Radical Doula

While many of us spend a lot of time fighting against anti-abortion legislation, crazy lawmakers and their ballot initiatives, there is a whole other group of people pro-actively working to ensure women’s access to abortion–by providing them.

Last week I was at the National Coalition of Abortion Providers Conference (talking about abortion doulas) and Dr. Susan Wicklund spoke about her new book. Dr. Wicklund is an abortion provider living in Montana, and has written a touching memoir of her life as a provider. She lives in Bozeman, MT currently and wants to open up a new clinic (in an area with few options for women) but has run into a lot of hurdles. Building owners who won’t lease to her under pressure from anti-choice people mainly.

So to help Dr. Wicklund some of the attendees of the conference opened a paypal account in her name, to help her open her clinic (possibly by buying a building). Want to chip in? Email supportsuewicklund@gmail.com and ask for information about how to donate!

Cross-posted at Feministing

So today is the anniversary of Roe vs Wade. If any of you are in DC, unfortunately you will notice that it’s also a huge day for the anti-choice community. Tons of people come from all over the country on this anniversary to lobby Congress and rally for the rights of fetuses. Meanwhile the members of the pro-choice community celebrate today as a milestone in the fight for women’s reproductive rights, since the Roe vs. Wade Supreme court case decriminalized abortion in the United States.

So in honor of the anniversary of Roe vs Wade, I’m blogging today about a new Guttmacher report that was just released about the status of abortion today. Abortion levels have now fallen to back to 1974 rates, continuing a decline from the spike in 1981. The steady decline in abortion providers is also leveling off, in part due to the increased provision of early medication abortions (like RU-486) which many providers are only offering.

It’s hard to know if this is good news or bad. Are women getting less abortions because they have better access to things like emergency contraception and birth control? Or are they getting fewer abortions because 83% of counties have no abortion provider, restrictions like the Hyde Amendment prevent low-income women from obtaining abortions (the report said that the average cost for a 10 week abortion was $413), and anti-choice sentiment around the country is making women feel shamed into carrying these unwanted pregnancies to term? Not to mention recent clinic violence, increases in medically inaccurate abstinence only education funding as well as a rise in crisis pregnancy centers–now two for every one abortion provider.

The answer is I don’t know. The jury is still out on this one–it’s a really hard thing to determine. We know that 1 in 5 pregnancies in still ending in abortion, and that half of all pregnancies are still unintended. What we don’t know if if those unintended pregnancies are also unwanted. No one is asking women as they give birth, “Oh, by the way, did you want to have an abortion but weren’t able to?” and who knows if they would provide an honest answer.

So until then, I say we need to continue to fight for wider access to services for all women–both “prevention” focused things like birth control, comprehensive sex ed, and emergency contraception as well as abortion services. My hope is that the abortion rate will one day reflect exactly that–how many women need and want that form of pregnancy termination.

PS If you want to go to a Roe vs Wade anniversary event, look here for a sampling of whats going on in your city.

Next week is the Anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision which upheld a woman’s right to an abortion. In preparation I’m going to blog about some more reproductive rights centered topics leading up to next week.

First off is a shout-out for the just released NARAL Pro-Choice America report Who Decides? The Status of Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States. The report gives a state-by-state breakdown of the laws affecting women’s ability to choose abortion, access emergency contraception, get insurance coverage for reproductive health services, among other things. They give each state a grade that corresponds to these issues.

For example, my lovely home state of North Carolina receives a D+ from NARAL for a variety of reasons including that 83% of counties in NC have no abortion provider (which is consistent across the country, by the way). You can see what grade your state gets here.   

They also have some awesome maps that give an overview of certain restrictions across the country, like this scary one about states with almost total abortion bans (even though they are unconstitutional) on the books.

What would be really awesome is if next year, NARAL could add some information about birth–which states allow midwives to practice and which allow home birth. I know a lot of you would agree that how you birth is a fundamental reproductive right as well.

Just wanted to share the link to a piece I just wrote for RH Reality Check about abortion doulas, particularly the Birth Sisters at Boston Medical Center and their attempts to expand their doula services to women having abortions. It’s called Mi Compañera.

Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion (Paperback) by Karen E. Bender (Editor), Nina De Gramont (Editor)

I went to Bluestockings last week to hear from the two editors and one contributor to this new book called Choice. It originally intrigued me because I thought it might be a broader take on what the term choice means for people in the United States. While I haven’t read the whole book yet, from the three contributions read last week and the editors remarks, it expands the concept of choice, but not as far as I would have liked. As a young queer woman, I didn’t feel particularly reflected or included in their stories, and from scanning the titles of the other essays, and looking at the biographies of the other contributors, didn’t feel compelled to keep reading.

While I think the book itself provides some interesting, thoughtful and well-written perspectives on what choice can mean for women, it misses an opportunity to really provide something new. I feel disappointed by these kind of publications frequently, and maybe that’s because of who is able to access publishers and agents, and who is in their circle of writers. It’s difficult for new writers (or even people who wouldn’t consider themselves writers, but have amazing things to say) to get publishedor included in these types of manuscripts.

I obviously need to read the rest of the selections to really be able to give my opinion, but in the meantime, you can check out this (kind of scathing) review of the book at SFGate.

For more from one of the editor, check out Karen Bender’s article at Huffington Post.

This article from the Independent today announces that some politicians in the UK are looking to expand women’s access to early abortions by allowing nurses and midwives to perform them.

MPs from all parties are to launch a campaign to modernise abortion law. They want to allow women to have early abortions on an “informed consent” basis and to allow trained nurses and midwives to carry out early abortions for the first time. They also want to expand the number of clinics offering early abortions so that women are no longer restricted to using centres officially licensed to carry out terminations.

A first trimester abortion is a very simple medical procedure (as well as one of the safest ones out there) and this isn’t the first time I’ve heard the idea to expand the definitions of who can perform these procedures. I’m not as familiar with the UK abortion climate, but here in the US, many of the laws regulating abortion providers are really meant to limit women’s access to abortion, rather than for their safety and protection. In the US, we are looking at a serious abortion provider shortage in the near future, with medical schools and students not being taught how to do the procedure.

The more authority midwives can gain to do medical procedures, particularly ones that have historically fallen under doctors domain, but are relatively simple. Plus, it will be a huge step forward toward increasing access to this important (and one of the most common) medical procedure for women.

To mark the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez on Monday, Page Rockwell has a great piece up at Salon about what kind of legacy he is leaving behind.

Let’s recap:

• Torture
• Suspicous and unexplainable firing of US Attorney’s
• The first Supreme Court cases banning an abortion procedure
• Overall shadyness and misconduct

Thanks a lot Alberto. We won’t miss you.

I found a thread on alldoulas.com about the article I wrote a while back about Being a Radical Doula, and specifically, how birth activism and abortion advocacy go hand in hand.

It’s interesting to see how doulas react to this discussion of the connections between the movements. I highly recommend checking it out.

Oh, and by the way, the tagline for the site is:

I would say supporting women who have abortions falls under that category nicely…but you all know that already.

Here are some highlights that I think are interesting:

it *ABSOLUTELY* reflects my views and my experience as a doula & reproductive rights activist, and im super excited to have read it, and to see it on alldoulas! this is another kind of dialogue that helps us learn from each other, and im excited to welcome it into our community…my 2 deepest interests in this world are definitely birthing and abortion, both of which i support adamantly and am deepy committed to women’s right and access to…ive never mentioned the word abortion here before, and i dont think i ever would have unless id read this post today.

A less supportive one:

I’m also what might be considered more of a ‘baby activist’ than a ‘woman activist’, if that makes any sense? I don’t judge those who choose abortion because I have NOT walked in their shoes and it’s not my place to judge. I do, however, feel that they should be counseled…not necessarily against it, but to know where their baby is developmentally, to see it on an u/s, to KNOW what the entire process entails physically, emotionally, mentally. I just hate hearing women say ‘they told me it wasn’t a baby’ or whatever and no one ever told them what was really going on OR that they had more choices than just having an abortion. There is support out there for women who don’t have great families or partners, etc. There’s also adoption (but I know this is a whole other topic where women, esp young girls, could potentially be taken advantage of and made to feel inadequate…) Anywho…the moral of my story is I’m all for women being EDUCATED!

I hate that argument, that women don’t know what they are doing when they make a decision to have an abortion. Totally untrue–and just shows a misogynistic view of women, just like Justice Kennedy in his Abortion Ban decision.

And another not-so supportive opinion:

This will probably be my only post on this thread, as this is a topic that so saddens me. I am an advocate for moms and babies. Aborting babies is totally opposite from that in my view. As much as I believe in a mothers right to choose in how she will give birth, I also strongly believe in the baby’s right to live. If you could ask him/her, I’m sure that they would choose to live. We are even talking about baby girls…who should be our future women…whose rights have been stripped away.

When I was new in this doula work, I started out assuming that most in the childbirth field would naturally be pro-life. It was very hard for me to comprehend how doulas and midwives could be pro-abortion. It still is, actually. I guess that I’m not a radical doula by description of this article, and that is quite ok. I will go on supporting moms and their babies, which in my very strong opinion is anything but what I just read in that article.

Check out the complete thread here.

And thanks to the person who posted my article on the site, this is exactly the kind of dialogue doulas need.

Check out this fabulous article by Susan Sharon Lerner from Salon about women’s access to abortions in Mississippi. Unfortunately for women in that state, every barrier that you can imagine has been placed on their ability to access services, we’re talking lack of providers (there is only one in the entire state), waiting periods, high costs, strigent (even bordering on harrasment-like) requirements on the clinic and provider, hostile political climate, coupled with extreme poverty and a twelve week cut-off for abortions in the state, and you have a scary set of circumstances that means a lot of women in that state will continue with unwanted pregnancies.

Lerner sums it all up better than I can: 

It’s hard to imagine someone who can’t afford a bus trip taking responsibility for a new life — especially when she doesn’t want to.

PS If you’re interested in reading more reproductive rights related news–check out my organization’s new blog, Nuestra Vida, Nuestra Voz where I’ll be writing more about reproductive justice and the Latina community.

Check out my post on RHRealityCheck about why LGBTQ activists should care about abortion advocacy.