A family doctor in a modern Canadian city helps people out of all sorts of scrapes but few of those are immediately life threatening. Rarely can the doctor slump into his or her armchair at the end of the day after a direct involvement in truly life-saving care. When I worked in emergency rooms early in my career, death was near and had to be cheated daily, but general practice is made of quieter stuff. Quieter and less desperate, that is, until an unhappily pregnant woman arrives and suddenly, in my head and my heart, the klaxons sound and the alarm bells ring for this woman and her baby, whose life hangs by a thread.

The abortion-on-demand system stands ready and waiting. In the thousands, children are torn away and women deposited on the sidewalk with a few new statistical probabilities:
a. an all-cause mortality rate for the next year over 3 times higher than if she had kept her baby
b. a suicide risk over the next year 6 times higher than if she had kept the baby
c. a lifetime breast cancer risk at least 2 times higher than if she
had kept the baby
d. a 60% higher risk of dangerous premature delivery in a future pregnancy than if she had kept the baby
e. a 100% guarantee that she has forever lost her baby. And this, obvious as it is, will in time be the deepest wound for many.

Knowing this, and knowing what will happen to this distressed mother and her imperiled child if they fall into the wrong hands, I try to listen very carefully and to understand the woman’s world as she is living through it.

I think of one new immigrant, with a small child at home, who could not imagine coping with another and whose nausea was clouding every day of her early pregnancy. Without much hope myself, I urged her to take a safe anti-nausea drug, to have hope for her son’s new brother or sister, and to have confidence in her strength to carry on. After an absence of several anxious weeks, she returned with many misgivings and I had the pleasure of seeing her through an eventually happier pregnancy and a happy birth.

I had forgotten about these patients some months later when, with her one-year-old daughter in her arms, this woman reappeared. Into my hand she pressed repayment of the small and long-forgotten loan with which she had purchased the anti-nausea drug - she had found a good job - and tears welled in her eyes as she looked down at her daughter and thanked me for not sending her for an abortion. There are few moments in my career for which I am more grateful.

Another young woman came to me with laminaria protruding from her cervix, the prelude to an abortion scheduled for the next day. Gently removing the laminaria, I prescribed antibiotics and we watched and waited through the next few weeks. All went well, and a healthy baby emerged 5 months later.

The rhetoric of “choice” is the one-note-samba of the abortion crowd, and I used to naively think they all really meant it until I met the 19-year-old who told me how she had climbed off the abortionist’s exam table in sudden doubt about going through with the procedure. “If you won’t do it today I won’t reschedule you!” he threatened, clearly annoyed at the disruption to his workflow (and income?). More words of admonishment followed. Happily, the bullying only served to strengthen my patient’s doubts and her son is a fine young fellow now with several younger brothers and sisters.

I would love my colleagues to know the deep satisfaction of offering a clinic to patients where their unborn baby will be safe, despite the abortion storm that rages outside. Abortion is bad for women, is fatal for their children, and was only these scant last few decades adorned by the medical profession with an unearned and unwise toleration. It is my profession’s biggest mistake bar none.

I have found that patients who cannot be supported enough to carry on with their pregnancies respect what I clearly explain my position to be, and return to me after their abortion, sometimes to share their anguish and regret, but always knowing that I still care for them. I lost track of one pregnant patient until, several months after an abortion, she finally returned to me and told me about her unhappy experience. She said: “After the abortion they asked who my doctor was, and when I gave your name, they said that I shouldn’t come back to you because you wouldn’t treat me very well when you heard about my abortion. So they sent me to another doctor, but I came back because you are my doctor.”

Just as physicians have no professional obligation to amputate healthy limbs, we have no compelling duty to do abortions or refer for abortions. The simple fact is that the best medicine we can offer is steady support through the trying times of pregnancy and a steadfast rejection of the abortion trap. Hold to these principles, and as physician, friend, or family you will be amply rewarded by the joy which will finally follow.

Dr. Will Johnston is a Vancouver family physician and president of Canadian Physicians for Life, www.physiciansforlife.ca

This article originally appeared in CAPSS Connection, national newsletter of the Christian Association of Pregnancy Support Services (www.capss.com) and is reprinted here with permission of Canadian Physicians for Life.