Last friday was Blog for Choice Day, apparently, but it kinda passed me by. I think I blog for choice on a regular basis, not to mention counseling for choice and working for choice and talking about choice. So instead of writing an obligatory post, I… didn’t.
Today, however, I am effing the dog, and I’ve been reading the blog over at NAF (the National Abortion Federation, which accredits clinics in Canada and the US). They have a weekly feature called Wednesday’s Words from Women; I strongly suggest heading over to check it out. These quotes are from women whose choices were made for many different reasons: abusive partners, sexual assault, bad timing, responsibility to children they already have. Some will break your heart:
I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006 at the age of 28. I am now 32 years of age, pregnant, and have a tumor growing in my uterus, and the doctors are concerned that it is cancerous. I have chosen to make this decision based on my health and the two boys that are already here that need me – alive! I have already given a baby up for adoption, so I know how that feels too. It wasn’t easy and neither is this decision. I did what’s best for my health and for my boys.
-submitted by Justine* through a member clinic
Others will make you smile, if you are like me and you smile when you read about empowering moments in people’s lives:
I grew up in an anti-choice household, but ever since I was able to truly think through the issue, have been pro-choice. But like many beliefs, for most of my life it went untested. Then, last spring, I became pregnant and came face-to-face with my belief that women have the right to their own body, including the right to an abortion. I was 29, had a master’s degree, was employed full-time and had a supportive network of friends and family. By some standards I had everything necessary to adequately take care of a child. But I wasn’t ready. I had just ended an unhealthy relationship; I didn’t want to be pregnant. I didn’t want to have a child. It was and always will be my body. I made a choice that was best for me. My body, my choice, and thankfully still my legal right.
–submitted by Susan* through our website
One beautiful thing about counseling is that I get to see women come to these decisions first-hand. The theme of last week’s Blog for Choice Day was ‘Trust Women,’ a phrase which Dr. George Tiller used often in defending and describing his work as an abortion provider. I believe that one of the best ways to learn to trust a person is to truly listen to them – though, of course, for a person to feel they can be truly, nakedly honest with you, a certain amount of trust is a prerequisite. The quotes on the NAF blog are all different, from women with varied backgrounds; the thread that links them is their thoughtfulness, the deep self-knowledge that people who make these decisions have about their own lives. I have never counseled a woman who was careless or cavalier about her decision to end her pregnancy. If anti-choice people trusted women and were willing to listen to their stories, I sincerely believe that they could not hold as hard a line as they do.
As it stands, I doubt that many women want to give these honest accounts to anti-choice people, because they know that the prerequisite trust doesn’t exist. We are here, though, working to understand all of the ambiguity and anxiety that surrounds the choice to end a pregnancy. Trusting women, their words and their understanding of their own lives.
Today I’m thinking of a particular client; my heart is with you and I hope you’re well.
*NAF changed names here, so I didn’t have to.
I thought I would take a few minutes out of my oh-so-hectic workday (that is extreme sarcasm, by the by) to talk about a couple of clinics local to me and why they’re so wonderful. Seemed like a spirit-lifting kind of post, though perhaps not quite as much as the gay animal couples.
Nine Circles Community Health Centre
This organization is involved in harm reduction activities, including needle distribution; as far as I know there’s only one other place in the city, the Methadone Intervention and Needle Exchange program, that provides clean needles to drug users. They provide HIV and STI testing, care for clients who are HIV positive, and an HIV/STI info line. These services are available elsewhere, of course, but they are strengthened at Nine Circles by the organization’s community focus. Nine Circles participates in some pretty fascinating research projects and they are trans-friendly, both in theory and in practice.
Anyway. I like them. Also because I went there once and my nurse-practitioner dude made me laugh so hard that he could barely give me a pelvic exam.
(Too much information, facebook creepers? Sorry. Get used to it.)
Klinic Community Health Centre
Klinic has two locations in the semi-inner city area where the provide a variety of services. They offer counselling for sexual assault and domestic abuse as well as crisis counselling and rural stress phone services. Their health services for men and women are primarily reproductive/sexual health care services, though they do offer limited primary care services to people in the community as needed. Their education services include Teen Talk, which lets young folks teach young folks about all kinds of sexy things like condoms. Klinic, like Nine Circles, has some programs geared specifically toward men, which the Women’s clinic I work at obviously does not. They are pro-choice and gay positive, and very welcoming.
Both clinics have volunteer opportunities available. As does the Women’s Health Clinic, just to get in a word for me and mine.
Back to work, maybe.
Our Bodies, Our Blog has a post up listing a few resources intended to help health consumers find credible sources of information online. This is important for everyone, of course, but I feel that it applies very specifically to women who are seeking real information about the abortion procedure and possible risks. Abortion is a medical procedure like any other, but because it is so politicized it can be difficult to find information without bias. I’ve spoken to countless women whose first resource was the internet, and who mostly found scare-mongering about breast cancer and infertility. So perhaps this will help.
Because I’m sitting here doing nothing but browsing other blogs, and because my darling best friend D. told me to, I’m going to post some randomness. Eventually, I want to get down to real-ish writing that people I don’t know might be interested in reading; for the moment, though, I think I’ll ramble.
I recently started training for a new job at a women’s health clinic in my home city. I’d already been volunteering there for a year and a bit, so some things are familiar. Other aspects of the day-to-day functioning of the place are brand new to me.
One thing that’s not so new is the whole confidentiality concern. The city I live in isn’t huge, and with only two options for abortion care it’s very likely that I’ll see names of women I know and details on their circumstances. This has come up before in practice, and wasn’t a real problem. I volunteer as a birth control and unplanned pregnancy counselor, and we have a fantastic program coordinator who makes herself available for de-brief sessions whenever we need her. That way, if I or one of the other counselors encounters something that would be too tough not to talk about, we can go to her. Her social work background makes her a pretty fabulous counselor herself.
In my current role, though, I don’t have quite the same support system. So today, when we were flipping through a record log for teen women’s pregnancies, and I saw the name of someone pretty close to me… Well, I just had to stand there letting the adrenaline rush run its course. There was nobody around who I could poke and go “OMG that’s so and so… and holy shit!” In regular life we can usually go off and “de-brief” with a partner or a tight friend when we know we can trust them with something. This is different, though, and it’s the kind of thing I’ll be dealing with forever if I do become a midwife. It requires that I learn new coping strategies, and figure out how to separate myself from situations that really have nothing to do with me. By now I’m so used to the counseling role at the clinic that I have the reflexive urge to say something or do something or offer something when I know about a situation that I think might be making someone’s life tough (which means that my now-coworkers constantly have to remind me that phone calls with clients should be pretty quick and that there’s a limit on how much information I can give them that way). BUT, I have to trust that the people in my life are capable of dealing with these things, just like I know I would deal with them in my own way. If someone chooses not to disclose something to me or anyone else, they have their reasons; and if there are medical practitioners and counselors other than myself involved, they have more than I could ever offer them. That is, they have impartial people providing care and allowing them to make whatever tough choice they need to make.
The confidentiality requirement also makes me reconsider the way I usually disclose things to people. There’s that rule that says you’re always allowed to tell your best friend/partner/sister… I’m not sure if that applies here, though. I guess specificity makes a difference. If I see a client whose situation is a through-the-roof kind of complicated, I might go home and tell a condensed, name-free version to my man friend; he, in turn, sometimes tells me bits and pieces about his job which he wouldn’t let slip with anyone else. Is this out of line? I dunno…
Ok, boring… It’s a good thing I only have one reader right now. She might be bored out of her mind. I swear, lady, I didn’t mean to! It’s just what came out! Next time I’ll have something wildly exciting for you — because, hey, tomorrow’s Thursday, and on Thursdays the Campaign Life Coalition hangs around outside the clinic with their fetus-picture sandwich boards trying to convince people that we represent EVIL and they represent GOOD. And save the babies! Next time I’ll record the only instance I have of actually talking to them… I think it’s more accurate to say that we represent SANITY and they represent BATSHIT CRAZY, but that’s just me.
