As we were having coffee this morning, my wife asked, "Have you read this?" I looked down to where Lisa had placed last Sunday's Washington Post magazine. The photo on the front cover was of Lesley Wojick, the subject of the lead article titled, "A Hard Choice: A young medical student tries to decide if she has what it takes to join the diminishing ranks of abortion providers."

I had heard about what proved to be a 7,289-word-long piece but had not gotten around to reading it. By the second paragraph I was "into" Patricia Meisol's profile, so much so that I quickly went to an online conversation with Wojick (a third-year medical student) and Meisol had with Post readers on Monday. [You can read the story at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/14/AR2008111401698.html and the follow up chat at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/11/20/DI2008112002671.html

Lesley Wojick

Interpreting someone's feelings and imputing motivations merely by reading an article is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel and probably as accurate as sketching a sunset blindfolded. But some of what comes out is pretty hard to miss. I really do want you to read this, so let me whet your appetite by discussing just some of a dozen different considerations worth pondering.

The issue the article is really raising is whether someone who went to Barnard college as a self-described "happy-go-lucky kid" and "left fully politicized about women controlling their own bodies" would become someone who literally put her professed beliefs into action. If you're pro-abortion-and-then-some President-elect Barack Obama reading the story, her initial actions would be encouraging.

Her consciousness raised and "more militant," Wojick joined Medical Students for Choice. In April 2004, she grabbed a Greyhound bus to Washington for the March for Women's Lives. "Inspired," we're told, "she began contemplating a career in women's health."

An additional factor was her subsequent deep unhappiness when a dear friend has an abortion "without any support from her boyfriend."

There is a bizarre section where Meisol writes about a "papaya workshop" proposed by the Students for Choice chapter president, "to expose more students to abortion." This would be a "hands-on opportunity for second-year medical students to learn how to perform an abortion, using a papaya as a stand-in for a woman's uterus. Lesley thought it was a great idea."

In fact, she thought it was "so cool," believing "she was doing something important to address the shortage of abortion doctors. After years of defending abortion rights, she would finally learn how the procedure is done."

However, Wojick's response was ambivalence. The "seeds and juice" that popped out of the fruit as Wojick mimicked performing an abortion are not exactly fetal body parts. To the workshop's credit (if that be the right word), the medical students were shown photos of a first-trimester abortion.

But the antiseptic language and the absence of a real discussion about how abortionists and patients interact--"the softer side of it, the emotional quagmire of what you have to deal with every day as an abortion provider--left her cold. But, she thought, eventually she'd get used to it. I suspect the one part she never got used to is what we discuss next.

The most chilling section is when Wojick sees her first abortions during her time in the outpatient clinic. One of her friends had begged off when the abortionist asked her to hold an instrument.

Then it is her turn.

"In the procedure room, the patient had been sedated, but her eyes were open," Meisol writes. "As Lesley watched, the doctor grabbed the tenaculum, numbed the cervix with a needle, grabbed the specula for dilation, then the suction machine. He was methodical and very fast. The patient was in obvious pain. Her screams gave Lesley the chills, and she thought she might throw up. 'I'm getting dizzy,' she said aloud. The doctor told her to sit down. She backed away, found a bench and sat. She was hot and sweaty."

However, "The second procedure was easier." The sedative had knocked the woman out, "Lesley's stomach was stronger now," and Lesley told herself, "I can take it."

She finds out very quickly whether this was true. "The doctor put Lesley's hand on the instrument, his hand over hers, and she let herself be guided by him, using the dilator, the suction machine and finally a metal loop for scraping the uterus. The abortions were over by 10 a.m., and for the first time in her obstetrics rotation, Lesley did not want to leave.

"She asked to stay, and she spent the afternoon following a nurse practitioner as she counseled and prepared patients for more complicated second-trimester abortions the next day." You can almost picture Wojick swelling the ranks of the diminishing number of abortionists.

Then there is the "resolute" woman, whose unborn baby is 14 weeks old, who wants a second-trimester abortion. Wojick actually asks if she can attend. Her subsequent ebb and flow is most revealing.

"This time, the procedure took 10 minutes instead of five," Meisol writes. "The dilator was bigger; there was more tissue to remove; and the patient, although sedated, was awake and moving with discomfort. Lesley watched as the doctor counted the parts of the fetus, and, to her surprise, she didn't find it jarring. To her, the parts appeared doll-like."

I almost stopped reading at this point. I'm glad I didn't.

"Later that morning, though, while conducting a pelvic exam, Lesley noted that she wasn't her usual slow, gentle self," Meisol continues. "That evening, discussing the second-term abortion with her mother, Lesley described a process that she found disturbingly brutal, especially the stretching of the vagina. 'It's a lot more invasive than I thought,' she said. 'A papaya doesn't bleed and scream.' Women do."

Eventually, she decides to go into anesthesiology. "I'd like to be more involved in policy and education as a more direct contribution" she tells readers in the online discussion, just not directly performing abortions. Why?

Well, a number of the contributors to the online discussion try to subtly reenlist her in the cause by attributing her reluctance to the bureaucratic, assembly line-like attitude–"the inhumanity of her experience." Naw, says Wojick.

"It wasn't just my experience on the wards, but also discussions about and research of the field. There were many factors going into my decision not to do OB, only one of them being my negative experience on my rotation."

So if it wasn't the painful agony women went through, the "barbaric" use of "the razor-sharp tenaculum" instrument, the "emotional quagmire," or her own stomach's instinctive reaction, what were those "many factors"?

Just speculating, it may have been a pro-life friend, Litty, who politely and respectfully discussed the issue with her. Wojick never accepted her friend's philosophical perspective on unborn life (that's pretty much the only part of the discussion we learn about), but actually joined a discussion where she was likely the only "pro-choice" person there. Indeed, there are other parts of the wider discussion that she more flatly disagrees, but a seed was perhaps planted.

Or maybe it was partly a comment her "liberal" parents had made when she was younger: that there can be consequences to irresponsible behavior, like "be[ing] willing to give up your freedom for 18 years." Also, again just guessing, there were so many other branches of medicine that were simply more affirming than evacuating "POC" (Products of Conception).

Wojick continues to buy into the deeply distorted notion that advocating and supporting abortion is to be associated with a movement that gives "grateful women" a "new lease on life." But she drew the line at actually tearing unborn babies apart.

Perhaps the same forces that tugged her heart in the right direction on the latter will bring her home on the former.