Magda Denes, who observed at an abortion clinic and wrote a book about it, on how she became hardened to the abortions and the death of the babies:
“Sensibility is blunted through exposure. After weeks of trailing Holzman from from OR 1 to OR 2, my sense of meaning dulls. I begin to see “cases,” “cervical apertures,” “fetal tissue.”… I worry about snags in tempo during operations, but no differently from the way I worry about an unfamiliar noise in the motor of my car. One time the circulating nurse loses her wedding ring during surgery. She discovers the loss at the end of the operation as the orderly is about the fold the bloodied sheets on the floor. She takes the filled plastic bag from the wastebasket and empties it into the middle of the sheets. Both kneel and with their bare hands rummage frantically in the pile of placental tissue and blood and
chopped up fetal body parts. “It has to be here,” she says nearly in tears. “We’ll find it,” he reassures her. I am all for them. Is frightful to lose one’s wedding ring.… Hours later, when the scene reasserts itself in my mind, I do not recognize myself. Is inhumanity a habit? Is indifference the result of the attrition of meaning? If so, one must watch the self like an enemy.”
Magda Denes, PhD. In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital (New York: Basic Books inc 1976) 239 to 240
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