Democratic Rep. Cori Bush reveals in a new book that a doctor performed an abortion on her against her will after she had made an appointment and changed her mind.
Bush, a U.S. representative from Missouri, discusses the traumatic moment in her new book, The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America.
Having undergone one abortion, she says she falsely believed she was emotionally prepared for a second abortion.
"I was thinking back to the first abortion – 'Okay, you've done this before, you know the rooms, you know what it looks like, you know what it feels like in this place.'… I thought I was ready," she told host Margeret Hoover in an episode of PBS' Firing Line.
Whoa. @CoriBush says she changed her mind about getting an abortion when she was 19 but the abortionist ignored her pleas, put the instrument inside her, and “started the instrument” to kill her baby.
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) October 7, 2022
“I’m saying no.”
“They absolutely ignored me.” pic.twitter.com/7JiiRSw68v
Bush described the situation in detail to Hoover.
"It's almost like an assembly line, you know, you go from room to room. And I got into the last room. I was helped up onto the table by the nurse," Bush said. "And I lay there, and I started to think, 'Well, one, I didn't tell the father that [an abortion] was about to happen.' And I just felt like I needed more time. So I said, 'No, you know what, I'm not ready.' And the nurse, just, you know, wouldn't listen to me. And I said, 'No, I'm not ready.' And as I'm saying, 'no,' they continue to pull the instruments and get everything ready. And it was just like, 'No, calm down. You know? No, you're going to be okay.'"
The doctor and nurse, she said, "absolutely ignored me."
"I remember laying there looking to see if there was someone else in the room that would listen to me," she said. "... During this time, they put the instrument inside me and started the instrument. ... And I'm saying 'no,' but it was too late because you couldn't stop once it started."
Hoover asked, "Why do you think they didn't listen to you?"
"I was a young black woman," Bush said. "Multiple times, I felt like it was, 'Oh, well, we know better. You don't know what you need. You don't understand. We know better.'"
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Tasos Katopodis/Stringer
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
