Prayer works

"Over the course of the next few months, I began spending some time with a young Christian woman, and I began reading the New Testament. Strangely enough, though I had no intellectual arguments against abortion, I found it more and more difficult to perform the abortion procedures at the clinic. What made it difficult was having to identify the body parts after the suction D & C. My training in suction abortions entailed confirming that the procedure was complete. I would take the cotton trap out of the suction machine at the end of the procedure, go to a sink and pick through the tissue with a forceps. I would have to identify four extremities, plus a spine, a skull, and the placenta. If anything was missing, I would again scrape and suction until I found it, lest my patients return in 48 to 72 hours with an infected, incomplete abortion, just like the women I'd cared for at Cook County Hospital. Somehow, my new relationship with the Light of the world allowed me to really see the humanity of the little bodies I was looking at, and my stomach for performing the procedure was gone.

I continued overseeing the work at the abortion clinic for another year and a half, training other physicians to do the actual abortions. In 1978, three years after opening the facility, I had the grace to resign from the abortuary and join the Protestant church I was attending.

At that point I was personally anti-abortion, but was not supportive of the prolife philosophy or movement. Two years later I was invited to an organizational meeting of Jackson Right to Life with a group of other Christian physicians. There I was challenged in three ways: (1) look at the biblical arguments for the sanctity of human life, (2) begin working in the prolife movement, and (3) consider the abortifacient nature of the IUD (intrauterine device). This last challenge came from a family practice physician, and I remember blushing at having to be reminded of how the device worked — me, the specialist! For several weeks my conscience struggled with the nature of the IUD, but in the end I bit the bullet and announced to my office that I would no longer be inserting IUDs. In many ways this was harder to do than announcing I was giving up abortions. I was afraid I would appear to be some religious kook and that my practice would dry up. No such thing happened, but a pattern of God's dealings with me began to emerge.

First would come a challenge to my worldly mentality, then a struggle in my conscience followed by eventual obedience, and finally reassurance that my practice would continue to prosper."

Follow her story here.

61 abortionists or clinic staff have quit their jobs because of a 40DFL campaign. Pray that those preparing to unleash the tragedy of abortion at 1625 Opdyke will experience the kind of conversion described here, that they will respond to Christ calling them away from sin and death.