Abortion and Hypocracy

I almost thought this article was real until I read it more closely. Being on the sarcasmist site I should have known better.

You see I knew a doctor like that.

The last job I had before deciding to punt general practice generates a lot of stories that are funnier than they were then. I have posted a couple.

I worked in practice with two other doctors. One was a young charlatan, the other was an older very religious doctor who had done missionary work for about 20 years before settling in this town. He was very active in the local Pentacostal church and by extension in the Pro-Life movement. This meant we had pictures of aborted babies in our waiting room and if I wanted to refer a patient for an abortion, it meant I had to do it secretively, usually making the phone calls from my home. I needn't have bothered apparently.

One of the GPs from the other clinic who also did anaesthesia told me an interesting story about my partner. Our hospital didn't do abortions but we also didn't send our surgical specimens for pathology. My partner it turned out had done lots of D+Cs for "menstrual irregularity". This meant he did a lot of young women. One day my GP anaesthesia colleague looked at slate, talked to a few of the patients figured out what was going on and confronted my partner.

Now at that time abortions were legal in Canada but were regulated. Abortions could only be done in an accredited hospital and they had to be approved by a committee of doctors. This made access to abortion anywhere from a rubber stamp to only in extreme cases depending on the make-up of the medical staff and the hospital administration. Our hospital which was non accredited did not have an abortion committee. (Actually the administrator told me he had intentionally not gone thru the accreditation route precisely so the whole issue of abortion wouldn't raise its ugly head).

Now of course when confronted my partner responded in his usually self righteous bullying fashion which I later came to experience but the other doctor stood firm and pointed that aside from the medical implications, my partner was actually breaking the law.

And from then on women with "menstrual irregularity" had to go to the next town over.