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The Right To Refuse Denies The Right To Choose

Lauren

Ryan sent me an article from NUVO, an Indianapolis-based free magazine that covers local and national news. “The Conscience Clause” is a powerful testament to the backwardness of religiosity in legal and medical institutions.

As her youngest, a 13-month-old with fluffy blond hair and bright blue eyes, teeters near her mother’s shins, Annie sighs heavily, pats her stomach and then puts a hand over her eyes.

“I’m pregnant,” she says through tears, “again.”

Annie and her husband Dan have been married for nearly eight years. They are a quintessential middle-class, middle-America family. The three-bedroom suburban brick ranch, the requisite mini-van, the paychecks that don’t go as far as they need to and the on-going struggle to just keep their heads above water.

Today Annie feels as if she is drowning.

“I wasn’t on birth control while I was breast-feeding. We were trying to use condoms. I don’t know what happened.” She laughs a bit, and then adds, “Well, I know what happened.”

There are a few awkward moments of silence. There are more tears wiped away with the back of her hand. And there is a confession.

“My mom said, ‘Don’t worry, Annie. You’ll love this child, too.’ And I hope she’s right. I mean, I know she’s right. But I … I just don’t know if I can do this again.”

Annie stops and draws a deep breath before continuing. “The thing is … I don’t want to do it again. But I don’t have a choice.”

It is not necessarily a polite question to ask, but why didn’t Annie do something about it after her last baby? Why didn’t she have her tubes tied?

“I asked. Hell, I begged,” she says as her laughter reveals more than a hint of bitterness. “But it’s a Catholic hospital. They wouldn’t do it, and our insurance doesn’t cover it if I go somewhere else.”

Has she considered an abortion?

“No. Yes. I mean no. Not really,” she stutters. She looks away and it’s clear she has more to say, but she doesn’t. She can’t.

Her oldest is now hanging upside down from a tree limb in the neighbor’s yard. Annie doesn’t have time to talk. She doesn’t have time to worry, or even cry. It’s almost 6 and she needs to gather the kids, check on the roast, get dinner on the table, clean up afterwards, oversee multiple homework assignments and baths, and all the other necessary tasks before tucking her daughters in for the night.

Dan will be home from work soon.

“He’s happy about the new baby. He says maybe this time it’ll be a boy.” Annie shrugs and picks up the toddler at her feet. “Please don’t tell him I was crying,” she says before going inside the house.

This article contains several powerful personal stories about the consequences of the conscience clause, legal exemptions of care for religiously-based institutions, and how the conscience clause plays out in Indiana.

Please read the whole thing.

8 thoughts on The Right To Refuse Denies The Right To Choose

  1. Oh wow. I just remembered something I hadn’t thought of in a very long time.

    When I was in college, I volunteered one night a week at a shelter for battered women. (I’m not sure how much good I did any of the women, but I learned a lot myself.) This article suddenly made me remember one of the women I met there. She was in her early 20s and had three children. The older two were living with her mother, and the third was with her at the shelter. She was also pregnant with twins. After the birth of her third child she wanted to have her tubes tied, but the hospital where she gave birth wouldn’t do it: she was under a certain age (maybe 25?), so even though she was a legal adult who already had three children, it was against their policy. She wanted to use birth control, but she was involved in an abusive relationship, and her boyfriend refused to use a condom. She couldn’t use oral contraceptives for some reason, and a diaphragm was also out because after the birth of her third child, she had a prolapsed uterus. So that’s how she ended up in a battered women’s shelter, pregnant with twins. When I met her I think it was already too late for her to abort, and I don’t know whether she would have considered it, anyway.

    I can’t believe how long it’s been since I thought of her.

  2. Gee Lauren, isn’t Indiana just a safe-haven for us fertile women and our reproductive rights? I cannot wait to leave this assbackwards, misogynist, fanatically religious state in three years.

  3. Pseudo-Adrienne,

    That’s about the amount of time I plan to be in Hoosier State. That’s over a thousand days to make a difference, i.e. enrage conservatives with your compassion and brilliance.

  4. Something else that pisses me off, a womans daughter had been raped and could not get a presription for the morning after pill for her daughter filled at a local Walgreens because the pharmacist decided it was against he principles.

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  6. “I asked. Hell, I begged,” she says as her laughter reveals more than a hint of bitterness. “But it’s a Catholic hospital. They wouldn’t do it, and our insurance doesn’t cover it if I go somewhere else.”

    Check out the available hospitals before you hook up with one through your HMO, I’d say. But there are so many hospitals where I live, I guess the choices are much more limited out west(??)

    Why the hell wasn’t her husband fixed? It’s a much easier– and cheaper– operation.

  7. Reading that article, I am currently very, very happy that I live in Sweden. Emergency contraception is available over the counter here since a few years, and it is not probable that any conscience clauses will revoke my right to contraception of my choice anytime soon.

    I have taken emergency pills once, and at that time it was still prescription only. (Meaning that you had to go to your local hospital and see a midwife.) Me and my then-boyfriend had an accident with a ruptured condom and though it was in a low-risk period for me, we very both scared and worried and went to the hospital at the earliest possible time the next day.

    I told the midwife what had happended and was naive enough to believe that anyone in her age would have life experience enough to realize that it was rather traumatic (for both me and my boyfriend) and, you know, be a little sympathetic.

    Well, that was not *quite* the reaction. The midwife, it was apparent, had chosen her line of work for the joy of helping new children to the world – not to be sympathetic towards girls who did not want to become pregnant. Instead she very heavy-handedly implied that girls who slept around without proper protection deserved both anguish and contempt (and probably pregnancy as weel). Had she been able to say that out loud without losing her job, I believe she would have. Lucky for me, she was forced to do her job and I went home with two pills in my pocket.

    My boyfriend, I might add, was totally ignored during this. I think gayle’s question (“Why the hell wasn’t her husband fixed? It’s a much easier– and cheaper– operation.”) points to something interesting – why, in the case of relationships, is this so very often seen as the woman’s problem/responsibility/area?

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