Lauren sent on this powerful piece written by an abortion provider, explaining why he provides the services he does. You really have to read the whole thing, but here’s a teaser:
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.”
He concludes,
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.”
He also illustrates something that many pro-choicers emphasize — that there is no such thing as an “abortion of convenience” — but phrases it better than anyone I’ve read:
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.
Emphasis mine, because that is an absolutely crucial point.
Also on Kos today is the question, Will a Dem win in 2008 generate right-wing violence? Meteor Blades links to Zuzu’s post about anti-choice violence never being called what it is: Terrorism. S/he goes on to question whether a 2008 defeat will bring back the right-wing militias, anti-government sects, anti-gay and anti-choice terrorists, and others who are currently quiet because they’re having their needs met by the Bush administration. I’ll add to the list the anti-immigrant vigilantes like the Minute Men, whose needs aren’t being entirely met by the current administration and who I suspect we’ll see further violence from even before the election — but I’d predict that a Dem win would exacerbate that, too.
We can’t be surprised when a political ideology that relies on violence and warfare as the solution to all of its grievances breeds smaller groups which rely on violence and warfare to solve their own problems, but without the legitimacy that the federal government assumes (and I would say “without the rules that the federal government is required to abide by,” but the concept of rules and basic morals seems to have gone straight to hell over the past few years).
Right-wing terrorists are festering across our country. They maintain sites like The Nuremberg Files (which I’m not linking to, sorry) which list the names, addresses and other information about abortion providers. They keep a list of “Aborted and Nearly Aborted Abortionists” that chronicles the doctors, nurses and other health care providers who have been killed or injured by anti-choice terrorists — the point being to celebrate the individuals who have murdered and attempted to murder the people on the list. Several of the terrorists are listed as “At large, planning next murder?”
According to site owner Neil Horsley (who in addition to threatening abortion providers with murder, occasionally goes on national radio programs to discuss his youthful penchant for having sex with mules):
We are updating this section DAILY. Our goal is to record the name of every person working in the baby slaughter business across the United States of America so, as in the Nuremberg Trials in Nazi Germany, we can punish these people for slaughtering God’s children. Email us with your evidence.
In addition to listing the names of abortion providers, they also list information about their families, judges, law enforcement officials, and on and on. Their efforts at stalking and violence are facilitated by “abortion cams” that tape women walking into clinics and put their images online.
But guys like Neil Horsley and the Operation Rescue and Army of God dudes are fringe extremists, right? It’s not like any of the mainstream, telephoning-the-White-House “pro-family” groups would embrace these men, right? Well… “brothers under the skin” seems like a pretty accurate characterization.
Thankfully, there are people like Dr. Harrison who, to incorporate the stereotypical feminist quote (that I love anyway), “daily provide women with a choice, who stand down a threat the size of Oklahoma City just to listen to a young woman’s voice.”
Dr. Harrison is not the only one. Other doctor diaries are here and here; there are hundreds of health care providers who do this same good work every day. Unfortunately, abortion providers are becoming fewer and fewer — nearly 90 percent of U.S. counties lack an abortion provider. Current providers — those who haven’t been killed, haven’t quit for fear of being murdered (or having their families murdered), those who have stuck out the harassment and the stalking and the glares of disapproval — are often in their 60s and 70s, continuing because there’s no one to replace them. Thankfully, there are some young people who are willing to make serious personal sacrifices — facing down violence, taking a substantial pay cut, exposing themselves and their families to threats and stalking and hatred — to provide women with abortion services.
They have my admiration and my gratitude.