Can I Get a Doctor in Here?

Can I Get a Doctor in Here?

These are not words you want to hear in the emergency department.  But one of the things that I have learned is when the nurses in the department express concern or call, you listen.  Stopping what I was doing, I went into the room to see what she needed.  I saw the nurse at the bedside with a young woman, clearly frightened with a blood-soaked towel pressed between her legs.

Several hours earlier, this young woman presented to the emergency department.  She told me that she was in her first trimester and was having some mild pelvic cramping.  As part of her workup, we performed her ultrasound, identifying a healthy appearing, late first trimester, intrauterine pregnancy. Everything looked fine we reassured her.

Now, hours later she was holding a bloody towel.  What began as light spotting increased to a heavy, period-like flow.  As I kneeled down with the nurse, I pulled the towel away to reveal the fetus that I had seen just hours earlier on ultrasound with a healthy heartbeat – now lifeless. 

As I looked at the newly deceased baby, I saw a strange mixture of beauty and grotesque ugliness.  It was a developing life, representing the awe and wonder of human development. Less than 365 days earlier, this is how my young daughter would have looked. And now, she possesses all the beauty of a newborn baby.  In this moment, this young child looked anything but beautiful.  It was alien – embryologically disproportionate and lifeless.  Witnessing this paradox stirred up several thoughts.

The Sacred and the Profane

One of the things that is so prevalent in our society is a lack of respect and a lack of appreciation for life in its most vulnerable situation —that is the developing fetus.  For most, the experience of pregnancy happens hidden in the protection of the uterus.  There are no audible cries of hunger or pain.  And until 16-20 weeks there is no sensation of movement.  Even after that, at times fetal movement more resembles bad carryout rather than gesticulations of a human baby.

But in this moment, the veil was pulled back.  This fetus was now exposed – forcing all who stood witness to reconcile the reality and nature of its existence.  I stood there thinking that perhaps one of the reasons that people are so quick to defend abortion is that, until the baby is born, they don’t have to contend with the reality of what is growing inside the expecting mother.  At this stage, the fetus is not something that anybody can see, hear, or feel.  Yet here, I held a lifeless human being in my hand - at the same stage where so many of those abortion procedures happen.  I was looking at that child, and I was seeing the beauty of the design and the intricacy of its development – but at the same time, witnessing the grotesqueness of the death that just happened in front of me in my department. Looking at this child, I was reminded of the words of David in Psalm 139:13-14:

“You knit me together in my mother’s inmost parts. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (ESV)

I was drawn to this thought.  In this moment the veil that separates our faith and our sight as expressed in Psalm 139 was stripped away.  We frequently repeat the words of David as a reminder of the preciousness of what God has created - hidden in the sacred realms and recesses of the uterus.  His work is hidden until it is ready to be revealed.  But now, in my hands was not some past tense understanding of the fact that God has fashioned some being ex nihilo into the present reality of an infant.  No, this fetus is an active manifestation of the present tense reality of God in the very act of doing the knitting – of literally orchestrating the growth and development of a unique human being, an eternal soul.

As I continued to think about this foreshortened life, the reality that this foreign looking thing was not just being fashioned by God but was also intimately known to God.  The idea of us as humans being known to God is not a theologically insurmountable idea to comprehend.   We speak of God being omniscient and omnipresent.  And unlike deists, we have categories in our thinking for God being present and active in the world that he has created.  Jesus speaks of himself as the good shepherd who knows his sheep (John 10:14).  And Paul speaks of our being known by God and the importance of that knowledge for our salvation in Romans 8 where he writes of this golden chain of foreknowledge leading to predestination, calling, justification and ultimately glorification.

However, unlike God, our knowledge is limited.  We cannot know what we cannot see, or hold, or touch.  But as the author of all life, God is not limited to our senses.  In the opening chapter of Jeremiah, we hear the words of the LORD spoken to the prophet Jeremiah. 

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” (ESV)

In this moment, it struck me that this fetus in my hand, this thing that was to me just pixels on a screen mere hours earlier, was intimately known by God.  In its imperfect form, this is the bearer of a soul that has been present in the mind of God from all eternity.  And even though this baby will not have the same opportunities as the rest of us to grow, form relationships, develop a personality and otherwise impact the world, this baby is known. 

No Ordinary People

We live in a broken world. What I witnessed was a soul that was created in the image of God — an individual that has yet to take a breath. It has yet to see the light of day, has yet to experience that which it means to be human. But it is at the same time altogether one hundred percent distinctly human, and known to God, and is an eternal entity — even in that moment of just grotesqueness of the miscarriage.

Everyone we meet is an eternal being with an eternal destiny.  C.S. Lewis in his essay The Weight of Glory penned powerful words about this idea – words that I frequently revisit.  He writes,

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.  All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one end or other of these destinations.  It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.  There are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal.  Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.  But it is with immortals with whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

There are no ordinary fetuses. There are no unwanted pregnancies. Everyone we meet, every ultrasound I perform, and every miscarried fetus I hold is made by God and has an eternal future.

This idea has profound implications for the millions of lives that have been prematurely cut short through abortion.  It is not just an inconvenient biological mistake or a random clump of cells.  What in Lewis’ terms one may classify as an “uninteresting person” is an immortal horror or splendor.

Several years ago, I was performing an ultrasound on a woman in the first trimester.  Everything was normal.  The baby was moving.  There was a normal fetal heart rate.  As I go through the typical process of performing an ultrasound and obtaining the necessary images, I generally print a few representative images to give to the mom as a first look at her baby and memento.  On this particular occasion, she declined to see the growing child.  She told me that she had no interest in keeping the baby – that she was intending to find a clinic to an obtain an abortion. 

It grieved me that this child will not be given an opportunity at life.  It will never take its first steps, have a first day of school, attend college, get married, have kids.  It will never experience a sunrise or see the ocean.  It will never know the warmth of an embrace or the security that comes through being known and loved by another.  I don’t know whatever became of the pregnancy and the mother’s “choice.”  Perhaps she changed her mind.  But in that moment as I scanned, I lingered - watching the fetus move around – knowing that I may be the last person to enjoy watching it jump and play.  I keep that printed ultrasound image on my desk at work so that even in light of the tragedy of its premature termination, it would not be forgotten.

So in this momement in the emergency department as I looked at this newly miscarried fetus, it just looked gross. There was part of me that just wanted to look away.  There was a certain disgustingness to this fetus — not necessarily because it was ugly by any stretch of imagination. It was a first trimester fetus, and so it’s certainly not going to have the same morphological dimensions and characteristics that a full-grown baby would. But part of the ugliness is the context in which I was looking at it — that it was just raw, out of the uterus, and it was not right, and that this baby was dead in my hands. 

God has created all things with three inherent properties – truth, goodness and beauty.  As we hold a new baby, it is easy to see the truth and reality of this precious life, to see the goodness of God in creation and the beauty of what he has made.  But this moment, this discolored, misshapen fetus seemed to be characterized more by tragedy and ugliness.  But to truly understand, we need to look past the uncomfortable.  A few more months of development and in a different context, this fetus would be the same baby we take pictures of, that we show off to our family and friends, and that we think is cute.  The being and essence are the same.  The only difference is time, development and context.  So, while I was standing witness to the tragedy of a prematurely shortened life, this was also a moment to remember, to reflect and to hold by faith the truths of God.  It was a moment to remember the truth, beauty and goodness of God even in a broken world.