Thread by @RyanRLion

TW: #Abortion, graphic descriptions

A thread 🧵 re: #RoeVWade

Several years ago while still in med school, I had a clinical rotation in a country where abortion was criminalized. My perspective on abortion is forever shaped by a clinical encounter with a 13 year old girl.

She presented to the emergency room in a small rural hospital with a chief complaint of copious vaginal bleeding, accompanied by her mother and the police. I didn’t think much of that detail at the time, I assumed he just escorted them since the girl was so weak?

At this point in my medical training, I felt comfortable with my speculum exam skills and confident in my genitourinary anatomy. I was equipped with a speculum while my supervising physician prepped for possible D&C.

When I inserted the speculum, confidence turned to confusion when I couldn’t find my landmarks but noted frothy, friable tissue. It was a bloody mess - I couldn’t locate the cervix. My attending took over.

Then, the gruesome realization dawned on us that this gory tissue we were assessing was her mutilated, bloody cervix. It was the result of stabbing herself with some sharp foreign object. This is what this child felt compelled to do in the circumstance of an unwanted pregnancy.

The police were outside the procedure room the whole time, not there to be a supportive escort, but awaiting for her to wake up from sedation to take her and her mother into custody.

I'm the product of a Catholic education. You can be informed by your faith & beliefs when making decisions pertaining to YOUR body. But there is nothing #ProLife about a system that allows stories like this to happen - and they will happen here if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

As @SymoneDSanders so eloquently stated. "#abortions will still happen, they just won't be safe or legal."