Abortion Gang

Last month I went home to Fredericton, the city where I met my love, to marry him (my love, not the city). The following weekend we attended the wedding of two dear friends who also met in Fredericton – at the abortion clinic where I used to work.

You can read the story from Tania here – it’s really sweet, although of course I am biased (I’m the Peggy in the story! Confusingly age-inappropriate!). People who know me know that I love love, and it absolutely warms my heart to think that two people I care about not only met, but decided to marry, in the parking lot of a place that has been the site of so much drama and heartache. Love is often political, and I feel like proposing to Tania in that spot was a radical act on her partner’s behalf – like they were taking back that space for love.

Spaces hold meaning, and in small communities they hold many memories and associations. When the abortion clinic opened in Fredericton, the adjacent middle school was closed for the day out of fear of violence. Friends of mine who went to that school remember this vividly; for many, it was the only reason they knew there was an abortion clinic in our city before I started volunteering there. And still when the school (which is downtown and doesn’t have any outdoor exercise space) has outdoor gym classes or safety drills, the kids are often running by protesters holding up giant gory anti-abortion signs.

During their annual March for Life, anti-choice protesters reach over the back fence that divides our clinic from their crisis pregnancy centre (yeah, it’s next door) and rub holy water in the shape of the cross on to the building. The small fences create a boundary where the protesters are not allowed to walk on clinic days. A safe zone.

When my partner had a summer job painting dumpsters (so glamorous!), before my association with the clinic, he started on the abortion clinic dumpster when the clinic manager – now a dear friend of ours – came out and eyed him suspiciously, asking what he was doing messing around with their garbage. The dumpster is kept locked. Anti-choice people will dig through it to find medical records and waste – things that would never be thrown out with the regular garbage, but never mind.

At the clinic I have seen people crying, screaming, hugging, sleeping, barfing and fighting. I have gently urged people out of their cars through an onslaught of protesters. I helped one woman climb over the fence when she realized she had accidentally parked at the crisis pregnancy centre. I have played with patients’ children, soothed their mothers, hugged their friends. I have refused entry to countless aggressive men, and hung up on many more. I have frozen my ass off in the parking lot, and had some of the funniest, deepest and most engaging conversations of my life with the other volunteers, and with the patients’ friends. Before I worked in the clinic, I volunteered outside – I spent hours patrolling those fragile boundaries. There’s no physical space in my life that I have protected so vehemently. I huddled there with a mass of strangers, holding candles, when Dr. Tiller died. I sat inside at my desk ignoring the stares of protesters through the window, willing myself to keep the blind open.

I thought of that space as my friends enjoyed their first dance together at their wedding. How truly lovely that a space that held (and holds) the hopes and fears of so many of the people that I care about should give birth to this moment. How strange the evolution of the places we call home.

I describe myself as an activist. I am now admitting to myself, that for the last year, I would also describe myself as majorly depressed. I am trying to understand if, and how, those two descriptors can fit together.

Being involved in reproductive health and justice means that you are faced with intensely personal and sometimes difficult realities; you see the failures of our social systems, you see the pain, up close, that reproduction and sexuality can puts us through. Being an activist in our community requires you interface with and think about inequality, misogyny, and racism. And if you think about it all too much, sometimes, it’s depressing. But the difference between depressing and depressed is huge. I use to find that working against the ugliness, and making improvements actionable would make me feel usefull, even joyous. But those feelings have been replaced with overwhelming feelings of guilt and regret about not doing or being able to do or say enough, with not knowing what is right. My depression has displaced my activism.

I want my activism back so badly, but it’s hard to know what to do. Because while staying away, not being involved in a community you love and care about hurts, engaging in it hurts too. I miss the passion and comradery I felt when I worked on a petition, or a blog, or for an organization that I knew would bring light to someone’s life. But at the same time, every time I sit to write or engage in some act of work or activism (even as small as responding to an email), I question my words, my validity, my worth. I have a miniature existential crisis that nothing we do matters, that our efforts are all a waste.

I know now that the existential feelings and the lack of worth are the depression, not the reality about activism, or about me. I know that the activism, research, and practitioners that I use to believe brought so much goodness to the world are still brining that goodness–it’s just that my mind’s eye is so out of focus that I can’t see it right now.

So, I am working on getting back in focus, and then I will try and re-find my place in reproductive health and justice work. My conclusion of my struggle with depression so far is that activism and untreated depression are incongruent. I don’t believe you can work on making the world a better place unless you believe in your (and others’) capacity to do so. But when I look around, I realize I am not alone, and that gives me hope for reengagement. I am beginning to see the positive, like my new belief that experiencing depression will ultimately make better advocate, activist, and one day, hopefully, a better abortion provider. Recognizing that committed activists, who seem eternally optimistic and happy, also struggle with depression is part of understanding the world of activism. I am learning and growing from depression, and in addressing my depression I am practicing qualities fundamental to activism: love, kindness and hope.

Imagine you are just out of college, you are bright eyed and ready to go out into the world and contribute. If you’re anything like me, you chose a liberal arts major with the goal of a law degree or Masters in your chosen profession. Teaching, inspiring, doing good is what you want to do. Now imagine you have an 8-year0old. He’s sitting at the kitchen table discussing the latest kick ball win from the playground earlier that day, you’re stirring pasta sauce, making sure you don’t burn the noodles. His homework has to be done, and he needs to get to bed at a reasonable time. Tomorrow, he will go to school and you will punch the clock at the best job you found in an economy lagging especially for just-grads. And you’re torn, because having a good job with good benefits is something many in this country do not have, and yet, you want more. Hell, you want a job in the area you studied in college.

That feeling is what I’m going to call the Quarter Life Crisis. I think a lot of people my age are experiencing this, the struggle to find work in their field of study out of college, the struggle to pay rent, all the bills, and of course, student loans. Some my age with a college degree don’t have a job. And many of us are wondering, is my life going to be like this forever? How can I get to where I want to be?

Steps like applying to grad or law school, rigorously applying for new jobs and promotions, working over time and the like, are options for many. For a person like me, with an 8-year-old eating spaghetti at the table, grad and law school seem like a distant dream. How can I pay for it? More importantly, when will I have the time? Guilt piles up when I think of night classes, my son’s lived through the night/day care and babysitters for much of his life while his mom worked and went to school; law or grad school seems like a selfish goal.

This dilemma is one that rarely makes it to the front page of abortion rights news. Teen moms that choose to parent are generally written and talked about as the people that chose not to abort. Depending on the group framing the message, our lives are framed as either one constant and terrifying struggle, or as tragically heroic. Either narrative essentially errases the reality that many single moms are college graduates and face many of the same issues other college graduates in their 20′s face today, with the added joy and stress of having a child to raise.

The added stress comes when you can’t just leave a job you’re unhappy with because you know you need the health benefits for your child and yourself (and you’re the sole provider who needs to stay healthy) . The added stress comes when you miss out on a promotion because you are unable to travel more due to lack of a reliable babysitter (it’s damned hard to find reliable and affordable sitters). The added stress comes when you’re constantly thinking about how your child is doing–is he happy? is he healthy? Is he getting all the nutrients in his dinner? Is he getting enough exercise? Is he performing well in school? Do I coddle him? Does he need space? I mean, parenting does not actually come with a manual. So all of these questions and concerns pile up in your brain and perhaps you don’t perform as well as you otherwise could because of it.

Leaving the ultimate feeling that you’re stuck, spinning the wheels but going nowhere, the quintessential quarter life crisis.

Many struggling right now are those of us that some would say “have beaten the odds.” We’re single moms, former teen moms, domestic violence survivors and well, we have “beaten the odds,” because we graduated from college, or have decent paying jobs, or are trying and succeeding in getting on a reliable career path with a 401k to boot. But saying “we beat the odds” erases the very real and very scary issues facing us, that raising kids in your twenties, alone, is damned hard and there are not a lot of options out there even though we “made it.”

Getting to grad school is, for me, a long term goal , when before it was an immediate action following undergrad graduation. It’s been six months and yes I have a good job, but the reality is, I have to be able to afford graduate school, and I need the time to do it. I am short on both. I have been so stressed about money and life in general for my son and myself that really sitting down and figuring out the pros and cons of graduate school now or later has been a simple after thought.

This is a challenge many face and when discussing abortion, parenting, and reproductive rights the issue rarely comes up. It is far past time to start a conversation about barriers to goal achievement and success for parents in their middle twenties.

My friends, as a general rule, have no immediate interest in having children; it’s largely a “maybe someday” kind of idea for the people I am closest to (like calls to like, I assume, and we also met under similarly classed circumstances, almost all of us only a generation or two American, working and middle class, and graduates of public colleges with similar life goals). In turn, however, I, and every one of my friends, and my sister, has at least one friend, if not more, who has an “I want kids by” plan.

The “I want kids by” plan goes something like this: in their early 20s, friend announces, “I want to have kids by 30/my early 30s.” It is always 30 or 30-adjacent; I assume this has to do with the manufactured notion of what “30″ is, and means, especially for women, and the constantly-reported “facts” about women’s fertility and its eventual drop-off, and articles that make the idea of being an older parent not only scary, but actively irresponsible, and the still-prevalent, perpetual, heteronormative emphasis on the need for biological family (your rapidly aging egg follicles are of no concern whatsoever if you plan to adopt – but for you, then, there’s the idea perpetuated in the last link, that having children when you’re older will be a burden on them). “I want to be a young mom,” friend says (see last link). “I want to be able to play with my kids. I want to have kids and then go back into the work force.” etc. There are many good reasons. (I am not being facetious – there are truly many good reasons to have children earlier rather than later in life, and if you want biological children, you do have a window that could close, depending on your economic means and access to fertility counseling, anywhere from your late 20s to late 40s.) By mid-20s, if friend has found “someone,” a partner to share their life with, the conversation shall now come to an end, to be replaced by ongoing discussions of fertility, family planning, and, from an outsider’s perspective, a somewhat unfortunate internalized pressure to move towards a goal-line of children, and whatever accompanying family structure and institutions seem appropriate to the two people involved, at a clipped pace. But most college-educated women are no longer married by their mid-20s. And here it gets sticky. If friend with “I want kids by” plan isn’t coupled up by mid-20s, but is instead mired in the common struggles of dating, cohabitating, negotiating and, not so much as an aside, working full-time or more and building a career, the conversation shifts into a very uncomfortable place.

“I want kids by 30, and he doesn’t want to get married for a few years,” one friend said of a partner they seemed genuinely happy with, when the discussion wasn’t about kids, but left anyway. “I thought I would be pregnant by now,” one friend who really, really is not fun to be around at weddings tells me all the time, still single and, I would like to say, holding out for a right person, not just any person, so good on that. I have multiple friends who hit 30 and were married within two years, two of them to someone they had not been dating for very long. “I want kids by” can be a powerful and compelling mantra, supported as it is by a multitude of social pressures and pseudo-science and a hanging sense of heteronormative judgment no matter what we do. Anyone reading this who has a personal “I want kids by” plan that is divorced from their real, lived conditions may, in fact, be feeling defensive and judged right now. Please don’t. I’m not saying people holding to these plans are bad, wrong, or foolish; I am insisting that the “I want kids by” is a perfectly normal conditioned response to a set of circumstances we should instead question and, if possible, fucking blow to high heaven; the circumstances that lead to the “I want kids by” plan are bad for us. They do not have our best interests at heart. And no good comes of formulating cherished plans and dreams based on circumstances and conditions that are working the fuck against you.

(more…)

A guest post from Kelly Gray, re-posted from the Bay Area Doula Project with permission.

I’ve spotted a trend at Jezebel, a ‘gossip, culture, fashion, and sex’ website ‘for the contemporary woman’: articles that claim that women who are exercising their right to choose their own pregnancy outcomes and discuss them afterwards are succumbing to random and arbitrary trends.  Why I Won’t Come Out About My Abortion, by Anonymous, and Homebirths Are Actually Kind of Dangerous, by Tracie Egan Morrissey, both make this claim.

Anonymous claims in her article that it is trendy to come out of your abortion closet, which sounded reminiscent of the recently written article by Morrissey who said “Now that Ricki Lake made it seem empowering and supermodels made it seem chic, home births are experiencing a spike in popularity.”

I’d like to write a little about ‘trendy’ and the negative implications that it hopes to cultivate. ‘Trendy’ discounts all the work that reproductive justice advocates have done to create forums where women can share stories and make medical decisions based on fact rather than from places of fear. Anonymous paints a world of daunting “public pressure”, as if angry feminists are demanding abortion stories from every woman on every corner in America. In reality, these abortion stories are organically finding their way through social networking sites that have become safe havens for women to share the reality of their experiences. These are women who might have felt silenced, stigmatized, and ashamed before going public. Others do it in the face of politicians who hope to define these experiences for us through policy and legislation.

‘Trendy’ discounts all the thought I put into writing my own abortion story – from wondering how my family would sit with it, to how it could affect my career. As a birth doula and childbirth educator, this “coming out” was no small matter, and I take personal offense that someone would assume I did so to be in vogue. It felt brave and vulnerable, which is not how I feel when I buy a new pair of shoes or get bangs for the first time in ten years (depending on the style).

Morrissey tackles the subject of trendy home-birthers and flippantly claims that home birth is kind of dangerous. As I see it, this is just another attack on women’s choice, but back handed and coming from our so-called allies. Homebirth is a choice and one that is normal, respected and practiced worldwide. The first thing Morrissey implies in her article is that if you seek the care of a homebirth midwife you have done so because you have watched a Ricki Lake documentary or hope to emulate some celebrity, which establishes in the reader’s mind that women are impressionable, ditzy, and couldn’t possibly navigate their own reproductive outcomes without a copy of Entertainment Weekly in their hands. Her calculations to support this assertion are weak at best. She completely ignores that the study she references that compiled infant and maternal mortality rates includes unplanned homebirths, which dramatically skews outcomes. She also ignores any mention of hospital birth risks, including that two to three women die every day in childbirth in hospitals, as cited in Amnesty Internationals Report Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA, and that this particularly affects poor women and women of color.

There is a reason women are choosing telling stories and speaking out in 2012. There is a history behind our silence and we feel it in our throats. For those of us who choose to scream, we do so because we are safe to do so or we have carefully calculated the risks, or, we just have no other option. We recognize that the problem is that we still feel fear, guilt and shame around pregnancy choices, be it abortion, stillbirth, miscarriage, hospital birth or home birth. We are silenced within the hospital and out of it. That is the problem and the true trend that we must break.

Kelly is a mother, full spectrum doula, childbirth educator and one of the founders of the Bay Area Doula Project. She grew up as a union organizer for public sector healthcare workers and has a passion for redefining healthcare access, models and justice. When she’s not helping women take charge of their reproductive lives, she’s guiding her fiery daughter to harness her own innate powers.

Originally posted at RH Reality Check.

Over the last few months, there’s been an electric energy around the sharing of abortion stories. We’ve seen two stories in the New York Times, a Jewish abortion story on Kveller, a continuation of an abortion story on Thought Catalog, an early abortion story on Boing Boing, and a piece by a woman reflecting on the consequences of telling her abortion story in the Texas Observer. One woman even documented her abortion in photos. And that’s just recently.

What’s going on here? Why are so many people “coming out” now? There are no simple answers to this question. Are women responding to the onslaught of anti-choice legislation? Has the uptick in media reporting on abortion policies eased some of the stigma around speaking about abortion? Are the calls to come out about abortion from pro-choice activists, politicians, and advocacy organizations actually working?

Without asking every person who’s shared her story, we won’t know the answers to these questions. By looking at what they’ve decided to publish, we can consider more basic issues: what are women saying when they come out? What kinds of experiences are represented? Who is coming out about their abortion experience, and who is silent?

To map the patterns and gaps in these published narratives, I created a tumblr to collect these stories: ihadanabortion.org. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

• Some women had wanted pregnancies. Some did not.
• Some women had illegal abortions. Some women had abortions after Roe.
• Some women went through their abortions with no support. Some people had the support of friends, partners, or family members.
• Some women had abortions by pill. Others had surgical abortions. Some attempted to perform their own abortions.
• Some women talked about having one abortion. Some women disclosed having multiple abortions.
• For some women, the decision to have an abortion was a decision about motherhood. For others, it was a decision about emotional or financial circumstances.
• Some women experienced emotional difficulty with their abortion. Others experienced relief. Others experienced a mix of emotions.
• Some women had explicitly pro-choice, pro-voice, or feminist takes on their abortion experience. Others divorced politics from their abortion experience.

Though there is great deal of diversity in the stories told by the women in these published accounts, there are also several similarities.

Many of the published stories focus on first trimester abortions. This may be slightly misleading, though, because many stories didn’t indicate at what gestation the author had an abortion. Still, the fact that so many of the stories are about first trimester abortions makes sense, since 90% of abortions take place before 12 weeks.

All the published stories that explicitly say that they are about abortions after the first trimester are about ending wanted pregnancies. Research tells us that a majority of those presenting for second trimester and later abortions do so because they were delayed in seeking an abortion, not because they had a wanted pregnancy gone awry.

Three stories discussed multiple abortions. According to the most recent Guttmacher data, about half of women who’ve had abortions have had more than one. Does stigma keep people from sharing their experiences of having multiple abortions? Or do women who talk about their abortions publicly only feel comfortable mentioning a single abortion, even though they’ve had more than one?

Several of the published stories are by self-described middle class, young, white women. White women do make up the highest percentage of abortions by race. However, as compared to their proportion of the population, younger women, low-income women and women of color have higher abortion rates than other groups. There are multiple explanations for why these low-income women, young women, and women of color may be less likely to come forward or have their stories published. These women may have less access to media than women with more privilege or education. Additionally, coming forward may place them at risk for multiple stigmas associated with their age, race, and class as well as with their abortion experiences.

One story mentioned difficultly paying for the abortion (and specifically mentioned an abortion fund). This might suggest that those who need help paying for their abortion may be different from those who reach out to the media to publish their stories. People who need financial assistance for their abortion likely do not have access to the media to share their experiences.  It’s also possible that there is stigma around asking for help to pay for an abortion, and that this specific stigma coupled with abortion stigma increases the chances that a woman will not publicly share her abortion story.

Sharing an abortion story, whether with one person or with an online community, always comes with risks. For some folks, especially those who do not inhabit privileged identities, that risk might be greater. Looking at these abortion stories all in one place makes it obvious that certain voices, among others, are missing from the archive of public abortion stories: the experiences of low-income folks, people of color, people who experience emotional difficulty with their abortions, abortion stories from queer, gender non-conforming, and trans* folks, people who wanted an abortion but weren’t able to get one, and people who had elective second trimester (and later) abortions.

In discussing the implications of sharing her abortion story, Carolyn Jones writes,

As a white middle class woman, I’ve seen how powerful my voice can be. Not to share that power with those who’ve had equally valid experiences of abortion is like stopping a story half way through. But how do we hear the voices of the marginalized when they’re drowned out by the noise of our race, class and gender-riven world? And how, from our eyries of privilege, do we draw those stories out while respecting the political context from which they came?

“Coming out” about an abortion experience is a form of personal and cultural risk-taking. You’re exposing yourself to judgment and stigma from your friends, family, and community. By documenting published stories at ihadanabortion.org, we’re supporting the people who choose to take on this risk and unearthing the gaps between these narratives. We’re figuring out how to create a culture that supports people who’ve have abortions and allows for sharing diverse, multidimensional abortion stories. We know the danger of the single story. Let’s connect the single stories that create the dominant narrative about abortion, and map out ways to expand the frame.

A guest post by Renee Bracey Sherman. Originally posted at Exhale, cross-posted with permission.

Indifferent. As I rode home from the abortion clinic and the days after the procedure, I felt indifferent. I had been told to expect overwhelming feelings of sadness and physical pain, yet I felt none. I felt fine. Not better than normal, but also not worse than normal. Indifferent. It was not at all what I was told to expect, by the doctors, the nurses, or what I had heard from friends.

I grew up in what many would call a ‘liberal’ family. We were middle class; my parents are both nurses, college educated, we lived in the suburbs of a major city, and we were a very open family. My parents are both ‘pro-choice’ and would have supported my decision when I was 19 years old to have an abortion, yet, why did it take me six years to tell them about it?

My experience wasn’t unlike other women’s; I had a steady boyfriend, I was on birth control, but I missed a few weeks of pills and became pregnant. At sixteen, when I told my mom about a friend’s abortion decision, she told me that it was a personal choice and one she supported. So, I should have been able to go to my parents when I needed support, right?

It just wasn’t that easy for me. Many of my cousins had children in their teens and were unable to finish high school and college, yet I was on track to do both. I didn’t want to disappoint my mother, I felt that if I told her that I was pregnant, I would let her down, make her mad. I felt that she and my father would be disappointed, even though they would have supported my decision.

Even until recently, I was afraid to tell anyone, for fear of the reaction that I would get, or the way they would view me. I felt that if I told my story, I would be wearing the scarlet ‘A’ forever. I felt that I would be one of the vicious women that senators and representatives talk about who ‘abort their babies to fit into a prom dress’. That kind of rhetoric hurts me because that wasn’t what happened. How could I make others understand without having to share the whole story of the abuse I had endured during that relationship, how to say that it was my choice and it was a way to get out of a really bad situation. It’s hard to justify your actions without giving away a huge part of yourself every time.

Even though some people may see me differently after knowing I had an abortion,  I’ve chosen to share my story to let others in the community know that abortion shouldn’t be a taboo subject. We can comfort one another and change the conversation. We can shape what people hear about our lives and our stories.

After talking to many of my friends, family members and co-workers, I found out that almost everyone has an experience with abortion; whether they themselves had one, a partner, a parent or a sibling, it is not uncommon. It is an experience that crosses all racial lines, the gender spectrum, class backgrounds and sexual orientations; yet, we don’t talk about it. I understand that there are many reasons some folks won’t want to share about their experience. Even if I don’t hear their story, I want them to know they are not alone. We’ve been through a similar experience and there is love and support available to you.

I recently told my mother about my abortion experience and she cried, not because she was mad, but because she was proud of me for having the strength to make a tough decision on my own. She wished she could have been there to support me. When I asked her if she was disappointed in me, she said, “No honey, I am proud of who you have become. You made a decision for you.”

Abortion is different for everyone. Each abortion is like stripes on a zebra; while on the surface they may seem similar, no two experiences are exactly the same. I hope that in the future, the abortion debate moves from above the heads of the people it affects, down to a conversational level, where women and family members who have experienced abortion can talk about how to best support each other. Our voices matter. Let’s listen.

Renee is from Chicago, Illinois where she graduated from Northeastern Illinois University, studying economics and sociology. Renee found a passion in working to break down barriers of multiple oppressions that women/people of color/LGBT/low income/immigrant folks face each day by sharing stories. Renee currently lives in San Francisco and volunteers with the Bay Area Doula Project, Exhale and ACCESS. Renee hopes that by sharing her personal abortion experience, she can help move the conversation past partisan lines and to a compassionate level.

We often talk about abortion as political, as personal, as an act that can be very private and yet paraded out in public. If I had endless time (and perhaps a few grants!), one thing I would do is analyze how poems about abortion (and there have been poems about abortion since at least the 15th century) are in conversation with our cultural and political discourse about abortion. For now, instead, I will provide you with a collection of poems about abortion for your reading pleasure. These poems are often not explicitly pro-choice or anti-choice  and confront individual experiences with and reflections on abortion (trigger warning: some may be graphic, emotional, etc). If I forgot your favorite, please let me know! More links are always appreciated.

The Abortion, by Anne Sexton
Christmas Carols, by Margaret Atwood
The Country Midwife: A Day, by Ai
The Egg, by Louise Gluck
This Version of Love, by Dorothy Hewett
The Lost Baby Poem, by Lucille Clifton
Ballad of the Brown Girl, by Alice Walker
The Mother, by Gwendolyn Brooks
Brass Furnace Going Out: Song After an Abortion, by Diane DiPrima
Country Woman Elegy, by Margaret Gibson
Right to Life, by Marge Piercy
The Sabbath of Mutual Respect, by Marge Piercy
An Abortion, by Frank O’Hara
Her Three Unborn Baby Boys, by Menke Katz
Motherhood, by Georgia Douglas Johnson

Other poems about abortion that I couldn’t find online:
The Abortion, by Liz Lochhead
Chriseaster, by Molly Peacock
The Wound, by Louise Gluck
Natalie, by Elisavietta Ritchie
The Truth About Karen, by Kenneth Carroll
Ten Years Ago, by Ellen Moeller
For My Neverborn, by Nancy Shiffrin

May 31 marks the third year since Dr.  Tiller, an abortion provider in Wichita, Kansas, was brutally murdered while serving as an usher in his church. Dr. Tiller was known worldwide as a provider of compassionate, kind, respectful later abortion services that focused on preserving the dignity and integrity of his patients.

To honor his legacy, we and the Provider Project asked folks to respond to this question: How can the pro-choice and reproductive justice movements better support the people who have later abortions and providers who perform them? Below is a list of posts taking on this topic and thinking about Dr. Tiller. This list will be updated as the day goes on:

Patient First 
May 31, 2009: Welcome to America
What Would George Tiller Do?
Honor Dr. Tiller: Keep Late-Term Abortions Available
The Good Samaritan
Dr. Tiller Would Trust Women
Thoughts on the Anniversary of Dr. Tiller’s Death
Thinking About Dr. Tiller
I Write Letters
Anniversary of Loss
We Are the Moral Side: Honoring Dr. Tiller
Remembering Dr. George Tiller
The Terrorism That Killed Dr. Tiller Remains a Threat
This Clinic Stays Open: Remembering Dr. Tiller
Three Years Later
Honoring Dr. Tiller ~ by fml and Servalbear

If you’ve written a post for the collective remembrance and don’t see it above, please email the URL to info@iamdrtiller.com or tweet the link to @IAmDrTiller.

When Dr. Tiller was murdered I was working at a small, progressive non-profit in Washington, D.C., where our job was to watch the news all day, every day. Our office contained dozens of televisions; we would watch the same 24 hour news cycle on an endless loop. I watched coverage of Dr. Tiller’s assassination the way people once watched President Kennedy’s. I cried. My boss was sympathetic but unhelpful. I had no way to explain.

In this battle for “women’s rights,” where the battleground is our very bodies and the enemy is within and without, I see our futures: mine, my friends, my aunts, my sisters and cousins, my future someday daughters. Dr. Tiller once said, “Make no mistake, this battle is about self-determination by women of the direction and course of their lives and their family’s lives. Abortion is about women’s hopes and dreams. Abortion is a matter of survival.” He said “survival for women;” I say survival for us all.

It was rare to hear of a doctor who performed later abortions before Dr. Tiller’s murder, rarer to hear from them, and now, since his death, rarer still to discover people still do this work. But they do. A doctor came forward recently to talk about it. He said he was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, in telling the fable of The Good Samaritan, said that what made the Samaritan “Good” was that his concern wasn’t, “What will happen to me if I stop to help this person?” but rather, “What will happen to this person if I do not stop to help them?” The question of what would happen to the women he saw in desperate need of later abortions was powerful enough to eventually bring this Christian over from staunch anti-choice beginnings to a practice in extremely rare and personally dangerous later abortions.

When we talk about later abortions, we so often tell stories. We talk about the woman who wanted her child and discovered a severe fetal abnormality and waited, waited, hoping the tests would tell her everything was all right, until it was too late, and she needed an abortion when only a few people would perform one. We tell the story of the very young girl who needed one after her rape, or the women – so many women – who were too poor to pay for one until they were past their second trimester, women tripped up by the stumbling blocks put up by state legislatures with that very goal in mind. And these stories are true, and I would, personally, love to hear these women tell them. But they don’t tell them; we do.

They don’t tell their stories because it’s dangerous and someone might hurt them and people will certainly harass them, their children, and their families. We tell their stories so people will understand, so someday, other women won’t face the same stigma. And so we create sides: the people the stories happened to, and the people fighting for new stories by telling the old ones.

To change it, we have to take it all apart.

Another highly controversial question is the so-called “sex-selective” abortion: specifically aborting a female fetus in order to try and get pregnant with a boy. Anti-choice activists decry this as sexism, and want to pass laws to prevent these abortions, the idea apparently being that restricting women’s right to independent family planning will, ultimately, fight sexism (?).

The fight against later abortions and sex-selective abortion is the same; the fight against all abortions is the same. The fight against abortion is about limiting people’s choices – not just women’s, but all people’s choices – about such highly, intensely personal things as how to create a family. The fight for abortion, at every level, in every instance, is the fight to allow people to dream whatever they wish; to create families in the time and way they determine is best for them; to subsequently create and live lives in the context of free will and self-power. To fight for abortion is to fight for a worldworth bringing children into.

The question we begin from today is, “How can we support providers of later abortions and people who have later abortions?” I believe we must start by eliminating the qualifier. It calls for stories, you see. It says, “tell me why youdeserve this, when your abortion is different than other abortions, when the abortion you provide is different, maybe worse, than other abortions.” But every abortion is an act of free will. Every provider of every abortion puts themselves in danger to consider the needs of another human being over their own. Every decision to parent or not to parent is an act of thought and bravery when done with awareness of the consequences and support from community. Stripping away access to things that allow for an informed decision is a step towards creating an unequal and imprisoned life; providing access is a step towards a world that offers far more freedom and requires far more responsibility.

Make no mistake, reproductive decisions are thoughtful ones, whether they are made by thoughtful people or not. It requires thought and care to prevent an unplanned pregnancy, it requires thought and care to choose to parent, it requires thought and care to decide to terminate. And when none of those things are your problem, when you could blithely proceed down the road, it requires not only thought and care, but compassion to stop and ask a stranger, “How can I help?”