My friend nurse midwife - sex therapist & writer Evelyn Resh wrote a powerful essay about providing abortions. You can read this and more of Evelyn's writing on Substack - she is 'Nightingale'
Most abortion providers are too scared to write about what they are doing. Evelyn is very brave and it's such an important view 'from the trenches.'
I Provide Abortion Services:
Read what I have to say.:
Evelyn Resh
Legalized abortion is on many people’s minds right now but for those on the Supreme Court and many in the populous, these discussions have a distinctly abstract quality. As someone who provides abortion services, termination of a pregnancy is anything but abstract to me.
My first question to women who come to me for an abortion is this: Does anyone know you’re here and will you have support when you go home? Recently, a patient told me she was unable to disclose her choice to anyone and that she would be on her own once she left my office. When I asked who she lived with she told me her two young children, one who is disabled. Like many of the women who seek abortions, hers was the voice of a loving mother who knows her limitations and wants to provide the best for her kids. In her case, this meant not adding a third child to her family. Her visit and the abortion service I provided was life-preserving for all three of them. Her inability to disclose her decision to anyone because of the stigma associated with abortion made things that much more difficult.
Let me be clear about something: when I look at ultrasounds of human fetuses about to be aborted, I clearly perceive their human potential. My work as a midwife who provides abortions services is not free of circumspection. But then, I meet my patient, whose uterus I have just viewed and who has decided she is unable to provide for the development of that fetus in a way she believes is sound for everyone involved. This is the human being I am most concerned with. The woman whose life would be inexorably altered should she be forced to carry an unintended, unwanted pregnancy to term.
This week, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett questioned why adoption or the Safe Haven Act weren’t adequate alternatives to abortion. As the mother of seven, two of whom are adopted, one would imagine that she would raise this issue. But let’s remember that Justice Barrett was able to put forth this argument in court while her house staff was caring for at least some of her children, and her cleaning lady was making things tidy, and she can likely hire someone to festoon her house with seasonal decorations. My patients, most people really, don’t have those resources when it comes to family life. Nor does our government provide them for families. Further, many people simply don’t share Justice Coney Barrett’s feelings about adoption and relinquishment which is as valid an argument for them as it is for her.
In my opinion, ardent abortion opponents are a different kind of criminal than I have been made out to be. I am called murderer for terminating the human fetus whose life cannot continue without the will and body of its mother. But my counter-parts propose terminating the life of a woman, as she is already living it, by insisting she carry a fetus she didn’t intend to conceive, including in the case of incest and rape. This feels like the criminal act of femicide to me. Should Roe V. Wade be over-turned then we will all be facing federally sanctioned femicide targeted at women of reproductive age. I have no doubt that should we lose our right to legal and safe abortions we will also start losing more women to deaths from homemade methods to terminate pregnancies. Must that time in history repeat itself for us to realize how important abortion rights are for the lives of women and families?
For those who cannot reconcile having an abortion under any circumstances then don’t. But women should not be subjugated through legislation that represents personal opinion and belief.
Put yourself in the shoes of my patient and ask yourself how you would proceed. The only answer that makes sense would be to do what is best for your children who are relying on you. Even if that means abortion.
I hope someday, the approximate 30% of women of reproductive age can do so without the burden of prohibitive laws and terrible stigma.
