The Good Old Days

In 1990, I graduated from medical school and started my internship at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. It was among the largest public hospitals in the country and was unsurpassed for the variety of cases to which I was exposed.

At that time (and perhaps still), patients beds were on open wards so that we had separate male and female medical services. During my training, I would rotate on a monthly basis among these various wards.

The busiest service was the emergency room where I would spend 24 hours on duty and 24 hours off. There was the rotation on the male ER and the female ER.

In the very back of the female ER was a separate large room with examining tables lined up ten on each side for a total of twenty. This room was dedicated to the treatment of young women who came to the ER with incomplete self induced abortions. This was the time before Roe when abortion was illegal.

If we were lucky, it was only a matter of completing the abortion with a dilatation and curettage. But too often, the coat hanger procedure resulted in infection or worse, a perforated uterus. Antibiotics were limited at that time and the complication often resulted in hysterectomy rendering the young woman infertile or worse, peritonitis (infection in the abdomen) from the perforated uterus which too many times resulted in the patient dying.

Today, the examining tables have been stored away but the pro-life zealots have succeeded in reversing Roe in the mistaken belief that that would end abortions. But clearly desperate women have been ridding themselves of unwanted pregnancies from time immemorial and I can’t imagine that that will stop.

I guess it is time to take those examining table out of storage — we will need them again.