When Emma Green announced she was leaving the religion beat at The Atlantic to cover cultural conflicts in academia for the New Yorker, many of us hoped that she could squeeze a bit of religion reporting into the mix.
I’ve got to say this about her first piece for the latter: One cannot accuse her of dodging controversy. This is the story of a pro-life obstetrics student in an occupation that is formidably bent in the other direction and what it’s like to get consistently slammed by one’s professional peers.
Green had no sooner posted the story on Twitter than a cascade of hateful responses sprung up.
In the past there have been many stories in the mainstream media about what aspiring pro-abortion-rights ob-gyns go through in terms of training — but this is the first one I’ve seen in a major publication about what the abortion opponents go through.
After introducing Cara Buskmiller as a millennial Catholic woman desiring to become an ob-gyn, the story continues:
But in 2010, as Buskmiller prepared to apply to medical school, she worried that admissions committees would be skeptical of her beliefs, and how her personal objections to abortion and birth control would affect her practice as an ob-gyn. What would program directors think of the volunteer stints she’d done at a crisis pregnancy center? And, when it came time for residency, would she be able to duck out of certain clinical rotations to avoid assisting with abortions?
Buskmiller got into medical school at Texas A. & M., and she went on to do her residency at St. Louis University, a Catholic school. But she felt that students like her needed more backup. So, during her second year as a resident, she launched a Web site called Conscience in Residency, a support network for doctors-in-training who have moral objections to abortion. The site’s tagline is “You’re not crazy, and you’re not alone.”
It feels that way to people like Buskmiller whose faith forbids them from taking part in abortions, sterilizations and dispensing with contraceptives.
The hatred shown toward such young professionals is almost pathological. There’s no middle ground here.
If you look up her personal website, you’ll also find one surprising addition: Provision for pediatric residents who object to performing circumcisions on male infants.
Conscience seems to cover a wide range of issues.
Even in an era when Roe v. Wade looks likely to be overturned, residents who describe themselves as pro-life are countercultural within their field. They believe that fetuses are human persons with moral status; when Buskmiller encounters a woman in even the earliest stages of pregnancy, she sees two patients, not one. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or acog, on the other hand, firmly maintains that abortion is a form of health care and supports the right of a patient to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability.
As I made my way through the story, I felt a lot of ink was devoted to why Buskmiller could be wrong, with plenty of abortion advocates were given space in which to talk.
This story was way kinder to the opposing point of view than its opposite would have been, if the tables were turned. That is, the pro-life resident was forced to admit the validity of abortion in certain cases; a mirror image article about a pro-choice resident would have never given credence to the pro-life view.
I’m glad the article noted the central role of billionaire Warren Buffett and his late wife, Susan, in abortion funding. We’re talking some $5 billion poured into abortion advocacy, think tanks; what some call the “abortion-industrial complex.”
Had this been a conservative effort, the media would have been all over it years ago but because it has to do with funding by the Left, few people -– unless you read Philanthropy Roundtable — know about the river of abortion funding from the Buffetts’ largesse.
The story has some excruciating details about what it’s like to buck this tide. After introducing Ashley Womack, another Texas Catholic ob-gyn student, the story goes on:
Soon after Womack started her residency, the program requirements changed: family-planning rotations at Planned Parenthood became mandatory. Womack knew a couple of residents whose requests not to go had been declined. So, uneasy, she showed up for her first day. The experience was upsetting: in her view, the medical staff didn’t fully counsel patients on options other than abortion. When Womack made it clear that she wasn’t going to assist with performing abortions, she was sent to the recovery room to clean chairs and hand out crackers.
During my reporting, several sources suggested that aspiring obstetricians who object to abortion should find another line of work. …
I was disappointed at how the story ended, with the pro-life students admitting how messy life can be and how the pro-choicers had a lot of good points in their favor. There was one person quoted -– an obstetrics professor –- who admitted that the abortion she performed on a woman in her 18th week of pregnancy (that’s second trimester by the way) killed a human being, but that point got lost in the rest of the text. And that anecdote was outweighed by other paragraphs slanted toward the necessity of abortion in hard situations.
I would have liked to have seen more pro-life students from other religions quoted -– such as Protestants, conservative Jews, Muslims -– to show the breadth of distaste at being made to learn how to do abortions.
Non-Catholics have a different read on birth control and there are ob-gyns who oppose abortion but who are OK with sterilization and IUDs. That population should have been mentioned in this piece, if for no other reason to explain to the Twitter mobs the range of opinion with these doctors.
Since so many pro-choice practitioners were mentioned, I am curious why someone the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists wasn’t quoted. Here you have a whole group of people who had to navigate their way through hostile residencies.
That said, it was radical for the New Yorker to cover this point of view at all. At the end of the piece, cast a glance at links on related topics and all of them are pro-abortion rights. And if you don’t think there’s a lot of hate out there toward abortion opponents, read the Twitter comments.
We know the Twitter universe is largely inhabited by the secular Left; mainly well-paid guys in their 20s and 30s, and the vicious replies to Green’s tweet shows it.
Obviously I hope she ignores the rancor, which shows the ire of people not used to hearing a different point of view in the pages of the New Yorker. As she plumbs other cultural divides, these folks had better get used to hearing different voices and that Green pushes ahead with her ability to showcase them. It’s called journalism.
FIRST IMAGE: Screen shot of logo from conscienceinresidency.com.