Caitlin Bernard is an obstetrician-gynecologist in Indiana. According to Indiana Department of Health records, she performed an abortion on a 10-year-old girl reported to have traveled from Ohio after being raped.
But for the past few weeks, life has been hard — for me and for my family. I’ve been called a liar. I’ve had my medical and ethical integrity questioned on national television by people who have never met me. I’ve been threatened. And I haven’t been able to talk and explain what I stand for.
My mission has always been to provide the best care to each patient who comes to me. This is based on my training as a physician and because I feel a moral and ethical obligation to provide compassionate care.
Even under the protections of Roe v. Wade, abortion care in my state has been limited and almost always urgent, difficult to access or both: She has been raped; she is bleeding; she has terrible heart disease; she is in an abusive relationship; she lives three hours away.
Every patient I see has a full life story, with a history and hopes and dreams. They are Christian, Muslim or atheist. They are children or grandmothers. They are doing their best to take care of themselves and their families. Most important, they had the constitutional right to seek an abortion legally, a right that has now been taken away.
For every patient who finds me, whose health or life improves under my care, who thanks me, I know I have made their world a little better. It is infinitely harder to be on the other side of the story now. Imagine being forced to tell someone in crisis: “I know how to take care of you, and I have everything needed right here, but our state government has told me I can’t.”
This goes against everything we stand for as physicians and everything we stand for as a society: compassion, love, respect, autonomy.
Today, in states with draconian abortion restrictions, we grapple with the heart-wrenching knowledge that our years of education, our honed practice, our teams’ painstaking preparations may be denied to patients who need us. Where the most vulnerable patients need our care, the government has tied our hands.
This is what keeps me up at night. As states move to severely limit abortion care or ban access entirely, health outcomes for girls and women will get worse. Patients will be forced to find care in faraway, unfamiliar places; to continue dangerous, traumatic or unwanted pregnancies; to turn to desperate measures. Some won’t be able to access care until it’s too late.
Next week, the Indiana legislature will contemplate dramatically restricting abortion, as many states have done since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Lawmakers will debate the particulars of the law and thus the fate of my patients. They will debate whether to include an exception for rape, whether to require a child incest victim to testify under oath that her family member abused and impregnated her before she could access medical care, how sick someone needs to get before they will allow us to save her life, whether to allow a mother to spare her baby from the worst suffering, to spare herself from the unimaginable agony of watching her baby die in her arms.
But they will never face my patients. They will never stand in their shoes or hold their hands. They will never know their pain. Legislators are the last people who should be in the business of deciding who gets medical care and who does not.
People in Indiana and across the nation have called me brave. But I’m not any braver than any other physician who would do the right thing when faced with a patient in need.
I don’t feel brave. I feel anguished, desperate and angry. I don’t want to be the one who sends a patient away, who sends a scared mother away. I don’t want to be the one who loses a patient because her pregnancy killed her before I could save her. I don’t want to live in a place where my government tells me that child sex abuse victims must become mothers. I don’t want to have to accept that a particular religious ideology eclipses my duty as a physician.
My life’s work has been to go where I’m needed, to serve my fellow human beings, and to relieve pain and suffering in any way I can. That is what I will continue to do.