“When I was doing my residency in New York, a patient came in 18 weeks pregnant and very, very sick. The only way to save her was to terminate the pregnancy. We were in a Catholic hospital … I vividly recall my director of obstetrics and the chairman arguing with the nuns. They said, “Well, the baby’s only 18 weeks, it’s going to die.” They felt very strongly that we could not do anything, but they would be okay with us transferring her to get care elsewhere. The director rode with the patient in the ambulance because he was afraid that she would have seizures. She was in her early 20s, and she already had a kid. That really got to me. How could we let this mom die and leave her child behind when we have the means to take care of her? I said to myself: “I never want my hands tied behind my back like that again.” I used to travel; these days I’m mostly in Georgia and I’m a backup physician in Alabama. In Alabama, my patients tend to be poor and young. The youngest was barely 12. She went to play with a classmate, and there were older boys over … When her guardians brought her in, I was reluctant to take care of her in an outpatient setting because we couldn’t sedate her. I went to the local hospital and said, “She’s just a baby. She’s suffered enough. Please, can we put her to sleep.” Everybody was onboard. Things have changed so much I don’t know if I would be able to get away with that now. The most frustrating thing for me, especially in the Southeast, is seeing so many women who are not empowered to take care of themselves. Especially women of color. You hear things like “I was told I’m too young for an IUD” when we know that’s not true. They need to know what their options are. I’m Haitian-American, and the part of me that is extremely cynical wants to say, Well, it’s because these are black women. But I really think it’s a matter of poverty. It just so happens that the face of poverty may be black. A few weeks ago, a woman came in for a medical abortion. As she was about to take the pill, she asked, “Do you think God hates me?” And I said, “No, he doesn’t hate you.” She said to me: “I tried so hard not to get pregnant. I told my boyfriend to use a condom, but he refused and forced himself on me.” If you overturn Roe v. Wade, what’s going to happen is we’ll go back to the way it was before. Every state for themselves. And best believe that the conservative states are going to try to outdo each other. Poor women will suffer. Poor women will die. There’s a generation of abortion providers who are more willing to be vocal about the impact of these different legislative measures. I tell my learners, “I don’t expect you to provide abortion care, but I want you to support your co-worker if they say, ‘Hey, we need a piece of legislation.’ I want you to stand behind us. But most importantly, I want you to be able to counsel and educate your patient in a way that respects her decision.” If I can train 500 providers who are compassionate and willing to respect and help their patients, I’ve done my job.”
if roe v wade gets overturned make no mistake, the women who are going to be most hurt by it are working-class women who more often than not might be against abortion and birth control in concept and will find themselves absolutely abandoned and without a place to turn when they need help!! the lack of educational resources about abortion (and even just basic female health!) and the allowance of “crisis” pregnancy centers that spread misinformation is one of the things that keeps women in working class conservative communities under the heel of the patriarchy and also in a state of financial insecurity! women who have children before they’re ready or who they cannot support become so financially insecure so fucking quickly! and I know it’s a weird thing to talk about them specifically right now but I’m going to anyways because while I do have love and sympathy for all my fellow middle class urban-living liberal/leftist women on my twitter timeline who are freaking out right now at the end of the day the biggest victims of reproductive health rollbacks are the ones who know the absolute least about their choices and options!!
I want to be really clear about something: Planned Parenthood has done more to prevent abortion than the pro-life movement ever has.
Yup, preventing abortion by giving abortions. Makes sense!
No you fucking crusty nutsack giving people the education and the tools to not become pregnant in the first fucking place
One of my Christian friends made a Facebook post about how PP gave her tons of resources when she was trying to get pregnant and people were actually genuinely shocked that they provided such resources; they had fully bought into the idea that PP is just an “abortion factory”. The misinformation that’s been spread about PP is unreal.
gosh it’s almost like Planned Parenthood will help you plan for parenthood
My great-grandmother was pregnant for over a decade of her life.
She was pregnant at least fifteen times, had over a dozen children. Raised all of them in a big rambling farmhouse in central Pennsylvania.
And I thought about her this afternoon, lying in bed with my spouse after my lazy weekend nap, snuggling him and burying my nose in his hair, taking deep breaths of the scent of his skin. This man who is the center of my universe, my best friend, one of two reasons why I literally decided I had to live and kept fighting through the pain after surgery when I really wanted to just let go and die: I held him closer and I thought of her.
I thought of how family myth tells us that after a decade of being pregnant pretty much constantly, she kicked my great-grandfather out of their house. How she made him go live in his workshop, and he came to the house for meals and to check in.
But he slept in his workshop.
Not because she didn’t love him, but because she did.
She loved him, and if they slept in the same bed together, these two people who had crossed an ocean together, had built a life together after getting out of Poland together, they’d have sex. And because cheap, reliable, universal birth control wasn’t available then, and she was terribly fecund, apparently, she’d become pregnant again, inevitably.
My great-grandmother was TIRED of being pregnant.
So she kicked her love out of the house, and he went. He lived in his workshop, on their farm, and they stopped sleeping together, in every sense of the word. My father tells me he remembers as a child his grandfather sitting outside his workshop, leaning back on his chair, and looking up at the house in which he couldn’t sleep anymore, just… sad.
They missed each other desperately from across the yard.
I listen to @adhocavenger sleep, to the sound of his breathing, a sound that’s as familiar to me as my own heartbeat, and I can’t imagine having to sleep away from him for long. To have to separate myself from my spouse or to have to completely eschew having the kind of sex they obviously enjoyed having. To not have him close enough at night that I can curl up to him and breathe in the scent of his skin.
And that, I think, is the sort of thing that I think maybe I take for granted. That I know I can be secure in the knowledge that I can have sex with my spouse when I want to, and not have a baby.
The personal is political. I do not want our country to continue to slide backward on reproductive freedom. I do not want us to lose our freedom, threatened and small as it may be.
There are a thousand small tragedies that we talk about from the Olde Days. The unwanted baby of the unmarried lass, of course.
But my heart breaks tonight for the story I was told as a child, of the lovingly married couple who had to sleep apart because she was just damn tired of being pregnant.
Because she’d been pregnant for a DECADE of her life.
Thank you for sharing this. I had never considered that aspect of the birth control revolution.
“Personal is pollitical”, agreed, whole heartedly.
This woman is named June Ayres and she has owned and operated Reproductive Health Services, which is currently the only clinic in Montgomery, Alabama, for about 30 years. May I suggest that you donate the price of that beer to The Linda D Foundation, which helps Alabama women afford reproductive services including birth control, emergency contraception, and abortion services? http://alabamareproductiverightsadvocates.com/thelindadfoundation/
This gifset is from an incredible documentary called Trapped. You can find or organize a screening or stream it for free here: http://www.trappeddocumentary.com/
It’s seriously an amazing movie about some amazing people.
This woman’s casual level of “Fuck You” herosim is exactly what I aspire to be in life.
Dr. Willie Parker, who is trained as a gynecologist and OBGYN, is a hero for the pro-choice movement because he’s honest about the undiscussed aspects of getting (or not getting) an abortion. Watch how he gives a consultation.
That last statement about regret is so important, because so many people don’t understand what it is or what causes it. Anti-choicers exploit this by manipulating pregnant people and creating doubt, which only increases the likelihood of regret, no matter what decision the pregnant person makes. You know what is best for you, even if it takes some time to figure it out.
“My body, my choice” only makes sense when someone else’s life isn’t at stake.
Fun fact: If my younger sister was in a car accident and desperately needed a blood transfusion to live, and I was the only person on Earth who could donate blood to save her, and even though donating blood is a relatively easy, safe, and quick procedure no one can force me to give blood. Yes, even to save the life of a fully grown person, it would be ILLEGAL to FORCE me to donate blood if I didn’t want to.
See, we have this concept called “bodily autonomy.” It’s this….cultural notion that a person’s control over their own body is above all important and must not be infringed upon.
Like, we can’t even take LIFE SAVING organs from CORPSES unless the person whose corpse it is gave consent before their death. Even corpses get bodily autonomy.
To tell people that they MUST sacrifice their bodily autonomy for 9 months against their will in an incredibly expensive, invasive, difficult process to save what YOU view as another human life (a debatable claim in the early stages of pregnancy when the VAST majority of abortions are performed) is desperately unethical. You can’t even ask people to sacrifice bodily autonomy to give up organs they aren’t using anymore after they have died.
You’re asking people who can become pregnant to accept less bodily autonomy than we grant to dead bodies.
reblogging for commentary
But, assuming the mother wasn’t raped, the choice to HAVE a baby and risk sacrificing their “bodily autonomy” is a choice that the mother made. YOu don’t have to have sex with someone. Cases of rape aside, it isn’t ethical to say abortion is justified. The unborn baby has rights, too.
First point: Bodily autonomy can be preserved, even if another life is dependent on it. See again the example about the blood donation.
And here’s another point: When you say that “rape is the exception” you betray something FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN about your own argument.
Because a fetus produced from sexual assault is biologically NO DIFFERENT than a fetus produced from consensual sex. No difference at all.
If one is alive, so is the other. If one is a person, so is the other. If one has a soul, then so does the other. If one is a little blessing that happened for a reason and must be protected, then so is the other.
When you say that “Rape is the exception” what you betray is this: It isn’t about a life. This isn’t about the little soul sitting inside some person’s womb, because if it was you wouldn’t care about HOW it got there, only that it is a little life that needs protecting.
When you say “rape is the exception” what you say is this: You are treating pregnancy as a punishment. You are PUNISHING people who have had CONSENSUAL SEX but don’t want to go through a pregnancy. People who DARED to have consensual sex without the goal of procreation in mind, and this is their “consequence.“
And that is gross.
Boom.
Reminder that sex isn’t something that deserves a punishment (especially when that punishment will permanently change your body and life) and that believing people should have rights to their own body does not make you a murderer. This has been a PSA
Loki is the Philosopher King 