Providence, R.I., Nov 11, 2010 / 03:58 am
It's no secret that Rhode Island Governor-elect Lincoln Chafee supports abortion. Still, even Chafee's supporters might wonder why his transition team features a doctor who boasted of performing secret abortions in Latin America.
“I never thought that I would be performing an abortion in a room with a picture of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, but there I was, in the middle of the Andes,” Dr. Pablo Rodriguez wrote in an essay published shortly before the 2000 presidential election.
The former medical director of Planned Parenthood, now a part of Governor-elect Chafee's transition team, packed his essay with disturbing Christian references– describing his clandestine abortion work as a “ministry” to spread the “gospel of reproductive rights.” He mused on the presence of religious imagery inside the clinic, noting that protesters outside U.S. clinics tended to display the same images.
Rodriguez also compared the American government's withdrawal of contraception funding from Latin American countries to the Biblical “Angel of Death,” and offered the possibility that the local women he was training to “stem the flow of misery” might regard themselves as performing “God's work.”