Abortion and doctors

Re “They feel they have no choice,” Column One, May 22

Why is it that only 1,800 of the nation’s 800,000 physicians have traded the healing arts for terminating the lives of unborn children? Abortion violates every human instinct. For doctors, abortion also contradicts the professional oath that has marked medicine since the 4th century BC, when Hippocratic physicians began reassuring their patients, “I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy.”

Most physicians who view a sonogram displaying the movements of the unborn child will experience an instinctive urge to protect that young person. To suppress that vital instinct is to sacrifice an essential part of our own humanity. The first step in restoring that loss is to follow the ancient physicians in resolving to “first, do no harm.” The next step is to welcome every new life into the world as if it were our own. Our lives and the lives of our unborn children are inseparable.

JONATHAN IMBODY

Washington

The writer is vice president for government relations at the Christian Medical Assn.

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I applaud the courage of medical student Megan Lederer in deciding to perform abortions because she wants to help women. Performing abortions is not emotionally easy, and the harassment and even murder by the “right to life” crowd make it worse. The medical profession is so terrorized that its frightened abandonment of this medical procedure threatens its availability. A Supreme Court decision upholds a federal ban on late-term abortions that threatens doctors with a two-year prison sentence. If the medical profession would stand up to these irrationalists, sanity would eventually return.

The only outcome will be the return of the back-alley abortionist but for a handful of brave medical students. The defiance of students like Lederer is an inspiration to all those who still think that a doctor has a duty to his patient and that medically safe abortion is the only sane policy.

GERI A. MELLGREN-KERWIN

Burbank

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Could it be that ultrasound technology makes it clear that the unborn child is indeed a baby and that abortion kills this baby? Could it be that more medical students are recognizing this and simply refusing to have anything to do with abortion? If longtime abortionist Warren Hern finds it “difficult” to do abortions, it makes one wonder why any aspiring doctor would want to take part in dismembering an unborn child.

NOEL D’ANGELO

Thousand Oaks