".  .  .  I got into my medical training. As part of the medical training, abortions became a necessary procedure, according to my chief of my department. This was in 1971. This was a few years before the law changed in the country, but it changed in New York a few years before, and the abortion law changed, and we were going to do abortions. After all, we needed to serve women. We needed to do it in a complete way. We needed to know all the procedures that we needed to do for women. We needed to know how to do them well; otherwise we weren't considered effectively trained. Our chief said that if we didn't do the abortions, we might as well get out of obstetrics and gynecology because we just wouldn't be a complete physician. He was a very influential man. I remember that he would be up with us at night, very frequently, with patients. He wasn't an "ivory tower" sort of guy--distant from the other residents in my training program. He was there with us, so we respected this man. He was brilliant, but right there on the frontlines with us, so when we started doing the abortions, we had panels. I don't know if any of you remember that, but there were panels that the women had to pass by before they had the abortion. They were made up of nurses, social workers, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like, to very carefully see if the women really were rather ill, medically or emotionally, before they had the abortion.

The abortions, when we started, were done by the D&C method--there was no suction then. This is where you dilate and curette--you actually scrape the lining. This took, sometimes, 15 to 20 minutes, even for an eight- or ten-week-size uterus, so it was kind of a bloody sort of thing. We didn't really like it, doing it, when we started, really. one doctor was Catholic, so he was allowed by his beliefs not to do that, but the others of us went along with peer pressure. We thought about it, though, and we felt uncomfortable about it, but we sort of did it. We knew we were going about it quite carefully, and we only did about five or six a week, so amongst 12 or so residents, that meant we only did one about every two weeks.

But things gradually changed--new technology came along; we developed the suction procedure, and things went much quicker. It wasn't as bloody  and it was quicker and it was a little bit easier to take. I can't really say that any of us had nightmares about this thing at that time. We just felt kind of uncomfortable doing them. But when the suction came along, we did them quicker, and then we did five or six in a day. Then gradually, those panels dropped by the wayside. We were doing too many to really have them go through this arduous, long process of evaluation, and then the reasons, of course, for abortion--the severity of the reasons, medically, became less and less, and then emotional problems needed to be less and less severe. It was a gradual desensitization, so to speak, or toleration of doing them, more and more and in larger numbers. Then we advanced up along in pregnancy a little bit further. It used to be we didn't go beyond about ten weeks. Then we want up to 12 and we kind of stayed there for a while.

Foot of a 12 week unborn baby

The media was very active early on. It really probably was one of the major influences to us. It told us that abortion was number one, legal, that it was to serve women, it was to give women a choice, more or less give them a freedom to grow and to take their rightful place in society where they had been kind of pushed down prior to that. We believed the lie that there were tens of thousands of women being maimed and killed from illegal abortions prior to the legalization of abortion law. It kind of made things feel a little bit better. By this time, since we were doing five or six a day, it didn't bother us as much.

In my life at this time, too, I had become married and I had moved, back in 1973, from Albany down to Atlanta, Georgia, with the Army--Uncle Sam got me. I spent two years there at Fort McPherson in Atlanta Georgia. During that time, I had one baby; then I had another baby, and I have two boys. I also began working in abortion clinics. That was the newest thing. There were like seven or eight of them at that time in Atlanta. I had been moonlighting at other times to make money to save to go into practice, because going into practice is expensive for a young doctor, and you needed to save your money in order to do that, so the clinics offered an easy way to make money. Prior to that, I had to do insurance physicals, and I had to travel all over the countryside to do them, so that didn't really pay off too well. I had to go down and work in Emergency Rooms a hundred miles away for 36, 48 hours at a time; up all that time working. And they didn't pay me, maybe a few hundred dollars for doing that, so that wasn't going to amount to much. In the clinic, I could make $25.00 for each abortion case, but we did 20 or 30 of those some days, and I remember one day, when they really got going, we did 62. That was my high point, or, you might say, low point. So you could make a great deal of money doing the abortions, it became quite evident. Through my industriousness and my skill, I was sort of appointed by the medical director of the clinic to more or less take over the running of the clinic from the medical perspective and I, myself, became the medical director of a clinic there.

Something was happening to me also at that time, emotionally, though. As it has been spoken about, I could do an abortion--rather, I could do several hours of abortions--and feel nothing. I was just a good technician. I think at the most, I would get a little bit of a charge out of the fact that women occasionally would thank me for doing the abortion. They were really relieved of the pressure that that would have brought on to their lives. But, for the most part, I didn't think much of it at all at that time. It wasn't until I became divorced and began really searching for something more. It was sort of like, here I was a doctor; I was making a lot of money; but what did I have? There must be more to life than this. I sort of had this searching feeling from inside of me. Something was not there. Something was missing. I thought at first it might be love, you know. So you take that to its natural extreme--I had a relationship with a woman outside the marriage--and the marriage broke up, and I became divorced. The sad part, of course, was that two little boys lost a father in the case. But still, I was determined. I felt that this time, I finally had it made--here I was, a bachelor doctor in Atlanta, Georgia, with just everything before me. I got all the women I wanted, and all the good times, life in the fast lane, so to speak. I really felt that I had it made, but I still had this gnawing sort of emptiness inside.

What happened then was a Christian girl came into my life and influenced me, basically. The reason she came into my life to start with is because the only prerequisite that I had for dating somebody was that they looked good. She happened to look good. So with that great motivation, the Lord twisted that around. She broke up with me, but on doing so, she gave me two Scriptures. Now that should have, under this influence, had absolutely no influence on this guy at all. You have to picture me now. I was a bachelor doctor; I had an Afro and a beard that made my face look rather round all the way; I had a leather jacket from K-Mart--it wasn't really leather, but it looked good, and I looked tough and I took Karate to prove it. I had a motorcycle, too, of course. You have to have a motorcycle with a jacket.

So this is this person here. Why this Christian ever dated me, I have no idea, but God did. She gave me two Scriptures--Jeremiah 15 and Psalm 139:13-18, well known to a lot of people. I had not read the Bible for years--you know that--and I hadn't. But for some reason, these Scriptures meant something to me. Now, she knew I had done abortions and felt terrible about them and this was to hopefully change my mind, and I kind of laughed.

But when I read them, I didn't laugh because it was just as if there was a knife that went right through my middle and it made me realize that instead of serving women, I was killing babies. This slowed this super-macho guy down real quick. But, it didn't stop me from doing the abortions. What those Scriptures say, briefly, and meant to me, is that God knew us before we were conceived (me, before I was conceived--all the babies I ever killed, before they were conceived), He had plans for their lives and they became human beings to me, in the truest sense of the word--they became babies, they became children, really, in a deeper sense than ever before. So, what they did to me was they made me feel uncomfortable doing the abortions. I just plain felt uncomfortable doing them. The Lord knew this.

At the same time, He knew that I was going to be starting to do these D&E procedures, because just at that time the D&E procedures were starting up in the clinic. Now, as you have heard about these, the babies are bigger. They are visible, they are fully-formed babies, and you are tearing them apart from below. I was experienced--I had done many, many thousands by then--so I was sent to Chicago to learn this procedure, and I did, because no one else knew how to do them safely. So, I did them and I started doing them, and then I really started feeling uncomfortable.

16 weeks- candidate for a D&E

 

The other thing that was shocking to this science of fetology that may have been talked about today was well-developed now. Interestingly enough, almost parallel with the abortion movement, this (I am sure God set this up, of course) was to show everyone that at the same time we are killing babies to tell us that they really were babies. I think the greatest thing there is-- there are all sorts of details on babies feeling things and having brain waves and being so well-developed and almost indistinguishable really from us and our own sensitivities--but I think the greatest thing that got to us was the ultrasound. At that time, the ultrasound was a sound wave picture which was moving, called real-time ultrasound, to show the baby really on TV. The baby really came alive on TV and was moving and that picture--that picture of the baby on the ultrasound bothered me more than anything else, because as I didn't know then really, you bond with that picture. Women get those pictures even if they are still pictures, and boy, it's their baby and they put it up on walls, they bring it in to show it to me, and they don't even know what's there, but they see head, arm, leg all typed out for them so they know what it is, but they know it's a baby.

Anyway, the nurses had to help with this, had to look at this to stage how far along the D&E was, because you got paid more if it was 14, 16, more if it was 18 weeks and so on. In other words, the larger the pregnancy, the more you got paid, and the more the clinic got also. So it was very important for us to do that and to make sure they weren't too large for us to do.

When we started, we lost two nurses. They couldn't take looking at it. Some other staff was lost. The turnover got greater when we started doing the D&Es and mostly, as I said, the ultrasounds. So I think the ultrasound was one of the keys there. The other thing, too, is because the women who are having the abortions are never allowed to look at the ultrasound, because we know even if they heard the heart beat that many times they wouldn't have the abortion, and you wouldn't want that. No money in that.

So that science, my intellectual development and my heart development, were kind of running parallel at that time. Well, I was undaunted. I was going to still search for the "truth" and so I decided to start giving a little bit more. I had kind of been a taker all my life--at this time of my life, I was quite a taker--so I was going to give back to people, so I joined the Lion's Club, and I roared with the best of them. And I got plaques for doing good stuff, for myself, really--it made me feel good. But it didn't--it still came up empty, so that didn't work too well so I decided to become active in the medical community. I got active in the hospitals and got all sorts of boring committees and things.

Dr. Randall then talks about how religion became important in his life after he tried numerous coping techniques without success.  He started to have reservations about what he was doing.

Now, what kept me on the fence for a year and a half was money. I had become trapped by the money; not that I wouldn't give up money, necessarily, for certain things, but not my whole life. And now I was getting divorced. By the way, a divorced doctor is known as a poor doctor in Atlanta. The reason for that is that your ex-wife gets a whole lot of money. In my case, she got two-thirds of my income. Now half of my income was tied up in doing the abortions, and the other half in a gynecology practice. I mention a gynecology practice because I didn't do obstetrics. I couldn't deliver babies. I just didn't do that.

I said I was giving up delivering because my abortions were my deliveries. Kind of a hard-hearted sort of a guy. You know, it was good not having to get up at night and so forth. It just worked out that way. So, here I was with two-thirds of my income having to go to support my ex-wife and fifty percent of my income, though, being involved with abortion. Therefore I assumed that I would go immediately bankrupt. Now the reason I assumed that even more was my ex-wife was not friendly. It took nine hearings just to get divorced. I just knew it was going to be a terrible thing to do, so I had to come to grips with a little bit of an honesty within me that said, Yes, you can wait till you finish up paying your wife off--it was only like a year or so later that I would be finished making these enormous payments. But the voice said, Do it now. Do it now. It said, Trust Me. A lot of voices were also saying you're going bankrupt; you're going to have all sorts of problems.