This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor (19 page)

“I want to see my girl!” the father demands, as soon as he sees me. His face is red; his hands are clenched in fists.

I keep a lid on my own temper, quell the temptation to scream at him, and instead, impose a cool, professional demeanor.

“It’s taking a little longer than we thought,” I tell him. “She’s young, and we want to be careful. It takes time to prepare such a young patient,” I lie. “Try to understand. She’s perfectly fine, and we’re doing everything to make sure she’s safe.”

“I want to see her!” he paces back to his seat.

I close the door and hurry to the administrator’s office. “We have a reportable incident,” I blurt out. “We have to hurry. The girl is a minor, an incest victim. She’s identified her father. He’s in the waiting room now, but he’s really nervous and demanding. He may suspect something. I’ve told him we’ve been delayed.”

She has the phone in her hand before I finish. We notify both the police and the Child Protection Agency, stress that it’s essential for them to synchronize. The girl will be escorted out the back door by a caseworker at the same time the police take the father out the front.

All this takes more time. It’s been almost two hours since the girl checked in.

“Where’s my girl?” the father demands when I return. “I want to see her!”

I have to physically block him from coming through the door. “Please. Be reasonable,” I say. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long. We’ll be through soon, but it only prolongs things if I have to keep coming out here. It won’t be long now.”

“I know something is wrong,” he accuses. “What’s going on?”

He finally storms back to his chair, muttering to himself.

Back with the girl, I fill her in. “People from a place called the Child Protection Agency are coming to pick you up. They are set up to take care of young people who have troubles at home. They’ll keep you safe while you figure things out.”

“He’ll never let them take me,” she says.

“The police are coming to ask him some questions. They won’t let him hurt you.”

The events daze her. By turns she looks relieved, anxious, scared, thankful. The door opens, and the administrator calls me out.

“Everything’s set,” she says. “The police are coming in.”

I get to the waiting room just as they open the door. The father is looking at me, about to speak, when an officer takes his arm.

“What’s going on?” he explodes. “What is this?”

“You’re coming in for questioning.” The officer handcuffs him as they speak.

“My daughter’s here. You can’t do this.”

He shoots me a haunting, burning look. He’ll be back, I think. He’ll be back, looking for me. I watch just long enough to be convinced they will indeed take him away, then turn and go quickly to the back of the clinic. The girl is just about out the door with the social worker, but I stop them briefly.

“Please come back and talk to me when you feel safe,” I say.

She nods distractedly. She looks tiny and vulnerable. A child starting a new life.

I tell the caseworker I’m available any time. I write down my phone numbers. The car drives off.

I have a moment of doubt. I didn’t have to probe for the truth. I could have performed the procedure and let her return to her life. It was only through my persistence, and my legal obligation to act on information, that this happened.

In the end, though, it is these cases that make me feel I’m performing the best medicine. It would have been easier not to be thorough, to ignore the red flags. But that extra twenty minutes spent digging for the truth, or explaining something a patient doesn’t understand, or answering the hard questions can make a difference for the rest of a woman’s life. The moment I simply become a technician performing procedures is the moment I have to quit.

I
rony, if not blatant hypocrisy, is everywhere in the realm of abortion clinics and women’s reproductive health. Sexuality is a universal drive, no matter what your ethics are, and a pregnancy is irrefutable. It forces people to confront weaknesses, to face the inconsistencies of their beliefs, conflicts of lifestyle, the disconnect between a public persona and private reality. Or it provokes the powerful temptation to deny and rationalize, to escape that confrontation, whatever it takes.

Sometimes the brazenness of the hypocrisy takes my breath away. In clinics and in protests, we see it every day.

Kathleen was forty-two years old and a model of perfection. Hair, nails, clothes done up as if she were prepped for a high-profile job interview. When I came into the room and asked my standard question, “Are you absolutely sure you want this abortion?” she squared her jaw and glared at me.

“Of course I don’t want to have an abortion. I HAVE to have an abortion.” She held an oversized purse on her lap, kept fumbling with the latch.

“Why? Is someone forcing you?”

“No one is forcing me. I just CANNOT have a baby now. I know it’s murder and should not even be legal, but I HAVE to have an abortion.”

“So,” I spat back, “if you think this is murder, do you think I am a murderer?”

“Of course you are.”

“Do you think I should go to jail for doing abortions?”

“Yes, I do.”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. I felt sick with outrage and disbelief. Maybe I had misunderstood. I asked her again.

“So, you think this should be illegal and that I should go to prison for murder, but you also want me to do an abortion for you?”

“Yes,” she said, without blinking an eye.

Everything inside me turned upside down. I had never encountered anything like this.

“I need to step out of the room a minute,” I said. I got off my stool and headed for the door.

“You can’t leave,” she barked. “I want an abortion. It is my right, and you have to do it.”

“I have rights, too,” I replied, and I slipped through the door. Flashes of the final scene in the movie
If These Walls Could Talk
ran through my head. In the movie, a couple comes to an abortion clinic, supposedly for an abortion. The woman’s partner accuses the doctor of being a murderer, then pulls out a gun from a hand bag and kills her. It is a scene burned into my memory.

I paused and took a deep breath before going to talk to the clinic administrator. After I relayed the conversation, I asked that someone else tell the patient that we would not be providing the abortion. There was no way I could do it.

The counselor who had visited with Kathleen earlier went into the room. Within twenty seconds the conflict was loud enough for everyone on the floor to hear.

“I will NOT leave! It is my RIGHT to have an abortion and I am staying until it is DONE!”

Brief silence.

“NO! I will NOT get dressed until I have the ABORTION!”

We heard a loud thump, the patient slamming her fist onto a desk. The clinic administrator called the front desk guard to escort her out. If that didn’t work, we’d have to call the police.

“I am going to sue that doctor and this stupid clinic!” the woman yelled. I imagined everyone in the waiting room cringing. I literally hid in the staff lounge until she was gone.

At the end of the day all the staff gathered in the empty recovery room.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t confront that woman,” I apologized. “It doesn’t happen often, but once in a while someone comes along who I simply can’t deal with.”

We talked about the danger a patient like that could present. From that time on, we established a clinic policy that prevented patients from bringing purses, bulky coats, or bags with them beyond the waiting room.

One of the most galling realities is the lack of consistency within the medical community. In Montana, as in other places, I was repeatedly attacked by anti-choice factions in editorials and letters to the editor. Statements containing false medical information and misleading “facts” went unchecked. Only one physician in Bozeman publicly supported me. The rest either were silent or professed to be against abortion, knuckling under to anti-choice pressure. Yet more than once I was asked to perform a secretive abortion after hours for a girlfriend or wife of a local doctor.

I remember meeting one such doctor at eight PM in the quiet hallway outside my office.

“Thank you for seeing us tonight,” he said, shaking my hand. He looked up and down the empty hall. “This is just so awkward, you know.”

I kept my thoughts to myself, focused instead on the woman by his side. When I didn’t respond, he continued. “Well, at least there’s an accountant’s office nearby. I can always say we were going there if someone sees us tonight. They work late sometimes, don’t they?”

Then there are the patients who come to us, admitting they have been against abortion, but struggling with the uncomfortable fact that they are now the victims of unwanted pregnancies. Suddenly, for them, the black-and-white parameters turn a decided shade of gray.

Early in my career, in a Midwestern clinic, I saw a twenty-two-year-old single mother in the waiting room whom I recognized as one of the group of protesters who had recently chained themselves together with bike locks, blocking the clinic entrance in an attempt to close us down. She had been sitting against the side doors, pounding her fist in a rhythmic way, doing her best to mimic a heartbeat. Thump thud. Thump thud. Thump thud. At the same time she screamed, “Mommy, don’t kill me!”

What was she doing in our waiting room? Was she a spy, gathering information? Would she open the doors and let in a flood of protesters? Was she faking a pregnancy in order to find out more about our facilities?

It became clear that she was actually there for an abortion. Unbelievable. The initial reaction from all the staff was anger and disbelief. How dare she expect us to take care of her? Did she take us for fools?

Our most seasoned counselor volunteered to talk with her. The two of them stayed cloistered in the room for perhaps an hour before the counselor reappeared with a look of determination and amazement on her face.

“She really is pregnant and really does want an abortion. I think we should help her, but I also think each of us needs to talk with her first. She should know how we feel about this. More important, she needs to understand the impact she has had on our lives and the lives of our other patients.”

There was a lot of resistance from the staff, myself included. The counselor persisted, telling us to be forgiving and understanding and to allow this woman the chance to learn the truth about us and about abortion.

“You never know,” she said. “This young woman might end up being an ally. Even if she doesn’t, it will be pretty hard for her to go back to the protesters.

“She knows now that things aren’t so ethically clear and simple as she was led to believe. Those pat answers aren’t working for her. Forget that she was a protester, and listen to her with an open heart.”

When I went in to see her, I started with a straightforward question: “Do you believe abortion should be legal?”

“Well, yes, I guess so. Yes. I do. Well, now I do. But I didn’t before . . . ,” she stumbled over the words.

“What has changed your mind?” I asked.

“This is my second pregnancy. The first time I got pregnant I came here to get an abortion, but the people out front stopped me and promised to help me if I had the baby. They told me I might die in here and that you were awful people that just wanted to kill babies.”

I kept listening and prodding her to tell me more.

“They said they’d pay for my prenatal care and give me baby clothes and diapers and all that.”

“So you had the baby?” I asked.

“Yes. And I really love him, but he’s only five months old, and I am really having a tough time taking care of him. I have to work, but I’d like to go to the community college. I don’t know how I could possibly do it with two kids.”

“So what happened to the people that promised to help you?”

“All they gave me was a layette set and two boxes of diapers. That’s it. They were all friendly and took me to church and wanted me to demonstrate with them, but they really haven’t helped me at all with anything. I feel like all they cared about was that I didn’t have an abortion.”

“But after all the things they told you about us, how do you know who to believe? How could you even dare to come here?” I asked.

“I talked to my aunt. She’s a nurse and told me a lot of things I didn’t know. I trust her, and she said I should trust you. She said this was a good clinic and that I’d be safe.”

I leaned back in my chair, thinking hard about the next thing on my mind. “Tell me,” I looked her in the eye. “Are you ever going to protest outside an abortion clinic again?”

“Absolutely not,” she replied without hesitation.

“And if your best friend got pregnant and came to you for advice, what would you tell her?” I wasn’t going to let up.

“I’d be her friend no matter what. It would be up to her, but I wouldn’t try to talk her out of an abortion like I would have last year.”