Loretta Ross on Women Fighting Back

Posted on 3.09.2012 by Amy

Watch Loretta Ross on Democracy Now! discussing the latest wave of attacks against abortion and contraception!

Caring for the Ones Who Never Call

Posted on 2.29.2012 by Amy

Cross-posted with The Abortioneers.

It can be a scary prospect to call up an abortion clinic and make an appointment for what has become one of our society’s most stigmatized — and yet one of its most common —medical procedures.

Which is probably why some patients don’t immediately admit that’s why they’re calling.

As a former phone counselor at a clinic, I used to hear a lot of: “Um…I wanted to know how much it costs?” and “Hi…I’m looking for some information about…abortion?”

(This last one was spoken as a question, with the word “abortion” issued in a whisper, like a big, bad, ugly secret.)

I sometimes tried to use the word as much as possible when I answered those tentative calls.

“I would be happy to answer any questions you have about ABORTION! What type of ABORTION do you think you might be interested in having?”

Often, these patients weren’t simply calling for information; they knew they wanted an abortion, but they were scared and confused about what the process might entail.

I sometimes felt like women called just to test us out. Maybe they had always believed abortion was murder and they wanted to know whether we would tell them what they were doing was wrong or try to make them feel guilty. Maybe they were wondering whether the women who worked in the Big, Bad Baby-Killing Center were human beings like them. Many were scared they wouldn’t be able to have children in the future, or that we would do something violent and terrible to remove their unwanted pregnancies.

They were certain we would judge them, just as others in their life had judged them. They were wondering whether they could trust us with their stories.

They ached to justify themselves.

The State of My Union is the State of My Uterus

Posted on 1.23.2012 by Admin

This post is by Aphra Behn of Guerilla Girls On Tour! It is cross-posted with Gender Across Borders.

While on tour this year, I felt an uncomfortable cramping near my crotch. It was somewhere between Arkansas and Oklahoma that I realized what it was. The government was tightening its grip on my uterus.

In Kansas, my uterus signed up for a sex education class but the only subject taught was abstinence. In West Virginia, my uterus got tired of abstinence and got a prescription for birth control, but my health insurance company wouldn’t pay for it. As a result, by Texas my uterus was pregnant and sought pre-natal care, but there wasn’t any because state legislators decimated Planned Parenthood's funds.

Conservatives proclaim to detest government interference in one's life. Republicans make careers out of repealing regulations. Yet, both groups seem obsessed with restricting what goes on inside my uterus. It got so bad this year that at one point, I think Congress believed that controlling my uterus would create more jobs.

Now, my uterus may not see ovary to ovary with other uteruses across the land. But no matter where we reside, we are all American uteri and as such are guaranteed a fundamental human right, the right to privacy. But without much outcry, my uterine rights are shriveling away.

In the first half of last year, 80 abortion restrictions were enacted in male-dominated legislatures across my country, more than tripling the 23 enacted in 2010. The last half of the year was gloomier yet, marked by Mississippi voters pondering an initiative that would have declared a fertilized egg a legal person and Health and Human Services Secretary Katheleen Sebelius overruling the FDA’s decision to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter for all women.

Patients Who Give Us Hope

Posted on 1.15.2012 by Amy

For me, it was the serene-faced mother of a two-year-old who looked toward the ceiling after her abortion and said:

“I am so grateful for this option.”

Each abortion care worker has at least one patient in recent memory who gave us that mushy-gushy feeling in our bellies -- who made the work feel worthwhile.

For Deborah Oyer, the Seattle doctor who owns Aurora Medical Services, one of those patients was a religious 17-year-old who was against abortion...until she ended up in Oyer’s office seeking one.

Now, I would venture to guess that each abortion care worker also has one or two patients who make them want to scream. For some of us, those are the anti-choice patients who, through tightly woven, convoluted and protective mental processes, have decided that they are the only ones who should ever, ever be allowed to have an abortion.

Deborah Oyer summed up the basic argument made by some of these patients:

“Everyone else in your waiting room is a slut, and I have a good reason for having an abortion. I’m against abortion, except I need one.”

I’ve struggled recently with the question of whether abortion needs to be a politically transformative experience. Is it fair for me to secretly wish all patients were as pro-choice as the mother whom I mentioned?

Arbitrary Abortion Laws, from South Dakota to Greece

Posted on 10.06.2011 by Amy

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders.

I have been planning a trip to Greece. So as you read this, I am taking a break from my job at an abortion clinic to gaze out on something like this photo.

Don’t hate me.

In addition to researching Greece’s legendary beaches...and history -- and the country’s protests in response to austerity measures -- I decided to research abortion laws there. In part, I wanted to know how open I could be about my work. But I was also curious. As recent and unparalleled legal attacks in this country have shown, abortion laws can be fascinating studies in systemic absurdity. When one belief system (the one that says abortion is murder) hits an irreconcilable belief system (the one that says women are more human than fetuses) the legal results are convoluted and bizarre. Governments try to compromise incompatible perspectives by regulating those procedures that involve slightly larger fetuses, or by making it harder for women to access abortion.

For example, at the end of March, South Dakota adopted a measure (which was blocked after a legal challenge) that would make a woman wait 72 hours for an abortion after her first visit with a doctor and force her to visit a crisis pregnancy center (havens of religiously fueled brainwashing) in the interim. A federal appeals court recently upheld parts of a 2005 law in that state requiring doctors to tell a patient that abortion “will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being” and inform the woman that she has “an existing relationship with that unborn human being.”