FAYETTEVILLE, ARK. — Dr. William Harrison, the abortion doctor who has drawn national attention for his blunt and honest words, invited me to walk a mile in his shoes.
The 70-year-old has recently been featured in the Los Angeles Times and on ABC News “Nightline.” He claims that what he does is “destroying life.” He drew the ire of some Christian groups for stating that his patients are “born again” when they are freed of the life growing in their womb.
I wanted to understand what makes him tick. We had spent weeks e-mailing back and forth after I had written a column criticizing him. Sometime before Christmas he e-mailed me boasting that “I think I am starting to like you! How can I appreciate a right winger!?”
Wednesday, I arrived at the stone house on College Avenue where Harrison works. I felt the weight of hopelessness press down on me as I walked in, but that was nothing compared to that which I would encounter looking into the eyes of some of the women who, like me, would walk through the front door.
Harrison, the engaging and polite abortionist, invited me to sit with him in his second-floor office. His walls were full of pictures of his three children and three grandchildren. There was a large painting of his clinic with pro-life picketers pacing on the sidewalks in front of his office, which was a routine occurrence back in the 1980s.
He told me about being raised by “conservative-Methodist” parents – fearing God was a way of life for him and his four siblings who grew up in eastern Arkansas. When he was 12, Harrison, an avid reader, read the Bible cover to cover.
Instead of reinforcing what he had been taught about God, Jesus and the Christian life, the experience filled him with doubt about the Bible being the actual word of God.
“I thought at the time, ‘There was something I was missing here, if this was the word of God then that isn’t a God that I want anything to do with,’” he said.
He is now a professing agnostic, claiming a belief in a deity that carries the characteristics described by Benedict de Spinosa, the 17th century Dutch Jew of Spanish descent whom Harrsion said believed that God gave order – not orders – to the universe. This was not the personal God he had cast aside in his youth.
While he openly questions and sometimes mocks those “fundamentalist Christians” who claim to know God’s will (which stands against abortion) with some certainty, he believes what he believes with the same certainty and fervor.
As we visit, his first patient arrives, a 15-year-old whose mother has brought her to get an abortion. Harrison’s nurse asks them if they would be willing to speak to me to which they responded “no.” He quickly runs out to see the girl. As quickly as he left, he came back into the office.
“I asked her what she was going to use for birth control. She said she was going to be ‘abstinent’ — we started her on the pill,” he said expressing doubts about her willingness to do either one. “As a general rule, they will be back (for another abortion).”
As we visited, he rang the nurse downstairs telling her to let him talk to the next patient before she administered the Valium. He disappeared again.
Moments later I was summoned down to the surgical suite. Harrison met me at the door. As we walked in he introduced me to the 29-year-old mother of two (a 9-year-old and a 4-year-old) who was on the operating table with her feet up in stirrups.
When asked why she had decided to have the abortion she said, “I have three classes left in college, money is tight, my kids get whatever they need and it’s not fair to bring another child in.” I couldn’t tell if she meant “fair” for her or for her son and daughter.
Harrison talked her through the process, asking her what she was using for birth control to which she responded, “I wasn’t.” Mere minutes would pass as Harrison began sucking out the 4-week-old life in her womb. It actually took 30 seconds to end the pregnancy.
More to come.
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David J. Sanders writes twice weekly for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is DavidJSanders@aol.com.
