A Doctor's Grisly Experience with Abortion.(Reprint)

Editor's note: This letter first appeared in the July 23, 2003 edition of the Washington Times, and is reprinted with the permission of the author, Dr. Hanes Swingle.

According to the Washington Times, Senate Democrats are slowing progress of legislation banning partial-birth abortion ("Abortion bill faces conference setbacks" Nation, Monday). Both the House and Senate have overwhelmingly passed bills that ban this procedure, and President Bush has promised to sign such legislation. Here is my experience with this issue:

In 1976, I was a medical student on my first obstetrical-gynecological clinical rotation. In my second week on the gynecology service, I checked the operating room schedule and saw I was to assist with a hysterectomy/TAB. At the operating table, I learned that a hysterectomy/TAB was the surgical procedure where the pregnant uterus is removed. TAB stands for therapeutic abortion; the hysterectomy was for sterilization. I held the retractors as the professor methodically excised the gravid uterus.

I already had assisted on two other hysterectomies, one for endometrial cancer and the other for a benign tumor. I had been taught during those first two cases to "always open the uterus and examine the contents" before sending the specimen to pathology. So, after the professor removed the uterus, I asked him if he wanted me to open it, eager to show him I already knew standard procedure. He replied, "No, because the fetus might be alive and then we would be faced with an ethical dilemma."

A couple of weeks later, now on the obstetrical service, I retrieved a bag of IV fluid that the resident physician had requested. The IV fluids were to administer prostaglandin, a drug that simply induces the uterus to contract and expel. The patient made little eye contact with us. A few hours later, I saw the aborted fetus moving its legs and gasping in a bedpan, which was then covered with a drape.

Several years later, I had my only experience with a partial birth, or late term, abortion during my neonatology training.

One day, the obstetrical resident who was rotating through the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was excited that he was going to get to learn a new procedure, a type of abortion. This obstetrical resident explained to several of the pediatric residents and me that a woman in labor and delivery in her late third trimester had a fetus who was breech (a baby positioned buttocks, not head, first) and also was severely hydrocephalic.