“Mothers should not die in childbirth!” my father fervently said. In the 1950s, with his skillful help, a small woman with a large husband — common in multi-cultural America — was delivered of two children. Her next labor was a horror — a baby too big for her birth canal. Endless contractions brought forth not the child, but the threat of both their deaths.
At nine years old in his tiny home town, he was stunned by his most loving sister’s excruciating labor and death. Her baby died weeks after. He said, “Mama! I have to become a doctor!”
“Before you were born, I prayed you’d have intelligence,” she said. “Now I’ll ask God for courage.”
To save his patient’s life, he moved her from the Roman Catholic hospital where he was chief of staff to the city hospital. In the delivery room there, he destroyed a fetus that would have brought death to the mother of living children. He told this with tears on his face. Believing creation is bountifully filled with the new, he accepted that some things come to fruition, some don’t, and that we are not an endangered species. So trusted was he that, in 1984, the maternal health center was dedicated in his name.
My dad was not, however, an “abortion doctor” as the murdered Dr. George Tiller of Kansas is so cruelly called, inflaming both sides. When Dad’s youngest sister asked him to arrange an abortion for her because she’d become pregnant in her 40s and didn’t want another child, he said, “I can’t legally help you.” Her son was born. Soon after, her husband died of heart failure. Any thoughts that she’d been let down by her brother vanished.
Dr. Tiller and my dad were Lutheran, people with a religious mission predicated on moral grounds — saving lives of mothers, preventing children from being made orphans and providing care for babies. Dad told how, with the help of city firemen holding his feet, he had rescued a newborn from a privy’s pungent depths — that outhouse where an ashamed young girl with no maternity care, gave birth alone.
Groups opposing any abortion try to co-opt the issue by claiming the higher moral ground. Their lives are often unaffected by an unwavering stand as my dad’s life was affected. Is a pregnant person not considered a child of God, too? we ask. Luther urging believers to make brave decisions in life also said, “Hold faith more bravely.” That’s trust, a sacred gift.
Shakespeare wrote, “Consideration like an angel came...” Let us allow the angel of consideration to inspire us on both sides. You and I. It is time. Time to demand a nationwide discussion with the information and moral issues that pertain. To enable us to support mothers profoundly, their partners, the unborn and born babies, we need kindness, wisdom and facts.
Like other medical procedures, abortion requires the informed consideration of physicians like the American doctor slain in his church. By his action, this sick killer wounded our nation.
Americans must know right now that preventing some abortions is as cruel as binding a daughter’s feet in China (now forbidden), cutting away a girl’s clitoris in Africa, or stoning a woman to death in the Middle East Sometimes providing abortions is to assist the Divine. We must wait no longer to have the conversation, to extinguish flaming fury, cooling it to consideration and hope.
Barbara Beasley Murphy, educated at Jefferson, Roosevelt and Springfield High schools, is an author of children’s books, including “Ace Hits the Big Time,” a CBS Special and now in print by Sunstone Press. Her latest is “Life! How I Love You!” Museum NM Press.