Pro-Choicers Recognize That Abortion Is Too Evil to Even Describe 

A recent clip of Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, questioning a pro-abortion law professor in a congressional hearing over the FACE Act has gone viral over the last week.  

In the clip, Rep. Gill—who gained notoriety last year by confronting the CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, with a variety of her prior radical statements about race—asked American University Washington College of Law professor Jessica Waters if she had a favored method of performing abortions.

When she declined to answer, he proceeded to describe various gruesome forms of surgical abortion, asking what she thought of each method in turn. Waters studiously and awkwardly refused to give her opinion. 

Why are abortion supporters so wary of describing—or even hearing a description of—this “basic healthcare” procedure?  

I saw an answer in the lives and teachings of two great pro-life physicians: my father, Dr. Joseph Gerardi, and the Chicago pediatrician and medical school professor Dr. Eugene Diamond, one of the founding figures of the American pro-life movement.  

Doctors are servants protecting the authentic, objectively knowable goods of health and flourishing; they are not mere technicians doing a paid job to fulfill a patient’s desires. Once doctors turn from that mission, the results can become too horrific even to hear. 

My dad was an orthopedic surgeon at Valley Children’s Hospital, a major pediatric hospital serving Fresno and the greater region of Central California. He was the head of the orthopedic department for many years, and the hospital estimated that he cared for approximately 100,000 children over his 31-year career.

He retired sooner than he desired due to a cancer diagnosis and passed away on March 12, 2024, at the age of 67. Valley Children’s announced in 2024 that it would rename its orthopedic center in his honor. 

Unlike Professor Waters, if Rep. Gill had asked for my father’s likes and dislikes regarding various orthopedic procedures, the challenge would have been getting my dad to stop talking. The man simply loved talking about orthopedics.  

My kids once asked their “papa” what his favorite part of the human body was, and were subjected to a long, enthusiastic presentation about the virtues of the acromioclavicular joint. (In English, that’s where the collarbone meets the top of the shoulder blade.)  

A natural teacher, Dr. Gerardi loved describing—to family and friends, to his patients and their parents, and most especially to his residents and younger partners—his methods for performing different procedures. Like a master carpenter, he took enormous pride in a job well done.

Not coincidentally, my dad also enjoyed woodworking; he joked that he loved occasionally cutting things that didn’t bleed. His enthusiastic joy was rooted in the fact that his work was ordered to clear goals of preserving human life and health. 

Abortionists cannot and do not behave similarly, lest they sound like sociopaths. The contrast between my dad’s exuberance and Ms. Waters’ guarded awkwardness could not have been starker.  

In fact, the one time America got to see abortionists in an unguarded light, it so revolted the nation that it prompted congressional investigations and criminal referrals.  

Undercover journalist David Daleiden’s videos of abortion executives speaking candidly about their shocking methods of killing children (one of several examples here) were so revolting that it prompted the GOP’s commitment (accomplished for one year via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) to defund Planned Parenthood.  

Abortion advocates were so enraged by this peek behind the curtain that they subjected Daleiden to a living legal hell for a decade—his last California criminal charge was only finally dropped several weeks ago. 

Waters’ testimony also points to a quietly raging debate: What language should we use to discuss abortion’s relationship to the practice of medicine?  

Contending sides of the argument will sometimes shout “Abortion is healthcare!” or “Abortion is not healthcare!” as if they are mere slogans, and I think folks who don’t follow the abortion debate might misunderstand what is being contended. They seem like different ways of calling abortion good or bad, but it’s more than that.  

What is at stake is the nature of healthcare itself: is it oriented toward objectively knowable standards human health and flourishing, or the fulfillment of a patient’s demands and desires? 

Dr. Eugene Diamond, who passed away in 2021, gave a fantastic framing for the former perspective. In the spring of 2008, Dr. Diamond spoke for a conference I helped to organize for my student club, Notre Dame Right to Life (one of his 58 grandchildren was one of my classmates, and she later became our club president).  

In his speech, Dr. Diamond repeated a simple concept I’ll never forget: “Doctors are not plumbers.”  

As he explained, while medicine involves technical skill and academic know-how to diagnose and treat problems within the overwhelmingly complex systems of the human body, doctors aren’t simply technicians doing a job to make a customer happy. There is a profoundly moral dimension to their work. Their activity can save or imperil the precious goods of human life and its flourishing. It must respect those objectively knowable goods. 

The minute a doctor’s activity strays outside of what fosters flourishing or the preservation of proper bodily function, his work becomes something different from healthcare. Straightening out a hockey player’s broken nose is healthcare; an elective rhinoplasty to make Michael Jackson’s nose look different (definitely not better) is something apart from healthcare, though the act might require a medical professional or have adverse medical side effects.  

This distinction has profound impacts on public policy: whether public or private insurance can or should cover a specific intervention, whether the state should subsidize it, etc. 

If doctors are not mere plumbers, then abortion cannot be healthcare. The practice does not treat something wrong with a woman’s body but, rather, artificially disrupts the natural and healthy process of pregnancy while destroying a new human organism.  

If abortion were something noble, something ordered towards human good and flourishing, its supporters would likely be able to talk about it more freely. Instead, they are mere practitioners doing a horrific job—a job Pope Francis likened to that of a hitman.  

If abortion is too unpleasant to even hear described, how can anyone bear to support it?

John Gerardi is a lawyer, the executive director of Right to Life of Central California, the founder and development director of the Obria Medical Clinics of Central California, and the host of the John Gerardi Show and Right to Life Radio on News/Talk 580/105.9 KMJ in Fresno, CA.