"We
chatted as the dialysis shift began. Jane was a young nursing student whose
name and face I still remember five decades later. She was from the Virgin
Islands and had come to New York for nursing school. She was nearly done —
justifiably proud, since she had funded it herself. I was a fourth-year medical
student doing an elective rotation on the renal service. The dialysis machine
was working well, so we continued to talk when we could as the hours went by.
It was 1968...
Jane
did what thousands of young women were forced to do in the 1960s — she
underwent a back-alley abortion, with disastrous consequences. Should Roe v.
Wade be overturned, there will be countless more young women like her."
Please
read the FULL
TEXT of this short and powerful essay by Julie R. Ingelfinger, M.D. in the August
23rd New England Journal of Medicine.
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| This image is from the article |
Ingelfinger is a pediatric nephrologist in Boston
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