1582 June 2001 American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology

Moral leadership and the issue of abortionTo the Editors: It is with humble admiration that I congrat-ulate Gambrell on his startling presidential address in theAugust issue (Gambrell RD Jr. Physicians should providemoral leadership to their communities. Am J Obstet Gy-necol 2000;183:261-70). Also startling was that the verysame issue had a symposium on the technique of earlymedical abortion. On the one hand, Gambrell noted thatdoctors “want to do what is best for their patients, partic-ularly obstetricians, because we care for two lives.” At theother extreme, another article, written by nonphysicians,recommended that after medical abortion, physiciansshould feel “free to advise patients to flush the productsof conception down the toilet.”1

The cultural line in the sand has been drawn. And ifindeed “nearly half of all women in the United States per-sonally benefit from abortion,”2 the societal impact on usall is far from trivial.

Modern American society has a strange ambivalenceto violence and death, on the one hand expressing hor-ror at high school massacres yet on the other hand per-haps merely shrugging in discomfort at the willful termi-nation of early human life to the tune of tens of millions.The roots of this ambivalence lie in convenience, self-cen-teredness, and our national confusion regarding legiti-mate versus illegitimate “choice.” Teenagers intuitivelysense phoniness and hypocrisy and may have more trou-ble than adults in reconciling this apparent paradox,which seems so unnatural to the innocent mind yet onthe other hand is almost taken for granted by society and,sadly, by medicine. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, “Ifwe accept that a mother can kill even her own child, howcan we tell other people not to kill each other? …Anycountry that accepts abortion is not teaching its people tolove, but to use any violence to get what they want….”3

The vocation of medicine and the vocation of mother-hood are both profoundly sacred and should teach usthat human life is of immense value. When the vocationsof medicine and motherhood are distorted into some-thing that cheapens life, we all lose.

Fritz Baumgartner, MDDivision of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center,UCLA School of Medicine, 1000 W Carson St, Torrance, CA 90509

REFERENCES

1. Borgmann CE, Jones BS. Legal issues in the provision of medicalabortion. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2000;183 Suppl 2:S84-94.

2. Grimes DA. Medical abortion: public health and private lives.Am J Obstet Gynecol 2000;183 Suppl 2:S1-2.

3. Thomas C. Truth, power, and abortion. The Augusta Chronicle1994 Feb 9;Sect.A:5.

6/8/114036doi:10.1067/mob.2001.114036

Moral leadership no excuse for invectiveTo the Editors: Gambrell may have had “pride, greathonor, much humility, and considerable trepidation”when he gave his recent presidential address (GambrellRD Jr. Physicians should provide moral leadership totheir communities. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2000;183:261-70), but his invective was a shameful display. I have re-spected Gambrell’s scientific contributions, but I amnow forced to reconsider because of his abandonment ofscientific integrity and honor in the name of so-called“morality.” I am shocked that the Journal published hisextremist and unabashed Christian fundamentalistpolemic.

Gambrell apparently wishes American society to re-turn to the Dark Ages. He raised issues and argumentswith incredible superficiality and without critical analysis.I had thought that we had long ago forsaken blaming so-ciety’s ills on the effects of modern music and hippies,but I must be mistaken. Rock and roll has apparently sim-ply been replaced by rap music as a cause of society’smoral decay, which must be terribly shocking to Christianrappers. We should take comfort, though, that those of usfrom the 1960s are still the principal villains. Had Gam-brell investigated the student movement of the 1960s, hewould have discovered that it was in fact not a rejection ofAmerica but rather a rejection of American hypocrisy,bigotry, racism, and intolerance of the sort that he him-self displays.

Speaking of hypocrisy, Dr Gambrell took care to men-tion Charlton Heston’s self-sanctimonious remarks con-cerning rap music and the recording industry. He failedto inquire, however, how, where, or when rapper Ice-Tprocured the shotgun mentioned in the quoted lyrics. Healso conveniently omitted any mention of the role thatHeston’s National Rifle Association has played in facilitat-ing the spread of gun-related violence under the guise ofconstitutional rights. Where, for example, was the analy-sis of the gun industry’s complicity as suppliers of themeans of death and violence in our inner cities and itsdisproportionate effects on African American citizens?

Gambrell wishes us to believe that a minority of polledobstetrician-gynecologists speaks for the vast majority re-garding abortion. He cited the result of a survey butavoided mentioning its obvious inherent bias. He useddata that were not peer-reviewed to refute what has longbeen known and for which data are incontrovertible: thatillegal abortion extracted immense tolls from the womenthat it touched. Abortion is still illegal in large areas ofthe world, and the carnage continues unabated there.The need for abortion is ancient and antedates by cen-turies Hippocrates, who by the way was debating the meth-ods of abortion, not its provision by physicians, in the oathto which Gambrell referred.

LETTERS TO THE EDITORS