This story is one in the Faithful Providers series published by Lauren Barbato in Conscience Magazine.
Cassing Hammond, MD, OB-GYN & Associate Professor of Obstetrics and GynecologyNorthwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Illinois.
One thing that unites us in the Unitarian Universalist church is the notion that religion is an awakening. It is a process, rather than a set of fixed beliefs. That’s how I would describe my journey to providing abortions: a process of my faith and work evolving together. Life experience converts you. There’s no more spiritual component of my life than practicing medicine, and that includes providing safe abortions to those in need.
If you had asked me during medical school, I couldn’t have given you a “bumper sticker” answer about my support for reproductive choice. Although I always supported a woman’s right to choose, I did not yet have real-life context related to abortion.
By the end of the first week of my OB-GYN clerkship, I knew reproductive health was my calling. As an OB-GYN, you can influence an entire lifetime of health by ensuring a successful pregnancy, by preventing an unintended pregnancy or by providing other types of healthcare women require.
When I began residency training in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Rochester, most residencies did not provide routine opportunities to perform abortions. At Rochester, we had the option to train in first- and second-trimester abortion. I couldn’t anticipate then how important this training would be.
One night during my residency, a 17-year-old girl came into the emergency room nearly bleeding to death. She was 17 weeks pregnant and hemorrhaging from a placental abruption. I didn’t know what to do.
Fortunately, I was on call with an attending physician who had experience in second-trimester abortion. Together, we were able to treat her and prevent her from undergoing more-invasive surgery. We saved her life—all because the attending physician knew how to successfully perform a second-trimester abortion.
After that night, I knew I needed to have this skill, too. More importantly, I understood that reproductive rights are not abstract political principles. Patient experience made the political principle behind abortion real to me.
Direct clinical experience continues to motivate me to provide abortions. In the early 1990s, I began working in private practice and continued seeing patients with medical complications that necessitate abortion: patients carrying fetuses with abnormalities, patients enduring early rupture of membranes, patients in danger of hemorrhaging and patients with life-threatening infection.
The more I treated patients and encountered these complicated issues, the more I realized that abortion was a profoundly important and personal part of patient care.
I also encountered patients expressing their spiritual beliefs. One of my first abortion patients worked for the local Catholic diocese. As I performed her procedure, she told me that she opposed abortion. I was struck by how she felt compelled to share her objection to abortion while she herself was undergoing an abortion.
Over the years, I’ve learned that this is a common experience among women who identify with a religion or belief system that morally objects to abortion. Religious and moral conflicts often lead women to feel worse about terminating a pregnancy. Their religious community does not offer spiritual support. A component of their life that has always provided comfort is no longer there for them.
Shouldn’t your religious faith provide you solace during a difficult time? Why does your religion instead make you feel frightened and uncomfortable about your life decisions?
One of the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism is respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. More than 50 percent of individuals in the world are women. I can’t imagine a religion or a nation that purports to respect women’s inherent dignity, yet restricts them from making one of the most important personal decisions they can make for themselves—whether to have a child.
Abortion is the one medical circumstance in which we expect women to let other people decide what’s best for them. In an ideal world, antichoice lawmakers, religious leaders and politicians would talk to my patients. They would sit down with the families of women who undergo abortion. They would experience what my patients and their families face. (Article continues below image.)
Direct clinical experience continues to motivate me to provide abortions. In the early 1990s, I began working in private practice and continued seeing patients with medical complications that necessitate abortion: patients carrying fetuses with abnormalities, patients enduring early rupture of membranes, patients in danger of hemorrhaging and patients with life-threatening infection.
The more I treated patients and encountered these complicated issues, the more I realized that abortion was a profoundly important and personal part of patient care.
I also encountered patients expressing their spiritual beliefs. One of my first abortion patients worked for the local Catholic diocese. As I performed her procedure, she told me that she opposed abortion. I was struck by how she felt compelled to share her objection to abortion while she herself was undergoing an abortion.
Over the years, I’ve learned that this is a common experience among women who identify with a religion or belief system that morally objects to abortion. Religious and moral conflicts often lead women to feel worse about terminating a pregnancy. Their religious community does not offer spiritual support. A component of their life that has always provided comfort is no longer there for them.
Shouldn’t your religious faith provide you solace during a difficult time? Why does your religion instead make you feel frightened and uncomfortable about your life decisions?
One of the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism is respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. More than 50 percent of individuals in the world are women. I can’t imagine a religion or a nation that purports to respect women’s inherent dignity, yet restricts them from making one of the most important personal decisions they can make for themselves—whether to have a child.
Abortion is the one medical circumstance in which we expect women to let other people decide what’s best for them. In an ideal world, antichoice lawmakers, religious leaders and politicians would talk to my patients. They would sit down with the families of women who undergo abortion. They would experience what my patients and their families face. (Article continues below image.)
Direct clinical experience continues to motivate me to provide abortions. In the early 1990s, I began working in private practice and continued seeing patients with medical complications that necessitate abortion: patients carrying fetuses with abnormalities, patients enduring early rupture of membranes, patients in danger of hemorrhaging and patients with life-threatening infection.
The more I treated patients and encountered these complicated issues, the more I realized that abortion was a profoundly important and personal part of patient care.
I also encountered patients expressing their spiritual beliefs. One of my first abortion patients worked for the local Catholic diocese. As I performed her procedure, she told me that she opposed abortion. I was struck by how she felt compelled to share her objection to abortion while she herself was undergoing an abortion.
Over the years, I’ve learned that this is a common experience among women who identify with a religion or belief system that morally objects to abortion. Religious and moral conflicts often lead women to feel worse about terminating a pregnancy. Their religious community does not offer spiritual support. A component of their life that has always provided comfort is no longer there for them.
Shouldn’t your religious faith provide you solace during a difficult time? Why does your religion instead make you feel frightened and uncomfortable about your life decisions?
One of the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism is respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. More than 50 percent of individuals in the world are women. I can’t imagine a religion or a nation that purports to respect women’s inherent dignity, yet restricts them from making one of the most important personal decisions they can make for themselves—whether to have a child.
Abortion is the one medical circumstance in which we expect women to let other people decide what’s best for them. In an ideal world, antichoice lawmakers, religious leaders and politicians would talk to my patients. They would sit down with the families of women who undergo abortion. They would experience what my patients and their families face. (Article continues below image.)
Direct clinical experience continues to motivate me to provide abortions. In the early 1990s, I began working in private practice and continued seeing patients with medical complications that necessitate abortion: patients carrying fetuses with abnormalities, patients enduring early rupture of membranes, patients in danger of hemorrhaging and patients with life-threatening infection.
The more I treated patients and encountered these complicated issues, the more I realized that abortion was a profoundly important and personal part of patient care.
I also encountered patients expressing their spiritual beliefs. One of my first abortion patients worked for the local Catholic diocese. As I performed her procedure, she told me that she opposed abortion. I was struck by how she felt compelled to share her objection to abortion while she herself was undergoing an abortion.
Over the years, I’ve learned that this is a common experience among women who identify with a religion or belief system that morally objects to abortion. Religious and moral conflicts often lead women to feel worse about terminating a pregnancy. Their religious community does not offer spiritual support. A component of their life that has always provided comfort is no longer there for them.
Shouldn’t your religious faith provide you solace during a difficult time? Why does your religion instead make you feel frightened and uncomfortable about your life decisions?
One of the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism is respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. More than 50 percent of individuals in the world are women. I can’t imagine a religion or a nation that purports to respect women’s inherent dignity, yet restricts them from making one of the most important personal decisions they can make for themselves—whether to have a child.
Abortion is the one medical circumstance in which we expect women to let other people decide what’s best for them. In an ideal world, antichoice lawmakers, religious leaders and politicians would talk to my patients. They would sit down with the families of women who undergo abortion. They would experience what my patients and their families face. (Article continues below image.)
Only then could they understand what happens when you expose women to the risks of continuing a pregnancy when they do not want to carry the pregnancy to term, or when it would harm their physical or mental health to do so. We downplay the risk of pregnancy, but a woman is often safer if she terminates a pregnancy than if she continues it. That does not mean that ending a pregnancy is always the right decision. However, government or spiritual leaders should never mandate these choices for women or force a woman to put her own life or well-being at risk.
My students at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine know this. Prospective residents ask me: “Do you have abortion training in this program? I only want to go to a program that has abortion training.” Unlike my residency days, there is now a more organized approach to abortion training.
Current residents learn various types of abortion procedures, unless they specifically opt out. This helps prevent what happened that night I was on call 30 years ago when, by chance, one of the few attending physicians able to provide a second-trimester abortion happened to be on call with me and helped saved a patient’s life.
Because it respects the inherent worth and dignity of women, providing abortion is a spiritual and moral act. It respects a woman’s dignity and helps her regain control of her life. I am proud to provide abortions. I am also proud that my own Unitarian Universalist congregation regularly donates its Sunday collection to Planned Parenthood and other groups that ensure reproductive rights. I hope other congregations might consider doing the same.