The lessons a formerly pro-choice nursing instructor can teach us all
By Dave Andrusko
I hope you are one of the thousands of people who read NRLC’s Facebook page. It is a deep reservoir of very interesting and very informative pro-life news.
If you’re not, click on www.facebook.com/nationalrighttolife and be prepared to learn and to be inspired.
A woman was kind enough to forward to NRLC’s Facebook page a link to a post titled, “How a Formerly Pro-Choice Nursing Instructor Discusses Abortion with her Students.” Written by Cynthia Isabell, it is a long post, but very, very much worth reading.
With that encouragement in mind, let me offer an overview.
Since 1980, Cynthia has been a labor and delivery nurse who also worked in a hospice. “Being a nurse,” she writes, “has allowed me to be present with people through their early beginnings of intrauterine life, and with others through their last breaths. It has been an amazing and rewarding journey. Life is precious and life is fleeting, and life should be respected. I am pro-life.”
The first half of the post is an exceptionally thoughtful point-by-point explanation of how Cynthia skillfully addresses abortion with her nursing students. She addresses the stereotype that opposition to abortion must be/can only be based on religious faith.
In fact her current position on abortion relies, she tells her readers, on her “understanding of human biology and embryology as well as my own experiences with abortion and thousands of pregnant patients which have shaped my current position on abortion.”
The post is fascinating on many levels, one of which we learn early on and developed later: she has not always been pro-life. She assisted in so-called “therapeutic abortions” until being around this kind of deliberately- induced death proved to be too much.
Perhaps the most powerful section details how she had persuaded herself to take part in an abortion–“I believed that it was acceptable because I was not actually performing the abortion and I was only taking care of the mother while the physician performed the abortion”– and how the brutality of abortion gradually removed the scales from her eyes.
However Cynthia “continued to care for the women who were having medical, ‘therapeutic’ abortions.”
With these abortions, the labor is induced and the woman delivers an intact baby which will then slowly die by suffocation. We wrap the baby in a blanket and the parents often want to hold the baby they are killing and bond with it while it slowly suffocates, believing the lie they were told that the baby is not suffering. There was one that was performed for what were dubious reasons, but the patient and her family were adamant that it needed to be done. I arrived to work after the baby had already been born and had died. I was supposed to take the baby to wrap it to go to the morgue, but I took the baby to another room and held it while I cried. I never helped with another abortion after that.
Her post ends on the reassuring note that all of us–not just nursing instructors or writers or anyone else who has a lot of experience communicating–can and should tell the pro-life story in their circles.
Cynthia writes, “We can combat the abortion industry through education, through conversation with our friends and coworkers.” We may not realize it, but “Our friends and family members and coworkers are listening, so it’s time we start offering a different message than the one that the media bombards them with.”
Amen to that.
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