A slow awakening

When he was a resident in the early 60s, Watson Bowie, Jr. performed occasional abortions to save the life of the mother. Then came the Ruebella Epidemic of 1964, and the belief that the babies were better off dead than deformed or retarded, so he aborted many, which he regrets now.

"By 1969, when I finished my two-year tour of duty in the Army Medical Corps, I had arrived at a firm pro-life, anti-abortion position. It was not a sudden epiphany or bolt-out-of-the-blue experience. It was a slow, creeping, incessantly rational awakening to the awareness that should have been crystal clear to me from the first: there is something inherently wrong with killing a human being to solve the problem of another human being.

It is a great sorrow to me that the sub-specialty of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, in which I am board certified, testing (blood and amniotic fluid tests and ultrasound examinations) in pursuit of finding fetuses with congenital abnormalities so that they can be killed before they are born. As physicians who allegedly care simultaneously for two patients, a woman and her unborn child, it is a tragedy that we often accomplish the task by deliberately killing one patient to serve the other.

How has my Christian faith related to my pro-life position? It is enough to say that I believe that the unborn, in the state of complete innocence, defenselessness, and vulnerability, are among "the least of these," who should be subjects of our care and concern, according to the admonishment of our Lord (Matthew 25:40). This should have always been clear to me, though I was blind to it when I first performed abortions."

From the June issue of Lifewatch, published by pro-life United Methodists (the denomination’s official view is still pro-choice).