OB/GYN Dr. Lori Buzzett describes how she went from pro-choice to pro-life:
Hi, I’m Dr. Lori Buzzett. And I’m an obstetrician gynecologist. I believed that the government shouldn’t have a say in what a woman did with her pregnancy. I felt that abortion shouldn’t be used as a form of contraception, but there were certain circumstances where I felt that it was acceptable for a woman to undergo an elective termination.
I began my training at a university based OBGYN residency program. In our training, we were actually required to go through the procedure and how to learn to do an elective termination.
My mentor showed me how to do the first abortion and then he had me take his seat and he walked me through the steps of the termination. And at the end, I just remember feeling very nauseated. As I left, I ran into one of the staff and he told me how proud he was that I had participated in that activity. And I don’t remember what I said to him, but I just remember thinking that is nothing to be proud of.
I knew that I would never do an elective termination, but I still held my pro-choice views at that time.
After I completed my residency, I entered into private practice and soon after that, my husband and I were expecting our first child. We were very excited. And because I had an opportunity as an OB to have an ultrasound early on, we were able to see our baby’s heartbeat.
I found myself lying on the ultrasound table, looking at a screen where our baby’s heart lay motionless. I left myself a little bit of time to cry, but then quickly collected myself and decided upon learning of our baby’s demise that I would spontaneously miscarry. I felt very responsible that I had lost the baby.
I shoved those feelings down, eventually miscarried, and soon buried myself back into my busy schedule of call and deliveries and surgeries. Because after all, once a woman experienced an early pregnancy loss, everything went back to normal, right?
The next six months [it] became more and more difficult for me to go to work. I finally confided my feelings with a close friend of mine, and she told me that I was grieving the loss of our child. I hadn’t let myself recognize my grief because of the following thought: if life didn’t begin until a baby could sustain itself outside of the womb, why was I in so much pain?
So, my pro-choice stance started to crack. As I continued on in my practice, I was given a new set of eyes with these revelations, and I began seeing the brokenness that these terminations were causing, and it has just made me realize that as obstetricians, we need to stop being complacent and allowing these babies to be disregarded.
When we completed our medical training, we took an oath to do no harm. And in what I’ve seen, there are two of our patients that are suffering when we allow elective terminations. It’s time for us to really take a hard look at what our profession is doing. And advocate for our patients’ health and well-being.
I would invite you to join me as we hold out our hands to help the most vulnerable in our society, our unborn children.
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