When the lilacs start to bloom I always think of this life-altering experience I had in 1973 and wrote about in this article more than 20 years ago.
When Lilacs Bloomed
By Kathy Schriefer,
RN
(this article was
first published in Brio magazine in 1992)
The early morning sun was already warming the earth on that
lovely spring day in 1973. The
city of Rochester, NY was preparing for its annual Lilac Festival, and the
scent of hundreds of fragrant bushes filled the air. Birds chorused as background to my own humming as I walked
across the park to the hospital.
I bubbled with anticipation of the day; I was scheduled to
observe a Cesarean birth, and I smiled at the thought. A junior-year nursing student, I was
spending my first week on a hospital maternity floor. Although I had already witnessed several births that week,
the privilege of being present as a newborn drew its first breath left me
amazed and hungry for more.
Leaving the beauty of nature, I pushed open the door to the
hospital lobby. Here the sights,
sounds and smells were different.
The strong odor of antiseptic cleansers stung my nostrils. Highly waxed floor tiles beamed
brightly. A voice blared from a
loudspeaker, paging a doctor.
I was reminded that I was entering a battlefield, a place
where a fierce fight against death and disease was waged daily. Nowhere else, it seemed to me, was the
essence of life such a sacred trust.
I felt proud to be part of such a noble undertaking.
In the elevator, I stared down at my newly polished white
nursing shoes and took deep, slow breaths to calm my fluttery stomach. When the doors finally slid open, I
quickly checked in with my instructor then headed for the dressing area; I
didn’t want to miss one moment of this exciting experience.
In the dressing room I stuffed my uniform into a locker and
threw on a green cotton scrub dress.
Drawing another deep breath, I hurried to the scrub room. There I awkwardly tucked my hair into a
paper cap and thoroughly washed my hands.
Just as I was reaching for a sterile gown to cover my scrub dress, the
head nurse entered the room and explained that there’d been a change. The Cesarean delivery had been canceled. I tried hard not to let her see my
disappointment, but my shoulders sagged slightly.
“I’m sure you’re disappointed,” she observed, and then,
brightening, added, “but there’s an abortion that’s just beginning. You could watch that.”
Abortion? Somehow I had never considered the
possibility of viewing an abortion!
Since childhood I had attended church, and at an early age I committed
myself to living by the principles God had set for me. I thought of myself as morally opposed
to abortion in principle, but still something made it impossible for me to
regard abortion as wrong in every instance.
Surely, I reasoned, there must be isolated instances where
abortion is the best option.
Simple curiosity, as well as my desire to be considered open-minded, overcame
any doubts I had, and I hastily agreed to observe the procedure.
I paused briefly before the operating room door and squeezed
my eyes shut. Then, composing
myself, I slipped inside, where everything was in place and the procedure was
about to begin.
The lights, the smells, the neat rows of instruments—it was
all familiar. I reminded myself this
was a hospital operating room, not some back-alley ‘clinic’, and that there was
nothing sinister about it. This
was possibly the very same operating room where I would have stood to watch the
Cesarean birth.
From the foot of the operating table, I could see that the
mother was already under the influence of the general anesthetic. She was about my age, and I began to
fantasize about why she had decided on this abortion. Perhaps she’d been pressured by the father of the baby or by
her parents. Maybe she was
financially unable to care for a child, or perhaps it was just an inconvenient
time for a pregnancy.
The low murmuring of the anesthesiologist, the O.R. nurse,
and the physician interrupted my thoughts. I then focused on the procedure itself. Dilators of increasing diameter were
gradually inserted into the cervix, or neck, of the uterus until it was
stretched enough to insert the suction tube.
I watched with interest—it was all so clinical, so normal,
so much like other surgeries I’d previously observed. The medical personnel talked casually as they would during
any procedure. My clenched fingers
uncurled, and my rigid back muscles softened. I slowly relaxed and grew more comfortable.
The suction tube was connected to a bottle. Inside the bottle a gauze bag dangled,
waiting to catch the portions of tissue that would be sent to the lab for
routine examination after the procedure was completed.
When the suction machine was flipped on, its smooth whirring
brought a flow of blood down the tube.
Then I heard a soft “plop”, and the physician muttered an obscenity as
she realized that the gauze bag containing the tissue had somehow fallen into
the blood at the bottom of the suction bottle.
In what seemed to be only minutes the procedure was
completed, the suction tube was removed and the patient was ready to be wheeled
to the recovery room.
One final task remained—the physician had to retrieve the bag
of tissue from the suction bottle and have it sent to the pathology
department. To ease the task, the
physician and the O.R. nurse decided to dump the contents of the bottle into an
instrument tray.
As the physician’s gloved fingers poked through the blood, I
looked again at the young, unconscious woman and wondered how she’d feel when
she awoke. Relieved? Ashamed? Frightened?
My thoughts were interrupted by the physician. “Oooh, look,” she whispered, “I’ve
never seen one come out like this before.
Here, take a look.”
I stepped closer, and she extended her bloody, gloved
hand. Then I froze in horror as I
saw what was cradled in her palm:
a tiny body. This was not
the “blob of tissue” that I expected to see after such an efficient, clinical
procedure.
This was a fully formed, 12-week-old, decapitated
fetus. Two tiny arms with the
smallest fingers imaginable hung from thin shoulders. Two fragile legs dangled from the delicate torso. About 2 ½ to 3 inches in length, this
was a perfect miniature human body.
“I’m sure the head is here, too,” the O.R. nurse spoke in
animated tones, still examining the tangled contents of the gauze snare.
Sick waves of revulsion churned in my stomach, and I backed
toward the operating room door. I
knew, beyond any doubt, that I had witnessed the taking of a human life and
that there could be no possible justification for it.
When I reached the safety of the dressing room, I stepped
clumsily out of the scrub dress and fumbled with the buttons on my
uniform. I felt numb. Dry-eyed, I sat down on the wooden
bench and absently scuffed my feet together, noticing with interest that black lines
now marred the shine on my white shoes.
I’m not sure how many minutes passed before I mustered the
strength to get up and walk to the maternity floor. The cries of newborn babies assaulted my ears, shrill and
distorted. I stopped in front of
the Special Care Nursery and gazed at the incredibly tiny infants, several of
them barely four months older than the infant I’d just seen cradled in a bloody
hand. Thousands of dollars were
being spent to sustain their lives—why wasn’t the life of that other infant
just as important?
Eighteen years have passed since that spring day in
Rochester, and I still like to think of myself as an “open-minded” person. But I’m absolutely certain of
this—abortion involves the taking of human life. That small lifeless baby I gazed at, horrified, will never
celebrate a birthday, walk in the park, smell the flowers or hear the
birds. I’ve buried its memory for
too long, and now I’m haunted by the thought of millions of tiny bodies being
placed in specimen bottles and sent to pathology labs.
I’ve asked God to forgive me for remaining silent and to
give me the courage to speak. He
has, and in speaking I find a measure of peace. Now, at last, my tears flow freely, as I remember that day
long ago when life was young and lilacs bloomed.
