June 28, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – An abortion provider has penned an op-ed for the New York Times that endeavors to justify abortion with the argument that coherence exists between becoming a mother and ending the lives of other mothers’ children in one’s work.
Against the “it’s a tough job but someone has to do it” backdrop, Christine Henneberg flirts with guilt over being an abortionist on the way to floating the idea that while becoming a mother demonstrates the veracity of life in the womb, the job of aborting children is in accord with motherhood and still must be done.
“How do I continue to do this work?” Henneberg asks.
“The answer is that there is a connection between my work as an abortion doctor and my work as a mother,” she says, “it’s just not what most people imagine. It’s not a tension or a contradiction to be reconciled. It’s a symbiosis, a harmony.”
The abortionist shares that she thought she was good at keeping boundaries and compartmentalizing, as a doctor should, until she encountered motherhood.
“As a doctor, I can draw a distinction, a boundary, between a fetus and a baby,” Henneberg states. “When I became a mother, I learned that there are no boundaries, really. The moment you become a mother, the moment another heartbeat flickers inside of you, all boundaries fall away.”
“Nevertheless, as mothers, we must all make choices,” she says. “And we must live with the choices that aren’t ours to make. We can try to compartmentalize. We can try to keep things tidy and acceptable.”
She goes on to say that everything is messy, whether the work of an abortionist, a mother, “and the love of each one of us for our children.”
“And yet somebody has to do the work,” Henneberg says.
She recounts how she was nervous at first about what her clients would think or say when she started showing in her pregnancy.
“But they always expressed genuine happiness for me, even in the midst of their own difficulties,” she says, offering anecdotes of expressed support, from a mother of three about to abort, along with a 19-year-old woman in for her first abortion, who smiled at Henneberg through tears, saying, “It’s your time.”
17-week-old baby she aborted ‘came through the cervix intact’
When Henneberg and her husband were trying to conceive a child and were unsuccessful after three months, she broke down, she says, telling her spouse she was worried about “bad karma,” that she was the abortionist who couldn’t get pregnant.
But Henneberg says this demonstrated only that she didn’t have as good a grasp of boundaries as she thought, dismissing the idea of penalty for committing abortions.
“At the time, the fact that I would even consider such an idea — as though I deserved some type of punishment for the work I do — should have told me that my boundaries weren’t as neat and tidy as I thought,” she says.
The single instance when she almost fell apart was when “performing a 17-week procedure” on a mother while she was in her second trimester of pregnancy.
“The fetus, which is normally extracted in parts, came through the cervix intact,” Henneberg recalls. “I dropped it in the metal dish and I saw it move, or thought I did. It was all I could do not to run from the procedure room crying.”
‘There is the fetus in the dish, the perfect curl of its fingers and toes’
But the hardest moment in the quandary of ending life vs. producing and fostering life wasn’t that one time she came close to falling apart while aborting someone’s child, or worrying over what her abortion clients would think once her pregnancy began showing, she says.
It was when the proverbial “anti-abortion protester” berated her in the abortion facility parking lot after seeing the baby stroller in her car. She recalled holding back tears as the protester noted the paradox the stroller represented, while calling her a baby killer and telling her to repent.
“I do not mean it’s an easy job,” she says. “Of course it’s not.”
“There is the protester on the sidewalk,” says Henneberg. “There is the fetus in the dish, the perfect curl of its fingers and toes.”
“Sometimes it reminds me of my daughter,” she continues. “How could it not? But that is precisely the point.”
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