Last week our Sociology of Medicine professor, a kindly old man who has been with the university for 50 years and is affectionately known as Papa Smurf, took us on a mini field trip to the part of the building where he normally works: forensic medicine. We had just been talking the class before about child and domestic abuse and he welcomed us to the forensic hallway where they have displays of the kind of things they see. Some are photos, some are specimens or parts of specimens in jars, and there is even a full body that was found in a mummified state with it's two aborted (also mummified) fetuses--that's mummified as in very well preserved, not with the wrapping like the Egyptians. Everything was arranged thematically: stab wounds, gun shot wounds, skull fractures, illegally aborted fetuses (Catholic country = no abortions), etc...

For the sake of all I won't go into details about what I saw, but there were both interesting pieces and disturbing pieces. It was a conversation I had on the following Monday about the trip that intrigued me. One of my classmates is a Romanian American guy from California. He said that the mini-field trip had hit him pretty hard because his mother had tried to have an illegal abortion with him--coat hanger and all. For him it was strange to look at the fetuses that were aborted (some also killed the mother during or after the procedure) and realize that it could have been him (and his mom). I know plenty of people who were "surprises" or "mistakes" for their parents, but I'd never met anyone who actually knew that they had survived a botched abortion. As a parent in that situation, in what circumstance would you release that information? It's a situation and relationship that I've never encountered before.