Here you will find stories of individuals who have dedicated their lives to making abortion safe, legal, healthy, and accessible to women and girls. These people may be nurses, counselors, escorts, volunteers at abortion funds, or abortion doctors themselves. You will not see the faces of these providers to protect their safety. What you will see is the story they decide to share - how they came to abortion work, what their function is at their abortion clinic, or their personal abortion story. We want to humanize these individuals to convey the kindness, courtesy, justice, love, and respect they have for women and the health care choices women make. We share our stories in hopes of ending clinic violence, to alleviate the shame associated with the abortion experience, and as an homage to Dr. Tiller's outstanding and courageous life work.
Please respect this space as one of compassion, dignity and love. We do not cover our faces out of shame. We do so to recognize an unfortunate aspect of the lives of abortion providers -- we must always be wary of our safety. No one knew this better than Dr. Tiller.
My name is Eli. I have worked in the abortion field for about 7 years. I currently handle the security at ARHC. People ask me daily how I can deal with these PROTESTERS, how I don’t lose my cool. Well, I really want to make experiences for women and those who enter a good one. I meet our patients at the corner and sing songs or talk loudly to drown out the ANTI voice. I am proud to be here and I pledge to dedicate my life to Reproductive Health.
I am Dr. Tiller.
No photo.
When I first started working here at the clinic, I remember wondering what I would tell people when asked the question, “what do you do?” I had never had any concerns about disclosing where I worked before. Even when I was doing public policy work around reproductive health issues, it never crossed my mind not to discuss the kind of work that I did.
For the first few months that I worked at the clinic though, I had a hard time just coming out and saying, “I’m an abortion provider” or “I’m a counselor at an abortion clinic.” Not because I was ashamed of what I do, on the contrary, I’m quite proud to work in this field, but because I was afraid of the response that I might get from the person that I was talking to. I’m not one to seek out confrontation and I was truly afraid that by telling someone what I do, that I could cause, if not a fist fight, at least a really uncomfortable political conversation.
At the time I justified this avoidance by saying to myself, “I talk about abortion all the time at work, why would I want to talk about it on my time off.” But if I really thought about it I could admit to myself that I was just scared. After a few months of telling people, “I’m in women’s health care,” I started thinking about my patients and about how most women are so hesitant to tell people in their lives that they have had an abortion. And I started thinking about how if all the women and men in this country who have been touched by an abortion experience in some way or another could find the courage to talk about their experiences, then maybe some of the shame and stigma and fear surrounding abortion would start to go away. When you consider that approximately 1/3 of the women in this country will have an abortion at some time in their lives, that 60% of the women in this country are already mothers when they have an abortion, that abortion is one of the safest and most common surgical procedures performed in the U.S., it seems ridiculous that anyone would be ashamed or nervous about talking about it.
But here we are, in a society that seems unwilling or unable to talk about this common experience except in terms of the political “abortion wars” that we’re all used to seeing around election time on the news. Unfortunately, this type of black and white arguing about abortion–perhaps one of the most complex issues we face in our lives–is a huge contributing factor to the hostile environment that women and providers face. We live in a world where if you can’t distill your rationale into a thirty second sound bite, your argument can’t be heard. And these big issues of pregnancy and abortion, which have everything to do with life, death, sex, faith and a myriad of other complex, personal issues, can’t be broken down into tiny little sound bites.
Finally, after a few months, I mustered up some courage and starting telling people, “I’m an abortion provider.” And so far, five years later, no one has spit on me or punched me and I’ve had hundreds of interesting and enlightening conversations about abortion. Since I’ve started talking about my work, I’ve discovered that many of the women in my life have made the decision to have an abortion at some time in their in their lives. I’ve talked to cab drivers about their wives and daughters, to car mechanics about their faith, to a manicurist about her abortion decision as a teen and how it affected her decision to have a child later in life. Not everyone that I talk to identifies themselves as pro-choice. And sometimes, these conversations can be pretty tough–but nine times out of ten, they are incredibly rewarding. Even when the person I am talking to doesn’t see eye to eye with me, by having a conversation I’m helping to create a more open environment where people feel safe talking about a tough topic.
Talking about abortion never fails to remind me that pregnancy doesn’t discriminate. It’s something that affects every woman at some point in her life and has a ripple effect that touches every part of her life and many of the people involved in her life.
So my call and challenge to all of you out there, is to be brave and be willing to talk about abortion. Not to fight. Not to try to change people’s minds. Just be willing to have a conversation about these complex issues and maybe create an environment where we can all talk about those touchy, hard issues that we like to avoid.
For thirty years, I was the director of Allegheny Reproductive Health Center, but my work goes back even earlier. Before the Roe vs Wade decision, I volunteered with a referral group that found locations for women seeking an abortion. So early on I learned that women knew when it was or was not the right time for them to bring forth a new life. I heard their stories, I walked at their side as they sometimes anguished, always wanting make a moral choice. I have met their partners, their mothers, their grandmothers, friends and colleagues. Their stories have shaped my entire adult life as have the dedicated physicians and staff members I have worked with through the years. Through the women, our patients, I learned so much about life’s possibilities, the hopes and yearnings of women, young and old. I learned about courage, dignity and respect, and I hope I have given as good as I’ve received. I cannot imagine a richer, fuller life than I have had, sharing both the joy and the grief with so many families. Dr Tiller believed wholeheartedly in the work he did. So do the many thousands who will carry on after him.
I provide abortions for my patients and for any other girl or woman who feels this her best option after making what is, for most women and their families, a soul searing self-examination before arriving at the decision to abort a pregnancy.
Why would I or any other reputable physician provide abortions? Good question.
First the long answer.
In 1964, I was admitted to medical school on the day that our second child was born. I sat with my wife through her labor and at the last minute they took her into the delivery room where our son was born. My mother and father, her mother, my sister and about half dozen friends were at the hospital with us. All came into her room a few minutes after delivery. There was such a tremendous feeling of love and goodwill in that room that I decided then and there that if I were granted the opportunity, I was going to become an Obstetrician.
I started medical school at age twenty-nine, the father of two wonderful children, the husband of a wonderful wife, and the happiest man in the world.
But a large part of this answer began years before the night I decided to become an Obstetrician.
I grew up in a small town, the son of small town teachers. We were Methodists but we went to whichever of the two churches (they alternated services) was open on a particular day for worship, Sunday School, MYF, BTU, prayer meeting or revival; the Baptist or the Methodist, it didn’t matter…we were there! My father was the Sunday School superintendent (at the Methodist church) and my mother played the piano at both churches. Obviously we were well churched. We were also poor as church mice since my parents had five children on a very limited income.
I had no concept that I would ever be able to go to medical school when I was young, and when we started in 1964, I had no idea how we were going to be able to finish. But my mother always said to me, “the Lord has a special purpose for your life.” (I suspect that she told all her children that.) The longer I live, even though I am not a particularly superstitious man, the more I have come to believe that to be true for each of us – if we make it happen.
By 1967 I was a third year medical student, still with no visible means of support, and we were pregnant with our third child. It was the spring of that year and I was ending my rotation in the Ob-Gyn Service clinic. I was assigned a 40 plus year old, poverty stricken mother of several children. I think she was unmarried but I am not sure of that now. This care worn mother-of-several had a large abdominal mass that I rapidly determined to be a well advanced pregnancy. I asked my resident to come and break the news to this woman; it was very obvious to me that she was not going to be happy about the news of another pregnancy. When told that she – already unable to adequately feed and clothe her family – was again pregnant, she looked up at me and the resident. There we stood, two white males, well clothed, well feed young men with superior educations. We were, in her eyes, stunningly blessed and obviously going places in the world. She began to weep silently. She must have assumed, for good reason, that there was no way that we would understand her problems; she knew also that there was nothing that we could or would do to relieve her lacerating misery.
“Oh God, doctor,” she said quietly, “I was hoping it was cancer.”
That mother’s anguished whisper eventually became a shriek of despair and hopelessness that has reverberated in my heart and mind and soul for over thirty years. Before that moment, forever seared like a brand on my memory, I would have described myself as “Pro-Life” had I then known this political term .
Over the next few years, I was exposed to real life as it is lived by millions of people who don’t have the sanctification granted in America to those who are white, male, well educated, well gene-ed, well nurtured, well advantaged. I learned that what this woman knew was a personal tragedy for herself and her family, was only one face in a multifaceted problem confronting thousands of girls and women every day.
How did I learn this?
I learned it – really made it a part of my essential being – by seeing the repercussions of desperation walk, and crawl, and be carried through our emergency room door three, four, five times, every night for four years. Each night we would admit to the wards of University Hospital in Little Rock (a fairly small hospital, as metropolitan hospitals go) girls and women with raging fevers, extraordinary uterine and pelvic infections, enormous blood loss, and a multitude of serious injuries of the pelvic and intra-abdominal organs as a result of illegal and self-induced abortions. During the years 1970 through the end of my residency in June, 1972 we did in the same hospital perhaps twenty to thirty safe, legal abortions a month on girls and women of various ages for mostly elective reasons. The contrast between the outcomes for these two sets of women was dramatic, not only for what happened to them immediately – that is, the almost total lack of complications in those undergoing legal abortions and the terrible consequences of some of the illegal abortions that we saw – but also for what happened over the next few years to those who had illegal abortions as they discovered that they were sterile, or faced total hysterectomy for the effects of injuries suffered during their illegal procedures.
I could and sometimes do go on for hours about what I saw during those years of training and in early private practice, before abortion became universally legal and affordable in the first few months of pregnancy for any woman who determined, for a myriad of reasons, that carrying a pregnancy to term and delivering a baby was not in her best interest. Or perhaps not in the best interests of her family. (The very poor in those early days of legal abortion were covered by Medicaid.)
But what of the concern for, as a ninth grader expressed it, “someone who is often forgotten, the little life who doesn’t even have a chance to live.”
No one, neither the patient receiving an abortion, nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life. We just don’t believe that a developing embryo or fetus, whose mother cannot or will not accept it, has the same moral claims on us, claims to autonomy and justice, that an adolescent or adult woman has. I have never seen an abortion decision entered into lightly by anyone involved. The decision to have an abortion is most often made in the time of the first great personal moral crisis that ever faces a girl, a woman, her family and the people who love them. It is only those who stand outside and condemn the women and families who are faced with these dilemmas who take lightly the decisions made in these straits and trivialize the circumstances in which they are made.
Moral dilemmas are always about difficult problems. Decisions between right and wrong are not moral dilemmas; decisions between right and wrong should be no-brainers and should never be difficult.
It is in deciding between what we consider morally near-equal alternatives that we are forced to make agonizing appraisals. The decision between competing evils or competing goods – these are the judgments that may burn in your mind and live forever in your memory, that fry your soul. And it matters not whether one believes elective abortion a good or an evil, for every abortion decision is made between self-perceived competing goods or competing evils, not between obvious good and self-evident evil.
Is legal abortion dangerous? I personally have not seen an abortion injury to a woman since 1974, with three exceptions: One was a young women who became sterile after a post legal-abortion infection in 1974 in my practice; another was a woman from my practice who had a ruptured uterus in about 1975 as the result of an abortion done in Little Rock at about twenty-four weeks by a resident using a no-longer-used method of abortion.
There are risks to any medical procedure; however, legal abortion, done by competent medical personnel is among the safest operative procedures performed today in the United States.
I mentioned earlier that my mother always said to me, “the Lord has a special purpose for your life,” and that the older I get, the more I think she may have been right; not just for my life, but for all of us. (But we have to find that purpose ourselves.) We each have unique skills, talents and abilities to be used in the service of our fellow human beings. What I mean by this is, that I was led into OB-Gyn by my love for delivering babies. Gynecology was really to be only an appendage to my obstetrical practice and I am sure that providing abortions, even thinking about abortions, would never have been a major part of my life had other physicians in my area continued to provide them as was being done prior to 1984.
However, I soon found my practice inundated with abortion patients because other physicians who had also been providing abortions stopped doing so. In late 1983 it suddenly became uncomfortable, and very soon dangerous, to provide abortions. I literally had no option but to make a “Sophie’s choice” between delivering babies, which I loved, or making what for me would be an immoral and unethical decision, that is, to choose to abandon those girls, women and families who started coming to my office by the dozens. How could I look my children, my wife, my mother and my friends – myself – in the face and say, “I believe that abortion should be legal, safe, and available. But now some people disapprove and it’s become very uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous, to provide them. And so I am going to stop doing what I know to be absolutely right. When it gets uncomfortable or dangerous, it’s OK to say, `not me, coach.’”
Was that the morality that I wanted to demonstrate to my children? To parade in front of my wife, my family and friends?
Not me, coach!
Why do I provide abortions?
Here is the short answer.
Like multitudes before me and, I trust, multitudes to come, I eventually heard (Try as I might to avoid hearing it!) in that mother’s grief-filled declaration, “Oh God, Doctor, I was hoping it was cancer”, a still, small voice asking, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” to which I was at last compelled to reply, “here am I, send me.”
I have been working as a volunteer in a clinic that offers abortion services for over a year. The senseless killing of Dr. Tiller devastated me, but remained a forceful reminder of how, even today, the gravity of working for women’s rights remains. I am proud of the work that abortion providers continue to do and I hope that pro-life activists can work to understand the importance of placing any and all decisions surrounding a woman’s health in her hands and her hands alone.
If nothing else, the question of abortion highlights the need for awareness surrounding the rights of women and the ways in which women remain narrowly defined based upon their relationship to others, rather than their individual sense of being.
I am pro-choice, most simply, because I trust in my sisters to make informed decisions about their lives (with the help of sustained education and access to healthcare and services) that promote their own well-being and the well-being of those they love. I believe that the demand for access to abortion should be coupled with the demand for community services for families–something threatened right now in Illinois due to economic constraints and perhaps skewed priorities.
I am pro-choice because I cannot possibly understand the lives of others and must only trust that others are trying to make the best decisions possible. And because I know we cannot always make the best decision (with the resources we’re given), part of being pro-choice for me means dedicating my activism to increasing resources and advocating for the best healthcare and education.
Pro-choice to me is invariably pro-woman and pro-community. The State should have absolutely no control over a woman’s body or lifecourse.
I believe this with all my heart and that is why I, too, am Dr. Tiller.
I’ve been working in abortion care in one way or another since I got out of college, mostly for the same clinic, Aurora Medical Services, in Seattle. I worked at the abortion clinic through my own planned and wanted pregnancy. I work there now as a mom. I work there as an apprentice midwife, and I’m about to be done working there as a distance-learning student.
I have some very deeply-held beliefs which inform my work in abortion care. My religious faith has taught me that we are all manifestations of the Divine, and as such I seek in all things to act out of love for my fellow beings. I have strong moral convictions which honor the divinity of life.
As part of this, I believe in the rights to self-determination, autonomy, and bodily integrity. I have no right to exert my will over the will of another with regard to what happens with their own being. This is why I believe that informed consent in health care and public health education are so important — we need to be informed health-care consumers who take up our own power over our bodies, rather than abdicating our power to a health care provider who tells us what to do. This is why I am working toward midwifery — birthing women and their babies need care that honors their unique humanity and wisdom instead of honoring routines, protocols and institutional guidelines. And this is why I believe that women choosing abortion deserve to be able to make that choice without danger, fear, or shame.
When I was pregnant and our midwives asked me about my work plans, I said that I wanted to keep working up until I really couldn’t any more. “I love the idea of being hugely pregnant and still wholeheartedly supporting women in their choice to end an unwanted pregnancy. These are both life-affirming choices, my choice to have a child, and their choice to end a pregnancy, doing what’s best for them, their families and any potential child who could come out of the situation.” The conversations I had with patients about my pregnancy didn’t necessarily give me room to articulate that point. People would ask, “Are you pregnant?” or, “When are you due?” and I’d say, “Yes, we’re due in March, it’s our first, we planned, saved a bunch of money, and got pregnant just when we wanted to. We’re excited, but we also know we have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into.” This exchange came most easily with the women who were already moms (the majority of our patients), and who were totally comfortable their choice to end their own pregnancy. We would talk about where they had their kids and what the experience was like for them. We would compare notes on pregnancy symptoms. They asked if I was having a boy or a girl, and most were shocked to learn that we had chosen not to find out. These women seemed to understand implicitly the truth that I was living as a happily pregnant clinic worker: that we are all just women, playing out the cycles of our reproductive lives, me starting my journey to motherhood, they ensuring the best for their already-born children by choosing not to have any more right then.
I wish, though, that the people who were uncomfortable with encountering pregnant me at the abortion clinic had said something about it, explicitly, to me. I wanted to engage with them on this, to be given the opportunity to say that we are both affirming life in our different ways. But the people who were uncomfortable were generally too polite to say anything, or perhaps just didn’t want to talk about it. The truth, so hidden in our culture, is that pregnancy has different meanings in different contexts to different people. My mother, a veteran of four pregnancies including a miscarriage, two abortions, and me, was not able to relate to my excitement at the positive test before I’d even missed a period. “I can’t get invested in this until the second trimester,” she told me. When I told her how unsupportive that sounded, she said, “Remember, I’ve never experienced trying to get pregnant.” She had a hard time getting past what pregnancy had meant in her life, to be able to get excited about what it meant in mine. For the women at the clinic that were truly uncomfortable with me caring for them when I was obviously pregnant, it’s the same thing; the meaning of pregnancy for them in that moment was far from joyful, and the fact that that could be totally valid alongside my happily round belly did not compute. We like our truths in black and white in this culture, no room for nuance or a plurality of meanings. But that’s just how it is. The same me that assists at births as an apprentice midwife assists at abortion procedures as a health care assistant. The same me that planned my own wanted pregnancy was there to help a woman cut through the guilt and the rhetoric that did not really belong to her, to help her see the truth, that she was making a good choice, based on her circumstances. Her pregnancy meant something different than mine, and I could recognize that and support her in her circumstances, even if they were different from mine.
Whether or not we beleive abortion is right, whether or not it is legal, women will still have abortions. Look around the world, where a significant percentage of maternal mortality is caused by illegal abortion. Living children will lose their mothers. Making abortion illegal again will not end abortion. Though you may be uncomfortable with the concept of abortion, please recognize that making abortion illegal does not end abortion. It only leads to criminalization of women and death.
No one would undertake such a dangerous choice as illegal abortion lightly, and yet it is undertaken because women know when they cannot mother one child more. In our country, where abortion is legal, opponents seek to create a similar climate of fear, shame and silence as though abortion were a crime; they call it “murder,” which is a crime. I suppose that I am grateful that women only have to contend with shame when they choose abortion in the US, rather than shame and death. Abortion care workers, it seems, are the ones who have to worry about dying as a result of legal abortion. I wish that women and care providers could both approach abortion without shame or fear of death.
George Tiller said, “Trust women.” Yes. Trust women to make the best choices for their own families Trust women to make their own private moral decisions. Trust that another individual might know their own life better than a stranger. Trust that your fellow humans make choices that seem just as absolutely right to them as your truths do to you — and entertain the possibility that the values of another hold more truth in their own life than your values. In our own lives we live by our own truths. I would never try to force another person to have an abortion, just as I would never force another person to have an unwanted child. It is a dishonor to the humanity (and to the divinity) of another to enforce that your will be done in their life. Each of us deserves the dignity of self-determination, if we are choosing to continue a pregnancy and give birth, or if we are choosing to end an unwanted, unwelcome and/or unhealthy pregnancy.
I work for a woman’s right to choose because:
I believe that as women we are human beings, we are capable of making our own decisions, and we should have the freedom to make those decisions.
I believe that each woman, no matter what she chooses to do when confronted with an unwanted pregnancy, is deserving of respect.
I believe that fifteen year-old girl who has made one mistake should not have to give up her future in order to raise a child.
I believe that a loving couple who learns that their child is going to die after being born should not have to suffer through the rest of the pregnancy and birth of that child.
I believe that a rape survivor who was too scared to tell anyone about the rape should not be forced to bear that child.
I’ve been working for reproductive justice for less than a year. The women I work with are among the most caring people I have ever met. I’m proud to work with them, and I’m proud of myself. When I hear stories of the women I’ve helped, I realize we do this work to help women who, for whatever reason, are not able to have a child at this point in time. We help these women have better lives and more successful futures.
When I was much younger, I remember seeing Dr. Tiller’s clinic on the news when Operation Rescue was swarming their clinic in the 80’s. I remember thinking how brave those abortion workers were and how grateful I was for doctors and clinic workers like them.
Two years later, as a young women, I needed an abortion. As I sat in the waiting room, I remember looking at the intake person and thinking about Dr. Tiller and this clinic and how grateful I was to all the men and women who kept my choice possible.
Five years later and for the past 15 years, I have been working for an abortion clinic. I am so proud to be one of many that helps keeps this important choice available to women.
Trust Women!
No photo for security reasons.
I’m a third-year medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I plan to become an obstetrician-gynecologist. I dream of delivering healthy babies, working with families and supporting midwifery. But as part of my practice, I also envision providing abortions to women who need them.
The road I took to get here isn’t your stereotypical one. My parents are small-town conservative Christians who believe that abortion is wrong. Growing up, I naturally shared their view. But I’ve also wanted to be a doctor since I was 4 years old, and in high school, I began to feel drawn to issues of women’s health. In college, I designed my own major to broaden my understanding of women’s health by including psychology, sociology and women’s studies courses.
I also served as a counselor for a volunteer organization that helps victims of rape. I sat in hospital rooms with young women who would look at me and say, “I can’t be pregnant. I just couldn’t carry his baby.” I could feel their desperation.
At the same time, I found myself shocked at how little many of my friends — women who were studying biology and planning to become doctors — knew about their own sexual health. They didn’t know about or couldn’t get the reproductive health care they needed because of barriers put up by their culture, their religion and their parents, whose sole contribution to sex ed was generally an unspoken “Thou shalt not!” One friend begged me to help her concoct a legitimate-sounding excuse — painful or irregular periods, say — for why she needed to be on birth control. No one could know the real reason: She was sexually active and didn’t want to get pregnant.
I began to feel as if I were leading a double life. At school, the choices I saw women struggling with were forcing me to question my old convictions. When I went home, I’d go to church with my parents but would find that my views contrasted starkly with those I heard in the sermons. It was a difficult time, because I felt that neither my family nor my church would welcome my questions or understand my struggle with my beliefs.
For the most part, I don’t talk to my parents about those beliefs. They already feel as though I’ve turned my back on much of what they taught me because my husband and I bought a house and lived together for a few months before we were married. “How could you do this to us?” they asked. Two and a half years later, that rift isn’t fully healed. I know that my views on reproductive rights would be another blow.
But ultimately, we have more in common than they might think. I agree that ending an unwanted pregnancy is a tragedy. When I advocate for reproductive rights, for choice, I don’t claim that abortion is morally acceptable. I think that it’s a very private, intensely personal decision. But I was stunned when one of my professors, a pathologist and a Planned Parenthood supporter, told me that years ago, entire wings of the university’s hospital were filled with women dying from infections caused by botched abortions. It’s clear that women who don’t want to be pregnant won’t be deterred by limited access to providers or to clinics. And I believe that it’s immoral to let them die rather than provide them with safe, competent care.
I still have a long way to go in my medical training. I’ve never witnessed an actual abortion procedure, though I have been trained, through my work in Medical Students for Choice, in manual vacuum aspiration, a very simple procedure used for both incomplete miscarriages and elective terminations in the first trimester. I plan to choose a residency program that provides further training — a place where I won’t worry that asking to be taught to perform an abortion could somehow limit my future options. At the start of medical school, I was very careful about how I presented my pro-choice views to the faculty for fear that I could jeopardize my grades or hurt my chances for recommendations or of being accepted into a program run by any of the professors. This experience of treading lightly is unique to medical students in more conservative parts of the country, where opposition to abortion is widespread — and it astounds many of my fellow Medical Students for Choice leaders from the Northeast and the West Coast.
As I continue my education, my views on abortion are still evolving. Take late-term abortions. When I first heard about them, I was horrified. I remember the flyer I saw at a pro-life event that described the procedure: It claimed that when the baby’s head emerges, the doctor jabs a pair of scissors into the back of its neck, severing the spinal cord. Even after I became pro-choice, this crossed a line for me. But later, I learned that this description was misleading and graphically politicized.
It wasn’t until I spent time in ultrasound rooms during a research job in graduate school that I began to see late-trimester abortions in a very different light. In one case, the patient’s baby had just been diagnosed with a lethal congenital anomaly. The high likelihood was that it wouldn’t survive after birth for more than a few minutes. As long as the baby remained in her mother’s womb, however, she would live. I asked the physician what this woman’s options were. The answer was, not many. She could choose to continue the pregnancy, but then she might be waiting for almost 20 more weeks to give birth to a baby that would never take more than a few breaths on its own. She was past the point where she could legally terminate the pregnancy in Alabama. If she could get an appointment in Atlanta within the next week, she might be able to have the procedure there. Beyond that, there were only a few physicians in the nation who would perform an abortion in such a case.
I could hardly wrap my mind around the agony that this woman and her husband must have been facing. They needed a caring and compassionate physician to help them through this dark moment, and if they chose not to continue the pregnancy, they also needed a physician who was both skilled enough and brave enough to provide them with the care they needed. They needed Dr. Tiller.
I can’t yet imagine doing precisely the kind of work that he did. When I think about my future practice, I think about a doctor I met at a conference who spoke candidly about the harassment his children endured at school because of what their father did. I wonder what seventh grade might be like for my children if I choose to provide abortions.
I’m not the only one with questions, of course. Once, after Medical Students for Choice co-hosted a panel discussion on reducing abortion by providing better education on reproductive health, some of my classmates approached close friends of mine. They were puzzled that a pro-choice group was talking about wanting to reduce abortions — and that it viewed ending unwanted pregnancies as a tragedy. Mostly, though, they were confused about what I was doing there. “I know she goes to church every Sunday and that she’s a good person,” one classmate asked. “Why would she be involved in a group like this?”
I know my answer to that question. Someday I hope my classmates will understand, too.
[Excerpted from the Washington Post with the author's permission] [R.F. Love, "My Choice", Washington Post, Sunday, June 7, 2009]
I am a Jewish college student who is currently applying to Rabbinical School. I am also a Jewish volunteer at a reproductive justice organization.
Last week, as we held a Faithful Presence in defense of a local abortion clinic, I held this sign. I held this sign because my community believes in women’s rights and my sacred texts support such a position. I didn’t mean to make any sort of controversial statement.
However, the sign did seem to increase the anger of many of the protestors. One of them started yelling at me about how Hitler killing my people was just like the abortions I now “support.” He failed to recognize see the irony of yelling hateful things in order to denounce hate.
That kind of false analogy isn’t going to sway me. I do this because I’m Jewish, not in spite of it. I’m tired of some people’s religious views dictating the reproductive services for all women. My minority religious status teaches me that we must always fight for those are being targeted by an oppressive force—whether that means, Jews, homosexuals, Communists, Gypsies, or, in this case, women and their doctors.
I am Dr. TIller.
