I Do Not Think Abortion Means What You Think It Means

I was this meme for Halloween.

If you’ve never worked at a job where random weirdos (who use “stupid” as an adjective to modify the word “head,” like angry toddlers) advocate for your violent assassination, it’s worth asking those of us who have before you defund the thing we believe in enough to show up, day after day, knowing that some people believe we should be dead.  Just the shallowest dip into a Facebook rabbit hole dredged up the kind of rhetorical aggression that makes working in reproductive health care so fraught, which is really the exact same aggression that women face all the time, subtly and overtly. I don’t feel the need to talk about Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion services (although they’re great and important) to defend why that organization should exist and be funded.  I don’t feel the need to justify my decision to work in a clinic any more than I would had we been providing dialysis instead of pregnancy terminations.  Even if you believe that abortion is bad, recognize that it’s the symptom and not the disease. I spent thousands of hours listening to pregnant women talk about their lives, and it never occurred to me to ask whether or not they should be able to choose to end their pregnancies. My questions are more basic: why is it that such an extraordinarily high percentage of my patients had histories of sexual abuse and trauma?  When we debate abortion “in cases of rape,” we render invisible the reality of how sexual violence manifests in women’s lives.  Whether or not it’s what got them pregnant, that experience is encoded in the same bodies, and it can’t be overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant.  I have other questions, too: how could a woman with multiple previous births present to us not knowing what a cervix is?  How could a pregnant 14-year-old present not knowing she’d had sex?  (”I thought we were cuddling.”)  How can women struggling within a system where poverty and racism and brutality have stolen their most basic sense of safety be punished again for asserting their right to more selfhood and sovereignty than just mere survival can afford them?