Utah Dr. Leah Torres spends most of her time working as a hospital OB-GYN, performing mammograms, prescribing birth control and examining women with high-risk pregnancies.
But on one Saturday each month, she heads to one of the two abortion facilities left in Utah and “help[s] people end their pregnancies.” She is an abortionist.
In an interview with The Nation, Torres lamented that she is not treated the same way as other health care providers because she performs abortions.
“I’m not driving around in a white van, knocking on doors, telling people they need an abortion,” she said. “I’m not a monster who hates children and makes a lot of money and does abortions left and right because I think [it’s] the right choice. I do abortions because it’s part of health care.”
“There’s a lot of shame and stigma surrounding abortions,” she continued. “That shame and stigma comes from silence from one side, and vociferousness from another side. You’ve got: ‘You’re a baby killer. Abortion is murder!’ That’s my motivation: revoking the power that the shame and stigma has over abortion. [It] drives all of these bad laws, drives the violence…. I’m trying to reduce that violence, the shame and negativity. Because abortion is health care.”
Torres grew up in Michigan, and she was adopted. However, she is no advocate for adoption as an alternative to abortion. Torres believes that adoption is only an alternative to parenting, not abortion.
She studied medicine in college and first became interested in doing abortions after meeting members of her college’s Medical Students for Choice club, a pro-abortion group. She said the members were “just super-fun” and friendly to her. After college and medical school, she moved to Utah to participate in a two-year fellowship program through the student pro-abortion group, according to the report. Though she found Utah to be a strong pro-life state, she decided to stay after the fellowship ended.
Both Torres and the writers of the piece criticized Utah’s pro-life laws, which require common-sense things like informed consent, parental notification for minors, waiting periods and requirements that abortion facilities meet the same health standards as other outpatient surgical facilities.
“The population in Utah that’s impacted most by these laws are those who have less money, who are lower in socioeconomic status,” Torres said.
Torres is very vocal about her abortion work, especially on Twitter. She said she fears being the target of violence from pro-lifers. The article spends a lot of time pointing fingers at pro-lifers and even making extreme, potentially slanderous claims about the movement.
“Anti-abortion activists have made the demonization, harassment, and even murder of abortion providers a central part of their strategy since the early 1990s,” the article, written by two editors at The Nation, claims.
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Even Torres did not go so far as to say that. She did say that she does not talk about her personal or family life, and she uses a post office box for her mail because she is afraid of harassment and violence. However, she also admitted that her experiences with pro-lifers in Utah have been “polite,” which “makes her feel safer.”
According to the article:
Torres has less patience for colleagues who mix their religious beliefs with their medical practice. One male ob-gyn that she’s worked with refuses to prescribe contraceptives to patients who aren’t married. (In the United States, it’s legal for doctors to refuse to provide services they judge to be in conflict with their moral beliefs. Accordingly, some Catholic health systems have gone so far as to try to prevent all of their networks’ doctors from prescribing birth control.) According to Torres, she’s helped three of this doctor’s patients end pregnancies they had hoped to prevent. “Those are the consequences,” she said, with some weariness, of holding the supposed moral high ground.
Torres seems sincere but extremely misguided in her abortion work. She appears to want to help women through difficult pregnancy circumstances. Unfortunately, she fails to see how her work destroys lives. She claims to be providing health care to one individual but in doing so she is killing another.
