According to a recent newsletter by the Pregnancy Care Clinic (PCC) in San Diego, “Providing free ultrasounds is an essential service that we offer …”  No surprise therefore that California has sought to stop any physicians practicing as sole proprietorships from being allowed to perform ultrasounds with its AB1720 amendment petition.^[9]  The Devil knows what he’s doing as a lying murderer.  Ultrasounds save children’s lives.

Editor’s Note: Pregnancy care clinics in San Diego County—the author’s residence, have recently been under serious attack to be shut down.  Please see the footnote below about today’s December 5 meeting with San Diego County Supervisors and how to influence them.^[1]

My wife and I had determined we fully filled my quiver this January with the delivery of our daughter.  So, I was quite surprised this June when she hinted that another little reward was likely awaiting us in her womb!  I responded, “That’s impossible!”—not out of desperation, but confusion about how it could have happened during the identified month of conception.

Yet, indeed, next March we are expecting our eighth covenant child.^[2]  We learned through an early blood test that he will be our fifth son, and we are now praying for him by his name, Gaius Ezekiel Van Leuven.^[3]  Naturally, we ask of the Lord that our “Little Guy” makes it to full term healthy and strong.  How frightful that such prayer cover proved important for him just to survive my wife’s first gynecology visit!

Right at the start, the lady doctor asked if we had planned the pregnancy.  When my wife sheepishly admitted that through natural family planning we had tried for her not to become pregnant,^[4] the doctor cavalierly responded, “Do you want to be?  You don’t have to be.  This is California.”

Thus, she lectured my wife while our then eight-month-old daughter, grinning her fresh cut choppers, giggled and bounced upon my knee—whom the doctor had already googled over upon entering the other end of the cramped patient’s room where we were tucked into a tight corner behind the door waiting with Mamma awaiting her checkup on the examination chair.  My wife and I were flabbergasted; but she quickly reacted resolutely confirming that we would gladly receive our gift from God.

The doctor, a mother of one young daughter who was filling in for my wife’s normally assigned and supportive gynecologist, shockingly defaulted to this sly rhetorical implication and pressure: “No, you don’t, do you?  You have too many children already.  You’re forty years old and you just cut your last child’s umbilical cord only a few months ago—her belly button has surely barely healed over.  Let’s end this now.  You don’t need this.  You don’t want it.”^[5]

But after seeing that her preliminary temptation was a lost cause, the doctor conceded to the second selection column of her mental checklist and wheeled over the ultrasound machine, flicking on its hum and beeps and blinks.  As she guided its scanning wand over my wife’s gel-lathered tummy, we watched in wonderment while our son kept kicking with his Mamma’s long legs and his strong heartbeat pulsed and scratched across the screen in real time!  It is always amazing.

I couldn’t believe how this medical professional who would have taken the Hippocratic Oath could now hypocritically look at our baby and enjoy him with us on the monitor just minutes after first offering to kill him; and frankly, robustly suggesting we take her up on that offer.

But what really struck me later as we strolled toward the hospital elevators and paused outside its entryway—repeatedly smiling over the sonogram strip of baby pics, was this: the doctor did NOT propose turning to the ultrasound machine in the room so we could see our living baby until AFTER we had affirmed we would keep him alive.^[6]  And that timing it seems to me was strategic.

Had we expressed uncertainty and been led toward aborting our baby, very likely we would never have been presented with the choice to look at him moving on the monitor before the deed was done and he was dead—nor have to face his little face in the aftermath.  How could we see his heart beating and then have the heart to crush it?  Of course, the doctor didn’t provide the pregnancy scan possibility during her initial inquisition!

But how many uninformed others hear no mention of the ultrasound machine before naively leaving it unplugged in the corner and then silencing a baby’s voice forever? —because of the powerfully persuasive and prejudiced push of a snide doctor’s urging?

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