‘I’ll sue you if you don’t provide her medical care.” That was Lidia’s response to the reckless doctor who botched her abortion at 26 weeks. “Your daughter will be a mental vegetable incapable of having a normal life. You should leave her to die on the table,” he said. Lidia was an immigrant living in poverty in New Orleans and no doubt had no idea how she would follow through with that threat. But a mother’s instinct kicked in, even as she had intended on walking out without that baby on that day in January 1990.
Sarah Zagorski writes about her earliest moments in a chapter of the new book Choose Life: Answering Key Claims of Abortion Defenders with Compassion, with a foreword from Alveda King, a niece of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Zagorski imagines the horror of the scene: “I can almost see her surroundings as she lay bare in front of the physician. Perhaps there were blood-stained linens beneath her, rusty medical equipment beside her, and maybe my tiny feet were barely in her view.”
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