Lady Troubles: The Audacity
They are calling it the Texas Heartbeat Bill, and as I’m sure you have heard it bans most abortions in Texas and effectively turns neighbor against neighbor for $10,000 and a fleeting sense of political and moral superiority.
It’s not that I didn’t see it coming.
Back in 2018, when I was working as an assistant in a Planned Parenthood clinic, I noted that there were no fewer than 45 bills introduced in the 2017 legislative session which aimed to make abortion harder to come by.
Of course, that was way back when.
Then Covid happened. Then RBG died. Then social unrest and environmental instability and if you ask me, it’s more a wonder why we are not arguing about the most ethical way to abort ourselves as a species, but I digress.
By 2020, religious conservatives and anti-abortion groups had gained enough popular and political traction to put the future of abortion rights in the state of Texas into question, a right which was hard won by multiple generations of women and a right it appears the current generation will have to fight for yet again.
I heard the alarm bells coming from those of import in abortion rights circles warning that there may be political momentum enough to overturn Roe and eliminate access to abortion if not make it illegal completely.
I just never thought it would actually happen — call me an entitled millennial, if you will.
No way could we as a country regress so far back that a woman’s autonomy over her body and life could be taken away just like that, in the name of God no less, all to serve one man’s political career and an increasingly bat shit crazy right-wing agenda.
No way, not in this country, right? Lol. Just kidding.
What sort of fresh hell is this? Who have we become as a people and what exactly is it we are trying to do to health care professionals if not frustrate the whole lot of them out of the profession?
As I listened to the news and as I watched people’s reactions on social media, I couldn’t help but think about the clinic and all my old co-workers. I couldn’t help but imagine what they must be doing at that very moment.
I could just see our doctor pacing back and forth, frantically talking to someone on the phone about the urgency of this woman’s case, or the likelihood of x event coming to pass over y, while the rest of the staff busied themselves reorganizing supplies, stocking exam rooms, talking amongst themselves about how they may need to find another job and soon.
I imagined the operating room empty. The fluorescent lights glistening off the waxy sterile floors, the tired table resting quietly in the shadows, the old AM/FM radio playing classical music in scratchy echoes to a nurse untangling cords from the vitals machine because there is really nothing left to do.
I could see the protestors outside sitting on lawn chairs scribbling license plate numbers in What Would Jesus Do notebooks all day long and in shifts just waiting to claim that $10,000 bounty and get the clinic shut down for good.
But most of all, I imagine her, and what she must be going through right now. Her, the unseen, nameless patient at the center of this madness. She is a real human being, and there were 55,175 of her in Texas in 2020 alone, patients of every color and creed imaginable.
They are women with hopes, and dreams and voter registration cards, not to mention the right to use them, although it appears as if the state of Texas has forgotten about that — at least for the moment.
They are not just abstractions, statistics, or convenient numbers for either side to throw around when it suits them. They are mothers. They are sisters. They are your friends and family.
They represent every woman who has ever had to deal with the consequence of being a woman no matter what shade of skin wraps her, what cultural ideals limit her, or what socioeconomic status binds her.
It is their abortion experience that is being re-appropriated and used to serve as a talking point in a larger political narrative that dehumanizes them and exploits the fetuses they carry. This is about each and every one of them, or at least it should be, because each and every one of them is a real live woman that is being forced to carry a real live baby she may not want to have or be able to care for.
I imagine her looking on in terror as the second pink line materializes on the test, and her frantically calling the clinic desperate to get through before it’s too late, if it isn’t already, but the line is busy and has been busy all day. I see her getting frustrated and driving to the clinic only to find the shell of a waiting room and in the emptiness of that room a cold and ugly truth: no matter what they say or how many posts they share, no matter who they are, red or blue, nobody really cares what happens to her. She is all alone.
And do you know who she is? This alone woman?
If you look at abortion statistics gathered by the state over the last five years, she forms a face more worthy of compassion than popular narrative would give her.
Most likely, she is about 24 years old. She is more likely to be a minority, specifically Latina, but in case you think it’s a race issue, it’s not there are plenty of white women that get abortions too, and wealthy ones if you can allow yourself to believe it. She is likely to be unmarried, under 8 weeks pregnant, and she may or may not have children, but more than likely she is experiencing her first and only abortion.
These are just statistics, but the women themselves, they are a rainbow of identities and sometimes they don’t even identify as women at all. See, it’s complicated, and the reasons they are getting their abortions are just as complicated, if not more so.
On the radio and in the newspapers, the reporters ask the same questions: What about exceptions to the ban? What about rape? What about incest? What about minors, or mentally ill women?
Forget about all that, my question is: what about the simple fact that she is a human being?
Why must the conversation always go back towards these kinds of violent exceptions? Must a woman be raped to have basic power over her body? Must she suffer incest or abuse to have access to the healthcare she needs?
I don’t think so. I don’t think she owes an explanation to anyone for anything, not to the strangers kneeling outside of the clinic and not even to her doctor.
These women choose to have abortions because they are trying to take care of themselves and their families. They choose to have abortions for unknowable reasons, for a number of reasons, for too many reasons to count and for reasons she does not need to give you or anybody else because no one else has to live with her decision or her lot, it is only her and her alone.
Unlike Governor Abbott, I have actually had to look directly into the eyes — the smiling eyes, the indifferent eyes, the crying eyes — of the women whose lives are destroyed by this sort of nonsense legislation. I have had to explain the unexplainable to her face, and I have had to accept responsibility for the consequences of laws I can’t even justify to myself.
Are they going to take me to jail for this? I remember one woman asking about some legislation she heard about on the news, legislation that was never actually intended to pass but was intended to threaten, intimidate, and stir shit up. I remember the way she held her ultrasound in her hands, gazing first at the fuzzy image with its damning black hole in a textured sea of white, and then back up at me with confusion and fear in her eyes.
The social stigma coupled with constant threats from the state make these women feel like criminals. As Carol Sanger, a professor of law at Columbia and author of the book “About Abortion” explains, “When you cannot ban something outright, it’s possible to make the process of obtaining it so onerous as to be a kind of punishment.”
Unlike Abbott, I have been sent into the room to deny medical care to a woman because she doesn’t have the time or the means to meet all the state-imposed requirements, of which there are many.
This is bullshit! she screamed at me in a fit of frustration because there was no one else to hear her.
And she was right. It was bullshit, the whole lot of it.
The fact that she was forced to look at the image of a fetus she didn’t want to carry only because the state thought she wasn’t educated enough to know what she was doing was bullshit. That she had to wait 24 hours and jump through 16 other hoops to get her abortion was also bullshit.
But that she won’t be able to access one at all after around six weeks into her pregnancy? Before she even knows she is pregnant?
That’s not just bullshit, that is an outrage, and it is an outrage that doesn’t give near enough credit to the gumption of even the most average Texas woman.
Let me tell you something about these women that I learned very quickly.
The type of woman that seeks out an abortion is a woman that knows how to get shit done. She knows how to take agency and responsibility for her choices and her actions. She knows how to be told no, how to track down resources, how to jump through hoops and do whatever needs to be done to protect herself and her family, and mark my words, if she wants an abortion, she will find a way to have one.
She will find a way, whether she can afford to drive to another state or not. She will find a way, whether or not it is legal and safe. And just as with any other black market, an industry will open up to serve her that could potentially threaten her, her fetus, and society as a whole more than any abortion clinic ever could.
The values of our society are represented by the trauma that does or does not live in that woman’s body, and that is a responsibility that we all carry whether we want to or not.
