I was beyond devastation by that point, and I glanced over at my beautiful Mother, in whose face was written the most heartrending pain I had ever seen. So when Dr. “H” (as I shall call him) stated that “we need to make sure the surgeon got it all” – the words had little to no impact.

Tragically, I underwent the operation – after attempting to inform the father and being assured that I had slept with someone whose sexual deviancy could have inspired the 9/11 hijackers 27 years later. In March 1975, I honored my doctor’s insistence upon a followup visit, and was assured that “everything looked fine.”

Evidently, the surgeon “got it all.”

Now, I would not wish a “botched” abortion on anyone – and I am very pleased that the butcher in the above-mentioned case is being punished – severely. But my own doctor’s well-meaning admonition came back to haunt me…..and him as well, if the last months of his own life are any indication.

Five months later, when the post-abortive angst (and clarities) began hitting me like a tsunamic torrent, I remember lamenting silently, “It wasn’t a tumor or an abnormal growth! This was human life!” I had no one with whom to confide about these emerging realizations and abundant sorrow. That, in my view, is (nearly) as tragic as the abortion itself. (Perhaps that’s why a certain Episcopalian minister nearly toppled off his throne, er, chair, when I related my experiences. Years of schooling at the finest seminaries in the East had obviously left him unprepared for certain harsh realities in the Kansas backfields of the 1970s.)

My abortion was certainly not “botched” from a physical standpoint. Yet its inherent logic was horrendously skewed, as so many of us have discovered. As my own doctor, God rest his soul, discerned as well.

As for the charlatan involved in this case, I would hope he is never allowed to practice “medicine” again.