There is not really such a thing, for me, because human bodies and human lives are so unpredictable. But one thing I can expect every day (and what gets me out of bed most mornings) is that I will meet at least one pregnant person, and will likely spend much of my day in pursuit of their surviving and thriving, no matter what pregnancy outcome they want or need. I will likely have to move some mountains (or at least some hills) to get them the care they need, in this deeply broken state and country, and to help them protect their joy, their health, their autonomy, their family, and their future.
How, if at all, has your work changed since the overturning of Roe in June?
I am definitely being called upon—both in the clinic and in my doula role—by more and more folks out-of-state, and by more and more folks in crisis. What might have been a relatively accessible 15-minute procedure in someone’s hometown has now become a three-day ordeal of traveling with young children, missing work, not being able to make rent. Or, horrifyingly and heartbreakingly, it has become a continued pregnancy and birth against someone’s will. People are suffering far more, physically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually, which makes caring for them and supporting them more intense and more full of stress and grief.
Every abortion care worker I know—especially those in the states now passing bans and instituting wildly unconstitutional and evil enforcement mechanisms for those bans—is deeply traumatized, but has no choice but to continue working through our trauma. Working even harder, in fact. We feel abandoned—by the politicians and parties who use our work as a football or a bargaining chip to raise money off of, but who communicate their complete disinterest in our or our patients’ actual survival and wellbeing by their every action, by the leadership of the organizations who claim Reproductive Justice as a mission but who then create and uphold wildly racist, ableist, and anti-family policies and environments for their workers, and often by our loved ones or people in our lives who don’t understand what our day-to-day lives actually look like right now, and don’t have the curiosity (or, understandably, the time and energy) to plug into abortion support networks where they’re most desperately needed.
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