I’ve been pro-life my entire life. Staunchly. I firmly believe that the life of a person outweighs a person’s right to convenience. Before you jump at me, I promise I hold a level of integrity to this – I am anti-war, in favor of social services, have signed up to be an organ donor, and donate my own A+ blood frequently. Let none of this be in question. I am so committed to the preservation of life, in fact, that I have devoted my entire life up to this point to becoming a doctor and now find myself in my first year of residency in a rural Texas hospital.
The rural Texas setting is much different than the liberal northeast of my upbringing, but I welcome it. The guns, for obvious reasons, I’m not a fan of, but other than that I’ve found myself surrounded by people who are similarly committed to life over convenience. In fact, they are more committed to this principle than the majority of their fellow Texans. We actually enshrined this principle of life into our county laws – if there is any event in which a person’s body is required for the preservation of another person’s life, the life will take precedence. Do not ask me about the constitutionality of this; I am not a lawyer and this is not my question. All I can tell you is that my beliefs are accurately represented in the laws now and I am glad for it.
I’ll argue that the effects of these laws are good. If you, for instance, saw a child drowning, you would be required by law (unless some legitimate condition prevented you) to help that drowning child, even if your shoes were muddied in the process. I’m sure we can agree this is good. Who would want a child to drown?
But to my residency. While I’m training to go into Emergency Medicine, my rounds have me shadowing all sorts of different doctors and following all sorts of patients. One of the most impactful was towards the beginning of my residency – a case of two teenagers, students at the local high school. The night after their homecoming dance, they had sex, not realizing at the time that the condoms they used were expired. When the girl missed one period, she assumed it was the stress of tests or the fluctuating hormones of a growing body. But as one month stretched into two, she grew more and more worried, until her boyfriend finally took her to see us.
I’m sure I don’t have to explain the rest, but I will.
The doctor I was shadowing – a mother herself, who saw something of her children in the patients and had much better bedside manner than I do – was tasked with breaking the news to them. I was just there to help with tests. While an abortion at this stage would have been significantly safer to the young mother than continuing the pregnancy, you’ll remember that we were still in Texas, and thus they were sent away with some vitamins and a small “What To Expect When You’re Expecting” pamphlet.
I don’t know what happened to them. But their graduation, their college ambitions, all the rest – we’ve already established to be subservient to the life of the fetus. Truthfully, I find myself less set on the “heartbeat” definition of viability than my neighbors, but if we grant that this is a life then surely this was the legally and morally consistent action.
I say all this to contextualize the next case, presented to me at 3am just today. Two brothers – Bob and David – who hated each other dearly came in just around the same time, rolling into emergency rooms across the hallway from one another. The cause? David had been driving along at night and Bob’s car T-boned his brother’s. Both loudly swore the other party had instigated whatever had occurred. The profanities and assignment of blame echoed through the hospital until both men passed out in the exhaustion of it all.
In the silence of the sterile hospital night, I am not here to play judge or jury. I am simply here as the anti-executioner.
The facts relevant to me, as a preserver of life, is that Bob had lost more blood in the ordeal than David had. Bob was O-, and therefore required O- blood. Our own stockpile had just run out, but there was a perfectly fine source of O- blood in the room just across the hall.
Strapping David to the bed was easy enough – he was asleep and didn’t notice. By the time we got to wheeling him across the hall to better position him next to his brother, he had awoken and started screaming bloody murder.
But, willing or not, his brother’s life was at stake. If we’ve agreed in the case of the fetus, then surely we agree here. Bob certainly has as much, if not more, claim to personhood than the teenagers’ child. Why should we find the forced use of David’s body objectionable here?
So I’ll kindly ask you to relax. I’ve drawn blood a thousand times before, this will barely hurt. It’s just a small pinch. You’ll find yourself drifting back off to sleep – you’re too tired to do much else at this point. There’s a non-zero risk of death, sure, but there is in everything, is there not? But right now, your body is much more useful for parts than as a whole and part of you. Shhh...
Just close your eyes.
And sleep.
