Abortion Then and Now

Christmas,1969, I was 19 working at Sears, Ala Moana in Hawaii. The only other woman under 30 working in the lamp department and I became friends.  She shared her sex life with

me, none of my peers had ever done this so vividly.  I had been contemplating becoming sexually active and how could I not, the sexual revolution went on all around me. My friend at Sears talked about a doctor who would prescribe birth control pills to single women and she told me to take note. 

 

Months later I decided to take the plunge.  I lived on the North Shore Oahu, with my roommate Karen. My cousin Lea was crashing with us.  Lea sat in the living room as I walked out the morning afterwards, she looked at me as if asking, “how was it.”  She reminds me even today that I panicked not that I did, “it” but because I could get pregnant.  When the man left Lea and Karen assured me you can’t get pregnant the first time you have sex.  They being experts with years of experience, I thought this good advice.

That day I decided I needed to get some protection.  Instead of going to the doctor my coworker told me about I went to Planned Parenthood, they had a sliding fee scale and I lived hand to mouth those days.  A couple of days later I left Planned Parenthood with two months’ supply of “The Pill” with directions to start the first day of my next period. That period never came.

Hawaii was one the first states to legalize abortion. I first went to a military doctor, I was 19, the legal age in Hawaii but was still considered a dependent by the military because I currently attended Leeward Community College.  The military doctor told me that the military didn’t do abortions but could give me what he called a voucher to get services from a civilian doc.  It was now that I called the doctor my coworker had told me about.  Dr. Chan was forward thinking.   Mom never talked to me about sex, birth control or anything about women’s health issues.  Now I was in the middle of a reproductive crisis.

Luckily for me in 60’s and 70’s women’s reproductive health landscape started opening up with more options for both single and married women, I took full advantage of this.  Even today I consider myself lucky to have come of age during this time when 30 states went from having laws prohibiting or restricting the sales and advertisement of birth control to Planned Parenthood winning a US Supreme Court case making it legal for married couples to buy contraception.  The landscape continued to expand in the years that followed.  At the end of the 60’s even though married women had won the right to buy birth control single women still needed the secret network passing around names of doctors that would illegally give out birth control to unmarried women which I had become a part of.  Social attitudes changed faster than laws in those days.

Today the vast landscape of women’s reproductive health shrinks from the gains of the 60’s and 70’s marking a new era of open season in using women's bodies in the war of public policy.  Women’s bodies have been laid out in the public realm where people, mostly men, talk openly about women’s sex lives, women’s bodies and reproductive standards.  Starting during his 2016 presidential campaign Trump abused women publicly, women’s reproductive health became a prime target and overturning Roe v Wade became a major campaign promise.  Steven Bannon, chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign, allowed the posting of an article on the Breitbart News website entitled “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” Trump also added his own brand of talking about women’s intimate parts when the Access Hollywood tape aired publicly capturing Trump saying, “You can do anything, Grab 'em by the pussy.”  During this time Trump paid off two women, who claimed they had sexual relations with him, keeping them silent during his presidential campaign.

Once Trump became president one of his first executive orders overturned President Obama’s directive of birth control for all impacting an estimated 62 million women.  He reinstated the “Gag Rule,” setup by President Bush with even more restrictions.  Trump’s “Gag Rule,” prohibits women on any federally funded healthcare program from going to Planned Parenthood and prohibits any health care provider receiving funds for giving a referral for a safe and legal abortion.  Trump didn’t stop there he legalized policies allowing religious employers to refuse birth control in their healthcare packages to their employees as a religious right.  Trump appointed federal judges recommended by pro-life groups to establishing a long lasting legal and social climate against access to safe and legal abortion he’s completing his agenda with Supreme Court nominees.

Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Judge Kavanaugh sealed the deal on restricting women’s access to reproductive health.  Even with the limited documents released about Judge Kavanaugh we knew he participated in delaying an abortion for an undocumented woman in custody a tactic anti-abortion activist use to limit abortions.  Judge Kavanaugh also submitted a decision supporting the Priest for Life, a pro-life employer, giving way to religious freedom while sacrificing a women’s right to birth control.  The timeline of women’s health care is tied to US Supreme Court decisions and Trump and his supporters know this. Judge Kavanaugh as a supreme court justice will totally wipeout any gains women have made in the past. Access to reproductive health may even go back as far as 1821.  This will affect every woman's life, so women take note and be prepared for impacts to your family, career, and economic well being and men this will affect you too.

Women know that reproductive decisions impact their whole life more than it impacts the father who is an equal participant in producing children yet society supports men in thinking they are just bystanders in reproduction and raising children.  There is little known about male birth control and only 34% of absent fathers are court ordered to pay child support, 72% of those don’t pay a dime, that’s a total of 9 out of 100 absent fathers pay child support.  We don’t hear men’s stories in this conversation.  We have created a society where men are not held to equal responsibility, nor equal joy in raising their children.  Where is the justice in this, who suffers, and who’s responsible?

Women’s Liberation health movement story of the 70’s also gets lost in this conversation.  During this grassroots health movement women took over the narrative on reproductive healthcare talking about women’s bodies, sex lives, and attitudes on reproductive health openly and respectfully like never before.  Starting with my conversations with my co-worker in 1969 I participated in this story which led me to joining a self-help women’s health consciousness raising group when I lived in New York City in 1971.  My first self-help exam is still vivid to me today.  We talked about all things of women’s reproductive health sharing our common experience, our common birth control history which by this time was extensive because of the challenges single women came up against.

It wasn’t until 1972 that the Supreme Court in Baird v. Eisenstadt legalized birth control in all states, irrespective of marital status. A year before this decision I looked around for a birth control provided in NYC and ended up going to a clinic I saw in an ad that offered an IUD birth control program including insert and unlimited follow up visits for as long as I had the IUD for $30.  At the time of my first self-help exam I had gone for at least two follow-up visits complaining about pain and other symptoms that should had been followed up on and weren’t.  My inners did not look well compared to others in the group and I needed to find help.

Within a week of my self-exam I started going to a woman doctor women in the group referred me to. The doctor went through a litany of medications to no avail.  A year later still not cured I took off bicycling to Seattle and my symptoms continued.  In Wawa, Ontario hundreds of miles later a male doctor actual took a sample to see what bacteria had caused the infection to prescribe an antibiotic that would work.  Days later and 180 miles of bicycling I called the doctor for the results, he called a local pharmacy setting me up for yet another potential cure.  Arriving in Seattle three months after leaving NYC the infection persisted.  Hope of a cure faded as I set up my new home in Seattle. 

Seattle’s political community turned out to be as progressive as New York City’s.  Within months I started meeting with a newly formed group of women to establish a women’s clinic, our goals included training women as para medical providers under a doctors’ oversight. In the true fashion of the Women’s Liberation Second Wave the clinic group operated as a collective where all of us participating equally, one vote, one person.  As part of the clinic we participated in a citywide women’s reproductive health network with all four women’s clinics run by women activist. I represented Fremont Women’s Clinic at those meetings.  We set agendas establishing a city wide standard for women’s reproductive health care in Seattle from access to birth control, abortion and founding a midwife program for home births.  We networked with medical establishments to provide low cost women’s healthcare for medical procedures we didn’t or couldn’t do in our clinics.

We did pelvic exams on each other as part of our training.  We invited medical professionals to hold educational sessions covering topics such as simple lab work we could do in clinic, how to do a pap smear, breast exam, what a healthy cervix looks like.  We learned a lot doing pelvic exams on each other talking about our birth control history and female medical problems we experienced.  Talking about our treatment at the hands of the medical establishment gave us reasons as to why setting up a women’s clinic was important in 1972. 

During the beginning of the clinic several Supreme Court decisions opened up the landscape of women’s reproductive health care starting with the 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird case that established the right of unmarried women to obtain contraceptives followed in 1973 by Roe v. Wade that characterized women’s right to privacy when making decisions on ending her pregnancy as a fundamental right to Bellotti v. Baird giving adolescent women the right to make reproductive decisions on their own.  These decisions fueled the women’s health care movement of the day, a movement that opened independent clinics in Boston, NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle.

Take note women the gains made in the sixties and seventies are gone thanks to Judge Kavanaugh and the US Supreme Court.  The latest political policy put women’s reproductive narrative back solidly in men’s court and the narrative returns to demeaning language by ridiculing women on topics including birth control, the #MeToo movement, immigrant women who have had their children taken away from them, to openly harassing women sexually in tweets.  These images dominated by President Trump during his presidency fueled a new age where men can now openly degrade and abuse women.  The conservative movement has turned a blind eye from the people in turn Trump’s delivered the kind of control the Republican Party has been working towards for decades.

We working are way back into history starting with 1821 when Connecticut became the first state to outlaw abortion after “quickening,” onto 1860 when twenty states limited abortions.  Are we going to see reproductive information become illegal as the historical 1873 Comstock Act, supported by the American Medical Association, which banned disseminating abortion and contraceptive information by mail?  Is this similar to Bush and Trump’s “gag rule.”  Working so hard expanding the possibilities for women’s reproductive health it breaks my heart to see this backward motion.  This is not the age to be a young woman who is just starting to discover her sexuality.

In the 80’s we started living through a climate of pro-life groups busting into women’s reproductive health establishments or blocking abortion clinics bringing brings to mind the first birth control clinic established in 1916 by Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrn.  After nine days of operation the police raided the clinic, shutting it down and charging both women with crimes related to sharing birth control and abortion information.  In recent years Texas has adopted several laws resulting in Planned Parenthood clinics closing all over the state.  This wasn’t done with propaganda outlawing abortions but by instituting some of the toughest restrictions in the country on abortion clinics.  This is how it’s done in the 21st century and is quite effective resulting in Texas going from 44 abortion clinics to only six that survived these new restrictions.

Laws over the decades have eroded not only abortion rights but also access to women’s reproductive health. Laws like the ones passed in Texas over the years have closed many Planned Parenthood clinics impact access to birth control not just abortions and the first clinics closed have been in the poorest areas of the State. In 1960 after the FDA approved the sale of birth control pills, 25% of married women in the US under 45 took the pill not counting unmarried women.  Today reports state 98% of reproductive age women have used birth control at some point in their life. Trumps was the finale in this anti women’s movement that has impacted access to reproductive health for 62 million women.

An AHA Moment!

Do you have an event in your life that was an AH moment but realize it until years later?

I’d like to share one of my life’s ah moment that I just recently realized was significant.

This event happened in Berlin while visiting my brother, Mark and his wife Barbara on my way through Europe. The year 1970. Mark and Barbara arranged for us to meet up with some of people at a sidewalk café. I love sidewalk cafes. Sitting outside eating good food and watching people walk by, I went to sidewalk cafes all over Europe.

When people arrived we introduced ourselves  and ordered beer. Before ordering dinner someone noticed the bar across the street. We all turned to look.

Right then a group of people walked up to the door, one of them grabbed the door knocker, then the peep hole slid opened. Eyes peered out. We could see them all the way across the street. They only let the women in. Someone at the table construed from watching that it was a lesbian bar. I wanted to go in to see what it was like.  It took some talking to get the other two women to go in with me but finally they agreed. 

The three of us approached the door, I grabbed the knocker “Knock, knock”  The peep hole opened up; I could see eyes looking us over, then it slid shout.  Without a word the door opened.  We stood in the doorway looking down a dark dim lit hallway we could see some light at the end and hear music coming from there. We walked down the hallway, once to the doorway there was the bar room. A little better lit then the hall way, music rang out form where I couldn’t tell, all I could see was women.  Women dancing with each other, socializing, unashamedly kissing, flirting woman to woman.  The three of us were spell bound.  Finally, and I don’t remember who broke the trans, we started talking a little. Still looking around a lot. I started heading for an empty table the two followed me. We sat down. “I’ll buy the first round,” I said and headed for the bar.

Back at the table we were still talking little and looking around a lot. After a while I said, “We should dance together so that no one will suspect we don’t belong here.” Barbara’s friend refused, there was no way she was going to dance with a woman.  Barbara agreed, she was a risk taker.  We walked out to the dance floor; a slow song came on right at that moment.  Women on the dance floor grabbed a partner and started to dance in an embrace as if they were new lovers.  Barbara and I didn’t quite go that far but we did dance in an embrace, chatting some. We were both a little nervous.

After the dance Barbara and I went back to our table. I’ll go get us some more beer the other woman said. We still looked more than we were talked. I for one was distracted by the two women making out in the corner right next to us holding each other in a passionate embrace. Most of the women seemed to know each other. I settled in to a hypnotic presence looking out into the foggy softness of the smokey room; a room that transported me to place I’d had never been to or even dreamed of. 

After a while we walked back out of dark dim lit hallway. The guard opened the door for us and we went back across the street joining our group. One by the one they shot out questions at us about the bar wanting to know what it was like. I didn’t answer thinking about the dream state I’d just walked out of. The other women answered, laughing at it all. I wasn’t laughing I contemplated wandering why I felt so comfortable in there.

Four years later, 1974, I walked into a Seattle gay bar, The Crescent. I was coming out of the closet. As in the Berlin bar I will never forget walking into that bar for the first time. I approached the front door hesitated, and walked in. ID, the bouncer barked at me.

The place was dark. Women at the bar all turned around at the same time to see who had entered. It seems that the lesbian community in Seattle was small enough then that they all knew each other. Someone approached me asking me how long I’d been in Seattle. Four years I answered. Oh the woman said I see you’re just new to this bar.  I felt self-conscious like everyone knew I’d just come out.

45 years after I came out, I started thinking about the bar in Berlin and how comfortable I was there but didn’t know why. It took me that long to realize that it was one of those Ah moments in my life. What event do you remember years later and think that was an ah moment?

 

 

 

 

Compassion at the Boarder

History can give us ideas for the present like the humanitarian move in the United States that brought children from Cuba from 1960 to 1962. I met one of these children as an adult. She shared with me how scared she was arriving in Spokane to move in with a new family.She had mixed emotions on it all.  

This humanitarian move started with Father Bryan Walsh, a priest in the Miami diocese, who worked out a project called Operation Pedro Pan with the U.S. State Department. After the revolution in Cuba Castro started separating children from their families as a literacy campaign. Shortly after this the Cuba government started closing down all the schools, including and especially the private and Catholic schools causing a mass panic. Operation Pedro Pan allowed visa waivers for children 16 or under. This agreement opened the US boarder for more than 14,000 children from Cuba to get visa’s to come to the US without their parents. Now I’m not saying this was easy for the families in Cuba, and especially for the children who left them. I even question the motivation, was it anti-communism motivated? 

Operation Pedro Pan is just one insight in how we can help children and other people showing up at the border. We should also look beyond the media hype because border crossings are much lower than their peak in 2000. The makeup of the people crossing the border is also different, more women and children are trying to enter the United States to seek asylum. Asylum is a legal category and can be hard proof. Back in the 80’s I knew someone from El Salvador who was seeking asylum here in the US, they had been here for ten years and still working their way through the process.

Several years ago I was asked to give a statement on the situation of woman and gays in Mali to be submitted in the case of a lesbian from Mali trying to get asylum status. I know the situation for woman in Mali is grim, I did a lot of work on gender and development when I lived there. This didn’t prepare for me for the lesbian’s statement I read. The fear she experienced I was unaware of. I knew nothing happened without the OK of the men in charge and never challenged this, always following protocol to get things done.

Think about the current situation at the US boarder where thousands of children are coming every day from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. These countries are among the world’s most dangerous societies where out of every 100,000 people, the homicide rate is nearly five times what the World Health Organization considers an “epidemic.” People face an insurmountable level of violence, insecurity and lack of economic opportunities. “Join-or-die” gang recruitment policies make life nearly impossible for innocent youth in gang-controlled areas. Business owners face extortion and threats from gangs while corrupt and inadequate policing fails to protect them.

Where is the Christian community in all this? Where is the humanity that people in the US showed the children from Cuba? There are some efforts both in the religious community and at the State Department. But there has been a nearly 20% decrease in U.S. assistance to Central America since 2016. US Foreign aid is supporting vital work that tackles the violence in Central America driving youth to leave their homes while providing security and opportunity to thousands of families in Central America. The US government funded a $13-million program in Honduras and El Salvador that provides job training and employment services to some 5,100-low-income youth living in violent and crime-ridden communities. But this is not enough.

Economic development as well as reaching out to local people who are the grassroots of any community to build capacity for humanity and safety. This is a forgotten strategy even here at home. Local people are the foundation of any society, not the policy makers, not the people with money. Its you and me in our everyday actions with people in our community that set the tone for society.