Abortion Manifesto

When I was asked to be a part of Radio Free Rock Hill, I vowed to remain apolitical and present stories of general local interest. My vision as one of the 3 co-founders of RFRH was of an electronic town square, a place where anyone, regardless of political affiliation, color, creed etc. could contribute thoughtful, factual content.

I did not want to talk about politics. Unfortunately, politics are now interfering with my day job, in addition to keeping me awake at night. They brought politics into my exam room and have introduced bills to gag me from ensuring that my patients get the standard of care.

I am inspired to share my thoughts with you, reader and hopefully voter.

I was not always pro-choice. I was once of the “well just be responsible and don’t get pregnant” mentality. I have not offered women elective abortion care and though I have become a loud voice for a woman’s sovereignty over her own body, I have for the most part kept my own hands “clean.”

During my formative years as a gynecologist, healthcare providers were being murdered and clinics burned and bombed. In the early days of the world wide web, there was a list of providers, with their addresses, their spouses’ and children’s names and even schools. It was doxing, in its earliest form. It worked, as terrorism often does and I had no desire to be an abortion provider, and as a resident in a Navy program, under the Hyde amendment, I received no training to perform them.

Brave healthcare providers have risked their lives to keep abortion safe and legal. They have endured harassment and have sacrificed the peace of their families and even their lives to do a job that someone must do. I do not disagree that we, as a sex should, when possible, use birth control and as providers, go out of our way to provide the safest, most effective and affordable contraception possible. I can place an IUD in less than one minute. It will prevent pregnancy 99+ per cent of the time for the next 5-10 years.

However, often the women who need me the most cannot afford to get in my door.

Sometime in the last 20 years, it occurred to me that abortion bans only apply to poor women. In Romania in the 1970s and 80s, birth control and abortions were criminalized, however, women of means were able to get birth control and abortions by traveling to other countries or bribing a physician to perform one illegally. Poor women either gave birth or took matters into their own hands and sought an illegal and sometimes unsafe abortion. Over 9000 Romanian women died between 1965 and 1989 due to complications from unsafe abortions. Most children in Romanian orphanages during this time were not actually orphans. They had been abandoned by parents who could not afford to raise them.

I wonder what plans the South Carolina legislature has in place to support impoverished women and children? No fair hating poor people when you are the reason that they are poor.

(Wonder if the legislators are familiar with the natalist policies of Nicolae Ceausescu? Wonder if they know of his fate? A cautionary tale. But I digress.)

It is also well known that abortion laws do not stop abortions and that countries with the more restrictive abortion laws have higher rates of abortion. Imposition of global gag rules harm women’s health worldwide, tramples on free speech and prevents delivery of comprehensive women’s healthcare which includes contraception and thus unwanted pregnancy rates go up.  When the party that will not be named is in power in the US, abortion rates in developing countries go up. Women are also ostracized for their misfortune and are prevented from reaching their full potential.

I have presented these facts numerous times to my state law makers. They either do not believe me or they don’t care. They seem to be immune to anything but cherry-picked Bible verses and complete investment in an unhealthy patriarchal establishment.

In a conversation following my 2019 testimony to the SC Senate Medical Affairs Committee, my senator said, and I quote “You are removing all consequences for getting pregnant (with abortion on demand)” He essentially believes that women deserve punishment for having sex. When asked what punishment men deserve, he said he was inquiring regarding statutes to facilitate payment and collection of child support.

He is naïve, my senator. He does not understand that for some women, sex is its own punishment.

He has no understanding of the frequency of coerced or cajoled sexuality and in even of the most loving of relationships absence of a “no” is not always a “yes”.

Women throughout history have traded sex for goods and protection and sometimes the payment is a few minutes of peace.

Though the thought is appreciated, he does not seem to understand that no amount of money gives any man or the state of South Carolina access to the rental of my uterus for 40 weeks and my psyche in perpetuity.

I realize that the Venn diagram of domestic abusers, rapists and those who would deny a woman bodily autonomy as to whether to gestate is not a circle, but there is certainly much overlap.

You read that correctly. Denying a woman’s autonomy regarding pregnancy is in the same category as denying her consent as to whether to have sex.

They would trample on my and your first amendment rights and tell us that we cannot advise our patients and friends that they can seek abortion care across the state line in North Carolina. They would come into my exam room and arrest me for telling a patient that her baby does not have a brain, and what her options are regarding this pregnancy that does pose a threat to her health and safety and will not result in a viable baby.

Legal counsel will advise me as to the ramifications of my referring a patient to a subspecialist who then offers the patient termination of a doomed pregnancy. I could face criminalization for delivering the standard of care.

When I retire, who will replace me? What physician, starting out, will want to practice in a state where lawmakers, most of them men, some of whom have little higher education, seek to tell experts what they can and cannot do.

We all remember certified Bitcoin professional and state representative, the Honorable Stewart Jones of District 14 writing a letter to DHEC during the height of the pandemic, demanding that they not prevent doctors from prescribing Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Because the MD/PhD epidemiologists at DHEC really need to be told what to do by a guy with an associate degree from Piedmont Technical College. This behavior ultimately has a corrosive effect on public health. However, someone elected this person. Perhaps Jefferson was right, you get the government- and the healthcare- that you deserve.

Will businesses choose to open in South Carolina, where women’s reproductive rights are infringed upon and where physicians are gagged and pushed around by men who got themselves elected, not to be public servants, but to inflict their own world view on the rest of us?

And when will we say enough is enough?

When indeed ladies?

And on that note, I would like to end with a special message to Republican women who have had abortions. Yes, I named the party that will not be named.

I know that you are out there. I know because some of you are my friends.

One in 4 women have had or will have an abortion during her reproductive years. Typically, abortion knows no political party. Why should it? It’s a medical procedure.

I won’t go into the fact that the party that won’t be named only has co-opted the cause to pander to the Evangelicals.

I also will not go into the harm that has come to the cause of Christ from the Evangelicals’ willingness to get in bed with the devil. There is a saying about what eventually happens when you get in bed with the devil… but again I digress.

Republican women who have had abortions and pro-choice Republican women, I need for you to wake up right now and try to assure the same rights for your daughters that you had and of which you took advantage.

I cannot imagine the words that you have heard supposedly describing you. I fear that some of you may have internalized these words and somehow see yourselves as less than or broken. They know nothing about you.

I fear that some of you may have not reached your full potential because you believed what they told you about yourselves. It became your truth.

You are enough. You are loved and valued.

You may have heard women seeking abortion made out to be something bad or dirty or somehow damaged. You may regret your decision. That is your prerogative, but I hope that you are at peace knowing that you made the best decision for you at the time.

You deserved to make that decision. I trust that you did what was right for you. It may have been tough, or it may have been easy. The life you have now, including your beautiful children, may not have been possible had you chosen differently.

They do not know that you sit with them on their church pews.

You may be their child’s second grade teacher. Your skill unlocked the place in their child’s brain helping him learn to read, when he was struggling. You may not have finished college had you chosen differently and that teacher, who made all the difference to their child, may not have been there.

You may be his wife and he wouldn’t even be with you had you given birth to the pregnancy you conceived with the man you met before him.

That person who is spewing anti-choice rhetoric and stigmatizing women who seek abortion may even be your own child. You may have had an abortion when he was 2 years old.

Perhaps you had an abortion a year or 2 before she was born and having not done so, you would have never met her father, and she would not be here.

Ha! Talk about your existential crisis!

You read me correctly. When an anti-choicer goes into an abortion stigmatizing vitriol, he needs to realize that there is a 25% chance that he is talking about his own momma!

You are wonderful mothers, home makers, professionals and friends.

Now I need for you to go vote.