Friday, February 27, 2009

Doctors don't like abortion

There was a time when abortionists were considered the lowest form of bottom-feeding life in the medical world. Physicians knew that what these people did was horrifying and evil and they did whatever they could to stop the practice, if for no other reason than that it brought the entire medical profession into disrepute.

Despite the deadening moral effects of our horrible times, it is still clear that abortion is not popular among physicians.

Dr. Jeffrey Nisker is one of the few secular IVF specialists and ethicists that I have any respect for. He has more than a glimmering of conscience and thinks deeply, as deeply as his post-modern intellectual blockages will allow, about this stuff. He comes to the wrong conclusions, but they are not always completely wildly wrong. Sometimes they're close to the truth that

"you can't kill people to solve your problems", even if those people are very small.

So we went into pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, whereas we were hoping to have been able to avoid the trauma of a mid-trimester genetic abortion. This is the worst procedure in medicine. It is something that certainly, when I witnessed it as a trainee, sent me to the bathroom. The nausea was overwhelming, seeing the suffering these women went through. Often the babies were born alive at 20 weeks. This is clearly something that is a horrible procedure for Canadian women and something that we should have improved upon.

So we became one of the world's leaders in the science and investigation, using a mouse model as a way that we could test an embryo at the eight-cell stage, so women who are carrying a severe genetic disease—for example, Tay-Sachs syndrome, where the child is born without cognition and dies within a year of life—would have the amniocentesis halfway through their pregnancy and basically have what is called a genetic abortion halfway through their pregnancy. The child would sometimes be born alive. It was horrible.

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