039;t know what I expected from that moment, exactly, but here&amp;#039;s what I saw: a rib cage, an arm. Tiny things, just pieces, less than an inch long and transparent. A lot of pink floaty tissue, like the plants you put in a fishbowl. Was this life? To me, no.  I know I can&amp;#039;t convince anyone that what I believe is absolutely right and what they believe is absolutely wrong. But more than anything, I think of abortion as personal. That woman, the college girl--I couldn&amp;#039;t know anything of her life, her circumstances. I couldn&amp;#039;t say whether she was right to terminate her pregnancy. And neither could the protesters outside, nor could a bunch of congressmen.  I won&amp;#039;t say she was happy when it was over, but she did seem relieved and a bit tired. She was wrapped in warm blankets and led to the recovery room, where she could lie down, have a cup of tea and some cookies, visit with her boyfriend. She had been on the examining table less than ten minutes altogether. In another hour, she&amp;#039;d be allowed to put her clothes on and go--out the door and past the protesters and back to her own life.  Everything didn&amp;#039;t change for me, spending time in the clinic. But it did confirm what I guess I already knew: It seems cowardly to let fear stop me from acting on what I believe. In a few months, I will have a medical degree, and I will use it to help women have healthier reproductive lives. This includes providing abortions. I&amp;#039;ve decided I&amp;#039;d be wrong not to. But it scares me. A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with a classmate. I mentioned that I&amp;#039;d seen an abortion last summer, and he said, &amp;quot;Oh, are you into that?&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Into it? No.&amp;quot; But I told him I&amp;#039;d decided to make abortions part of my practice someday, and it came out that he&amp;#039;s on the antichoice side, and we argued for a long time. I found out, too, that one of my cousins is a protester. I can accept that about her, but will she accept that I may be the one pushing past her to get to the clinic door? I don&amp;#039;t know. It bothers me that my classmates and I can talk about every medical issue under the sun, but we seldom talk about abortion. It bothers me that when I go to learn the procedure during my residency next year, I&amp;#039;ll have to do it as an elective in my spare time--which is to say, in addition to the eighty-hour workweeks.  It bothers me that in making abortions a part of my practice, they could take it over. With so few abortion providers out there, that sometimes happens. You get labeled an abortion doctor, and people forget that you are an obstetrician, too. I want to deliver babies. I imagine it&amp;#039;ll be the best part of my job. Someday, I will need to sit my children down and explain all this to them. And I will also try to explain the risks of what I&amp;#039;ve chosen to do, why butyric acid and hit lists and snipers will probably always be, at least theoretically, a part of our lives. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a1621/esq0299-feb-corbett/>