- Email: [email protected]
William Harrison
Obituary
JT Wampler
The printed journal includes an image merely for illustration
William Harrison Obstetrician who was a proponent of abortion rights in the USA. Born in Faulkner County, AR, USA, on Sept 8, 1935, he died on Sept 24, 2010, in Fayetteville, AR, USA, aged 75 years. William Floyd Nathaniel Harrison was a man of strong convictions and no little personal courage. His many opponents dubbed him Dr Satan or the Abortionist of Arkansas. He said he was looking after women. Harrison, who wrote and spoke openly and often about his work, performed perhaps 20 000 abortions in his career in the USA, continuing to offer them when many providers closed their doors out of fear for their own safety. He became an obstetrician for love of delivering babies but ended up specialising in abortion because, he said, he could not refuse the poor and desperate women he saw in his clinic, some of whom had suffered appalling internal injuries after attempting to terminate the pregnancy without clinical help. The moment of understanding came for him in 1967, he wrote, when he was a third-year medical student with three children of his own and little money. He was obliged to tell a 40-year-old woman who had too many children already to clothe and feed that her abdominal mass was, in fact, an advanced pregnancy. “Oh God, doctor”, she said quietly. “I was hoping it was cancer.” Until that day, he said, he would have considered himself “Pro-Life”. In one of many articles explaining his position, Harrison wrote: “Over the next few years, I was exposed to real life as it is lived by millions of people who don’t have the sanctification granted in America to those who are white, male, well-educated, well gene-ed, well-nurtured, well advantaged. I learned that 1460
what this woman knew was a personal tragedy for herself and her family was only one face in a multifacted problem confronting thousands of girls and women every day.” He described the “repercussions of desperation” he saw in the emergency room of University Hospital, Little Rock: “girls and women with raging fevers, extraordinary uterine and pelvic infections, enormous blood loss, and a multitude of serious injuries of the pelvic and intra-abdominal organs as a result of illegal and self-induced abortions.” Abortion was legalised in 1973, the year after Harrison set up the Fayetteville Women’s Clinic in Arkansas where he worked for the rest of his life. He would have concentrated on delivering babies, but began to be besieged by unhappily pregnant women who were being turned away elsewhere as doctors began to be targeted by anti-abortion campaigners. In the end, Harrison was the only doctor in the region who would help. He became a target himself. His offices were firebombed and he and his family received many death threats. Protesters picketed his clinic. He refused to be intimidated, said his nurse and office manager Kitten Weiss, who worked with him for 20 years. “He would go out and talk to them, offer them lunch, shake their hands”, she said. “At first they were frightened—he was Dr Satan, the devil doctor. He was a baby murderer. But after they talked to him and saw he was a really nice man, they backed off and talked back.” Harrison was not a man to hide himself or his opinions. He went to speak to ethics classes and even anti-abortion groups and was well-received, said Weiss. He did not make light of what he was doing. “No one, neither the patient receiving the abortion nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life”, he wrote. It was not an easy choice but a hard moral dilemma, between two evils. To abandon the women who asked for his help, however, he believed would be “immoral and unethical”. The son of school teachers, Harrison’s family was nominally Methodist. His father was the Sunday school superintendent, but because the two local churches, Baptist and Methodist, alternated their services, the family attended both. When he was 17 years old, Harrison enlisted in the navy, but later enrolled at the University of Arkansas to study business. When he met his future wife, Betty Waggoner, she was dating a premed student, so he claimed to have switched to medicine himself to impress her. They were married for 50 years and had two daughters and a son. All of them, and seven grandchildren, survive him. Harrison said that when he started medical school, his family did not know how they would be able to afford for him to qualify. But his mother always told him that “the Lord has a special purpose for your life”. He came to believe that in his medical career and in his abortion provision to poor women, many of whom he helped without payment, he was fulfilling that destiny.
Sarah Boseley [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 376 October 30, 2010
JT Wampler
The printed journal includes an image merely for illustration
William Harrison Obstetrician who was a proponent of abortion rights in the USA. Born in Faulkner County, AR, USA, on Sept 8, 1935, he died on Sept 24, 2010, in Fayetteville, AR, USA, aged 75 years. William Floyd Nathaniel Harrison was a man of strong convictions and no little personal courage. His many opponents dubbed him Dr Satan or the Abortionist of Arkansas. He said he was looking after women. Harrison, who wrote and spoke openly and often about his work, performed perhaps 20 000 abortions in his career in the USA, continuing to offer them when many providers closed their doors out of fear for their own safety. He became an obstetrician for love of delivering babies but ended up specialising in abortion because, he said, he could not refuse the poor and desperate women he saw in his clinic, some of whom had suffered appalling internal injuries after attempting to terminate the pregnancy without clinical help. The moment of understanding came for him in 1967, he wrote, when he was a third-year medical student with three children of his own and little money. He was obliged to tell a 40-year-old woman who had too many children already to clothe and feed that her abdominal mass was, in fact, an advanced pregnancy. “Oh God, doctor”, she said quietly. “I was hoping it was cancer.” Until that day, he said, he would have considered himself “Pro-Life”. In one of many articles explaining his position, Harrison wrote: “Over the next few years, I was exposed to real life as it is lived by millions of people who don’t have the sanctification granted in America to those who are white, male, well-educated, well gene-ed, well-nurtured, well advantaged. I learned that 1460
what this woman knew was a personal tragedy for herself and her family was only one face in a multifacted problem confronting thousands of girls and women every day.” He described the “repercussions of desperation” he saw in the emergency room of University Hospital, Little Rock: “girls and women with raging fevers, extraordinary uterine and pelvic infections, enormous blood loss, and a multitude of serious injuries of the pelvic and intra-abdominal organs as a result of illegal and self-induced abortions.” Abortion was legalised in 1973, the year after Harrison set up the Fayetteville Women’s Clinic in Arkansas where he worked for the rest of his life. He would have concentrated on delivering babies, but began to be besieged by unhappily pregnant women who were being turned away elsewhere as doctors began to be targeted by anti-abortion campaigners. In the end, Harrison was the only doctor in the region who would help. He became a target himself. His offices were firebombed and he and his family received many death threats. Protesters picketed his clinic. He refused to be intimidated, said his nurse and office manager Kitten Weiss, who worked with him for 20 years. “He would go out and talk to them, offer them lunch, shake their hands”, she said. “At first they were frightened—he was Dr Satan, the devil doctor. He was a baby murderer. But after they talked to him and saw he was a really nice man, they backed off and talked back.” Harrison was not a man to hide himself or his opinions. He went to speak to ethics classes and even anti-abortion groups and was well-received, said Weiss. He did not make light of what he was doing. “No one, neither the patient receiving the abortion nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life”, he wrote. It was not an easy choice but a hard moral dilemma, between two evils. To abandon the women who asked for his help, however, he believed would be “immoral and unethical”. The son of school teachers, Harrison’s family was nominally Methodist. His father was the Sunday school superintendent, but because the two local churches, Baptist and Methodist, alternated their services, the family attended both. When he was 17 years old, Harrison enlisted in the navy, but later enrolled at the University of Arkansas to study business. When he met his future wife, Betty Waggoner, she was dating a premed student, so he claimed to have switched to medicine himself to impress her. They were married for 50 years and had two daughters and a son. All of them, and seven grandchildren, survive him. Harrison said that when he started medical school, his family did not know how they would be able to afford for him to qualify. But his mother always told him that “the Lord has a special purpose for your life”. He came to believe that in his medical career and in his abortion provision to poor women, many of whom he helped without payment, he was fulfilling that destiny.
Sarah Boseley [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 376 October 30, 2010