“The patient lay on her back on the operating table, her ankles dangled in the air, gently held by a loop of cloth tied to high steel poles. At the tap of a button, the bed rose, bringing her womb up to working level, and the doctor lowered a clear plastic face mask, like an arc welder’s.
The doctor inserted his gloved right hand deeply into the patient’s vagina until only his thumb protruded.
”I am looking for a foot,” he said to the resident standing beside him. I stood directly behind them. He pulled out a foot, a bit longer than an inch.
”There is the foot,” he said. ”Now you pull the one leg and then you reach in and flex the other one like this.”
He re-inserted a single forefinger into the vagina and suddenly two legs, froglike, appeared. The skin was translucent, membranous. The feet quickly turned a dark purple. Within minutes, so did the legs. The doctor gripped each leg as if holding hedge clippers.
”Place each thumb on the buttocks,” he instructed. The pads of his thumbs and the fetus’s buttocks were perfect matches in size and shape. ”Then turn and twist like this.”
He pulled firmly. A back appeared, then with the flick of a forefinger, a small arm fell out and then another. The anesthesia had relaxed the natural paisley curl of the fetus into something linear and flaccid. A 10-inch homunculus, its head locked into the cervix, hung in full view, motionlessly toward the floor, its long tapered legs disturbingly elegant.
It happened quickly. The back of the fetus’s skull was punctured. There was a tiny spurt of blood into the stainless-steel waste can that sat on the floor beneath. A curette was inserted, a hose was attached and the deep rumble of the suction machinery near me kicked on.
Into a clear plastic jar at my feet there appeared instantaneously about a half-inch of pinkish fluid marked by tiny whitish-gray globules. On some animal level, deep in my own brain stem, I knew what it was and leapt back in fear.
The periphery of my vision went gray, and a minute later, when my equilibrium returned, I found myself standing amid an ancient medical ritual.”
…
The procedure is profoundly upsetting. The image of that limp suspended fetus has not left me. By the time I traveled back home — two days later — I had trouble holding my 8-month-old daughter…”
Hitt. “Who Will Do Abortions Here?” New York Times January 19, 1998
