There was one time when I almost fell apart: I was in my second trimester, performing a 17-week procedure on a patient. The fetus, which is normally extracted in parts, came through the cervix intact. I dropped it in the metal dish and I saw it move, or thought I did. It was all I could do not to run from the procedure room crying.

That was the only time.

At first I was nervous about what my patients would think and say when I started showing, but they always expressed genuine happiness for me, even in the midst of their own difficulties. “Girl, you are going to love that baby,” one mother of three said to me as I prepped her for her procedure. A 19-year-old woman, ending her first pregnancy, smiled at me through her tears. “It’s your time,” she said.

In fact, the hardest moment came long after my daughter was born.

One day at the clinic, a protester watched me from the sidewalk as I pulled into the parking lot. I felt his eyes on me as I climbed out and opened the trunk to get my bag.

We keep a stroller in our trunk, like any other parents of an almost-1-year-old.

Oh, look at that! The man shouted across the lot, the vitriol in his voice coating me like grease. That’s hypocrisy if I ever saw it. The baby killer has a stroller in her trunk. How do you live with yourself? Killing babies in the morning and going home in the evening and putting the baby in the stroller. You are sick!

I closed the trunk, holding back tears. I walked to the door of the clinic.

He called after me. Repent! Repent, baby killer!

How do I continue to do this work?

The answer is that there is a connection between my work as an abortion doctor and my work as a mother; it’s just not what most people imagine. It’s not a tension or a contradiction to be reconciled. It’s a symbiosis, a harmony.

I do not mean it’s an easy job. Of course it’s not. There is the protester on the sidewalk. There is the fetus in the dish, the perfect curl of its fingers and toes. Sometimes it reminds me of my daughter — how could it not? But that is precisely the point.