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Catholic OB-GYN Explains Why She Had An Abortion

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Grace Carr Reporter
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A Catholic obstetrician wrote a Monday op-ed detailing why she had an abortion, considered especially taboo given she is a religious doctor specializing in the care of pregnant women during and after birth.

Botswana-based Scottish Livingstone Hospital obstetrician Dr. Rebecca Luckett’s “I’m a Catholic obstetrician who had an abortion. This is not politics or religion. It’s life” describes how she gave birth to a healthy child at the perfect time in her life in 2015 and how she experienced only the highs of pregnancy prior to aborting. Luckett became pregnant again in 2018 and opted for abortion after the doctor explained her child wouldn’t survive, according to USA Today.

“Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in his moccasins,” Luckett wrote, citing a proverb that hung in her family’s home when she was growing up. “I am confessing outside of the confessional today because I have hope,” Luckett explained, noting she feared how others would react to her admission, but she hoped others would understand how a person of her profession and religious affiliation could make the decision to have an abortion.

“Abortion was both right and necessary” for Luckett because she did not feel she could continue carrying a child who would die upon birth, she explained.

People should “focus [their] energy on uplifting women, making them stronger and breaking the structural violence that keeps them from controlling their own lives” rather than arguing about the laws surrounding women’s healthcare, Luckett posited. “Every woman lives within her own intimate space. If we could extend that empathy to all women, those we have not yet nor will ever meet, to walk in their shoes, then we might trust all women to make the best decisions for themselves.”

Luckett’s op-ed comes after a federal judge upheld a Mississippi law requiring doctors performing abortions also be certified as OB-GYNs. The ruling comes after Mississippi’s only abortion clinic sued the state, charging Mississippi’s abortion law poses a barrier to health care and presents an unconstitutional burden on women in the state seeking abortions. (RELATED: Abortions In Mississippi Need To Be Performed By OB-GYNs, Judge Rules)

Mississippi has been pushing for abortion reforms, including moving to ban abortions after 15 weeks of gestation, which some pro-choice advocates think is really a disguise to push the abortion conversation all the way to the Supreme Court.

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