I learned a few things recently in a ladies bathroom at Washington’s Reagan National airport. If I could have fit all 535 members of the United States Congress in that bathroom with me, they could have learned a few things too.

The ladies bathroom is not a traditional hangout for me; I was there at my wife’s urgent insistence. While in there she had found a young Hispanic woman in one of the stalls in serious medical trouble, and offered her the services of a physician she knew was nearby in the airport and available to make stall calls.

If you can be in deep doo-doo in a bathroom, this young woman was; 24 weeks pregnant and in active labor, sitting on the toilet and feeling the urge to push. Even a rocket scientist could have figured out this was trouble, and that the airport potty is no place to be birthin’ babies. An airport travelers aid volunteer with us called 911 while my wife and I got the young woman off the toilet and onto the floor, and told her that, whatever else she did, DO NOT PUSH!

The expectant mom had come to this bathroom from the airport restaurant next door, where she worked full time and had been having contractions all day. This was her first pregnancy, she told us, so she had little idea what was happening. She had been too scared to say anything until a couple of caring women heard her in the bathroom and did one of the many things women do so well – offer help and kindly refuse to take no for an answer.

A short while later she was on her way to a hospital, and we were on our way home.

In the days since we have thought often of that young woman and her baby, wondered what happened and how they both are, and thought about what it all meant. Here is what I think I learned, and what our politicians in Washington would have learned had they been sitting with us on that bathroom floor waiting for the ambulance.

I became more convinced than ever we are going to have health insurance for everyone in America within a decade. How do I know? When we told that young woman she had to go the hospital ASAP she said, “I don’t have health insurance, how will I pay for that?” That means a young woman who works full time is sitting on an airport toilet in premature labor and reluctant to go to the hospital because she has no insurance, in the world’s richest country. Those appalling stories about what the lack of health insurance does to people are unacceptable to most Americans.

If that does not motivate us, perhaps this will; With lack of health insurance now extending well into the middle class where voting power lies, it could have been any one of our daughters sitting in that bathroom uninsured and pregnant that day. This young woman may have had a brown face and a Hispanic accent, but more and more, she represents us and ours.

As I watched my wife kneeling on the floor, her arms wrapped around the woman and reassuring her while the paramedics checked to make sure the baby was not about to come out, I realized something else; my wife is the archetypal good American. She has a heart of gold and arms waiting to wrap around anyone in the world who is in trouble.

We may want to turn our backs on the world because getting involved gets us burned, puts our sons and daughters in uniform in harm’s way, consumes money we need here at home, and because the world sometimes seems awfully ungrateful for our best efforts. We may fail to always do what we should. We may be deeply flawed in many ways, but we are a great people in the country of the big heart, and we cannot look away from human need for long, or resist forever our urge to do the right thing.

Something else dawned on me as I thought back on those hectic moments with that young waitress from somewhere south of our borders. While she may have been in America legally, many others like her are not, but this country is never going to kick out 12 million illegal immigrants. We are simply not going to do that when they are good people too who work long hours like us and for us, fear for the future of their children just as we do ours, cry in pain and fright like us. Our leaders in Washington will just have to figure out another way to deal with the problem of the illegal immigrants living among us.

Our airport experience recalled to me the story of another young woman who also labored in a dingy place unfit for human habitation and surrounded by strangers. That story of the Virgin Mary, and ours of the young woman in the airport bathroom, reminded me we cannot turn our backs on our fellow human beings without betraying our faiths and who we are.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.