The Abortionist

            Whenever the pains got too strong, we'd hit her with more morphine and close the door so her yells wouldn't wake women on the ward sleeping off their Cesareans.

            I forgot about her until one of the nurses caught my arm.

            "She just broke her membranes," the nurse told me.

            We went in.  The room was dim.  She was lying back, her body limp, eyes empty.  Her legs were splayed out, tangled in the sheets.  From the curtain by the door I could see tiny feet poking through the dusky clots under her mons.

            "Put her up," I told the nurse.  I didn't say anything to the woman.  I was too tired and she was too zoned for us to bother with courtesies.

            In the exam room, the nurse already had the fetus in a bucket.  The kid was a girl, maybe eight inches long, limp, purple, and bruised.  I wrapped my fingers around the length of cord still between the mother's legs, an umbilical cord about as thick as heavy yarn.  I was mumbling to myself to keep the patient distracted.  The afterbirth came down smoothly.  It was smaller than my palm.

            "We got it all," I told the woman.  She was too wasted to care.  The bleeding stopped quickly enough.

            "I knew you wouldn't have to operate," she said, smiling from somewhere over the rainbow of her opiate dream.  "I prayed to Jesus, and he told me you wouldn't have to operate."

            She was asleep before she got back to her room, a half smile still askew under her swollen eyes.

            The other nineteen-week abortion that night was not so nice.  The placenta wouldn't come free.  I tried pulling it out in the patient's room, too tired at three in the morning to cut the fetus free.  Like a marionette, he danced around when I tugged on his navel string.  One of his eyelids was still fused, but the other stared at me, opaque and dead.  He was so funny to look at, because his skull hadn’t calcified, and the brain inside his bald scalp hung over one ear like a rakish beret.

            Most of the placenta came out with forceps, but we had to take the patient to an operating room and gas her to finish the job.  The anesthesiology resident was grouchy because we got him up so long before dawn.  He fussed about the consent form, because the girl was only fifteen.  In the end, though, it was a good clean job.  I got to sleep around half past five.

            After rounds, I stood in front of a mirror and tried to make my hair lie down straight for Sunday.  That was a waste of time.  I went down to the bakery and drank cappucino with my sweet roll.  The sunlight came in sharp and dazzling through big windows.  The place was crowded:  young people in bright colors, women in loose skirts, the girls behind the counter with their hair tied back in red bandanas and their sleeves rolled up.  The air smelled of coffee and sugar and yeast.  My wife came in and kissed me.  We read the Times and watched the crowd move.  Somebody I knew said hello.  I waved.  He had his baby girl in his arms, and she waved back.

            "On call again?" he asked.

            "It shows that much?"

            "Pity the poor intern," he said, shaking his head and grinning.

            He sat his little girl in a highchair and stepped over to my table.

            "Dammit, bo," he whispered through his grin, "don't you know better than to wear those shoes around normal folks?"

            I looked at the shoes, bought Walmart white in June.  The tally of my training was written in the purple and brown bloodstains of an obstetric summer, the fresh red of last week's surgeries.  I shrugged.

            "They're comfortable," I shrugged.

            "You punchdrunk bastard," he said.  He laughed, his big beard bobbing on his chest.  He hit me a high handshake and went back to help his daughter smear jelly on her face.

            On the way out, I stopped at the door and read the bulletin board:  astrologists' business cards, ads for karma matching services, the telephone numbers of massage trainers, notices of uptown gigs.  One flyer caught my eye.

            "Exercise your right to safe and legal abortion," it read.  The Abortion Rights Committee was holding "a fun run for reproductive rights."  The program promised to include aerobic dance and a bicycle race for enthusiasts.  Refreshments would be served.  Maybe I could talk one of the chief residents into doing demos with me in a back room, so we would all know how the needle quivers when a saline injection starts and the baby thrashes about until salt stills the heart.

            My wife's a feminist, though her friends tell her she's an oxymoron, being married to me, a guy gynecologist.  For her, abortion’s an abstraction, just a word, like equality, truth, justice, or freedom, to be defended on nights and weekends.  For her, blood and steel and women's tears have no part in it.  When I came home, she smiled indulgently at my idea, pulled off my shoes, and put me to bed.  I imploded into my own exhaustion.

Stewart Massad, M.D.

Obstetrics & Gynecology