I am a Catholic, baptized, confirmed, and Jesuit-educated with all the pro-life ideologies that one would expect. But despite all the homilies, ethics classes, and debates I’ve had on the issue of abortion, none have affected me as what I saw some weeks ago. I grappled for some time with whether to write about this, but the images have been seared into my mind and I feel compelled to share my story.

As part of my experiences this summer, I had the privilege of viewing hundreds of procedures preformed in the operating rooms of various hospitals. In one particular instance, my regular service had finished their procedure early so a resident friend I had made in the OB/GYN service invited me to view a second trimester abortion. I have seen amputations, severe burns, gunshot wounds, and limbs stripped down to the bone and ligament on the trauma service, I was largely unfazed by most of it, but none of that prepared me for this.

The Procedure

In what they explained to me was a Dilation and Extraction , a surgical procedure for second trimester abortions, the women was put under general anesthesia. Then, pieces of the fetus were cut, torn from the torso, and pulled out through a dilated cervix. Now I say fetus because that is the scientifically correct term, but I can attest that they were unequivocally human. Legs, arms, body, head, and any remaining tissue were cut, scraped, pulled, and suctioned out for about half an hour. The pieces of the fetus were then put in a red biohazard bag and thrown into the same red biohazard trash can as the bloodied gauze pads. The women was then woken up and sent home. After the procedure was finished I asked my the resident how many of these she sees and she told me it was relatively ‘rare’, with only about 150,000 in the U.S. a year.

As I walked out of the OR I was in a daze, what had I just seen? I was angry, I was confused, I was frustrated. That deep-set feeling when one sees injustice, wrong, and evil, was unmistakable.

I am not in the field of politics, law, women’s rights, or religion, so I will refrain from commenting in those regards, but I do have experience in the field of science and medicine. A founding principle of both of those fields is a simple one, “Primum non nocere”- first, do no harm. It is hard as an aspiring man of science and medicine to reconcile that principle with what I saw. Perhaps more importantly, it is hard as a human being to reconcile my humanity with what I saw.