Anti-choice politics of limiting birth control cause more abortions than they prevent. This should be obvious, and one woman demonstrates it here.
General idea is this: Busy married couple with two kids find some private time, and they have sex. In the heat of the moment, woman forgets to insert her diaphragm. Woman does not want to be pregnant, as she already has two kids and is on medications that cause severe birth defects. The next day she calls various doctors trying to get emergency contraception, and is routinely denied. Woman gets pregnant.
Had she been able to get Plan B over the counter, chances are that she would never have gotten pregnant, and would never have had an abortion. But actually preventing abortions is secondary to the anti-choice right, which is more interested in stripping away women’s human rights than protecting babies.
After making the decision with my husband, I was plunged into an even murkier world — that of finding an abortion provider. If information on Plan B was hard to come by, and practitioners were evasive on emergency contraception, trying to get information on how to abort a pregnancy in 2006 is an even more Byzantine experience.
On the Internet, most of what I found was political in nature or otherwise unhelpful: pictures of what your baby looks like in the womb from week one, and so on.
Calling doctors, I felt like a pariah when I asked whether they provided termination services. Finally, I decided to check the Planned Parenthood Web site to see whether its clinics performed abortions. They did, but I learned that if I had the abortion in Virginia, the procedure would take two days because of a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, which requires that you go in first for a day of counseling and then wait a day to think things over before returning to have the abortion. Because of work and the children, I couldn’t afford two days off, so I opted to have the procedure done on a Saturday in downtown D.C. while my husband took the kids to the Smithsonian.
The hidden world of abortion services soon became even more subterranean. I called Planned Parenthood two days in advance to confirm the appointment. The receptionist politely informed me that the organization never confirms appointments, for “security reasons,” and that I would have to just show up.
I arrived shortly before 10 a.m. in a bleak downpour, trusting that someone had recorded my appointment. I shuffled to the front door through a phalanx of umbrellaed protesters, who chanted loudly about Jesus and chided me not to go into that house of abortion.
All the while, I was thinking that if religion hadn’t been allowed to seep into American politics the way it has, I wouldn’t even be there. This all could have been stopped way before this baby was conceived if they had just let me have that damn pill.
After passing through the metal detector inside the building, I entered the Planned Parenthood waiting room; it was like the waiting room for a budget airline — crammed full of people, of all races, and getting busier by the moment. I was by far the oldest person there (other than one girl’s mom). The wait seemed endless. No one looked happy. We were told that the lone doctor was stuck in Cherry Blossom Parade traffic.
He finally arrived, an hour and a half late.
The procedure itself took about five minutes. I finally walked out of the building at 4:30, 6 1/2 hours after I had arrived.
That’s what happens when clinics are under-funded and over-crowded, thanks again to anti-choice politics.
Perhaps my favorite thing about this whole op/ed is that I can just hear the response of the anti-choicers already. Amanda went in to this as well, but I have no doubt that this woman will be accused to being “selfish” and having an abortion of “convenience.” Forget the fact that nothing in her story souned especially convenient. We’re living in interesting times when wanting to have sex with your husband and also wanting to remain un-pregnant is “selfish.”
Stories like this always make me think of the 70s-era phrase, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” The first time I heard it, I thought it was ridiculous — but consider, honestly, whether we would tolerate these kinds of limits on reproductive rights if it was men who got pregnant; who had to take time off work for pregnancy, birth and child-rearing; whose bodies had to go through all sorts physically trying experiences; whose lives were irrevocably shaped by the decision to give birth. Would the class of people who are generally in charge tolerate those kinds of limitations? I don’t think so. We tolerate limits on reproductive rights because it’s women who need to exercise them.