Blog for Choice Day

I have to confess to having been previously unaware of this, but today is apparently the 5th annual Blog For Choice Day. (One of the perks of living on this side of the International Date Line is that you can sometimes get away with being late on these things!) In any case, the topic of the year is "What does Trust women mean to you?"

For Blog For Choice Day, I can't help thinking my entry would be about the same regardless of the exact topic at hand. It would most likely start with wanting to explain why I am as staunchly pro-choice as I am; but I can't do that, because it concerns something a close friend told me once in a moment of alcohol-addled intimacy and then openly wished he hadn't told me.

That's right, he, and that brings me to what would most likely come next in any case: a rather bitter refutation of my inimitible ex's belief that no man has ever - not once, since 1973 - been there for his wife or girlfriend when she was going through the sometimes-unpleasant experience of getting an abortion. (And that would likely lead to me reciting her other greatest hits, such as "all men benefit from rape". But I digress.)

That, in turn, would lead to my addressing the difficult, but essential, point that yes, sometimes the decision to get an abortion is a difficult one for a woman, and sometimes she will experience emotional pain in addition to the physical aftereffects. That, unfortunately, is a tough one for us pro-choicers, since it creates an easy opening for antis to accuse us of contradicting ourselves regarding whether or not abortion hurts women. Here's my response, as neatly as I can put it: sometimes it does, but 1) that is not a reason to ban it; and 2) in many cases where it does hurt women, that is only because the anti-choice movement has done such a great job of stigmatizing abortion.

At this point, any response I make is going to have to veer into an amusing-if-it-weren't-so-pathetic recital of a few of my greatest hits from when I was escorting back in DC. (Tom Paxton said it best: "Some folks you don't have to satirize, you just quote 'em".) These included a lengthy treatise on how the abortion industry creates a demand in order to line the pockets of doctors with blood (this coming from a guy who once gave me a hard enough shove that I nearly lost my balance, and I am very proud to say I didn't hit back); "Margaret Sanger supported eugenics to rid the world of African Americans" (she didn't); "They're gonna kill your little brother!" (that one was directed at a little boy who was entering the clinic with his parents and a younger sibling in a stroller; naturally the kid looked at the stroller and started to cry); "Place of murder, place of death!" (only one time the guy slipped up and said, "Place of abortion" - I nearly spat out my coffee trying not to laugh); "Who's going to take care of you in your old age if you don't have any kids?" (I still regret that I didn't have the nerve to ask that particular woman if she'd never seen or read Like Water for Chocolate); and of course, the songs. Yep, they made up songs on the spot. My favorite: "The fruit of abortion is war!/Nuclear war!", roughly to the tune of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from Cabaret, which if you think about it is really pretty appropriate.

And then I would have to admit to the rare moments of actually addressing the folks across the sidewalk as if we were both human beings. It didn't happen often, but it did happen. Of course I didn't tell them my real name; but I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I claimed my name was something extremely unusual, which of course clued the smart ones in to the fact that I was obviously lying. I did consider using my middle name and my grandmother's maiden name - that would be far off enough from the truth that I'd be in the clear - but odds are there really is an Andrew Mayforth out there somewhere and I wouldn't want to be responsible for his hate mail. If I really wanted to get under their skin, I guess I should have told them something very Christian, like Peter. Oh well. (You'll notice I don't repeat the name here that I gave them. Call me paranoid if you like, but remember George Tiller.) In any case, there were times when we actually agreed to disagree, and even a time or two when we could joke about things like the weather. One really cold and rainy day, we joked that God was obviously on somebody's side, but which? Once just before Christmas, the antis sang "We Wish You a Merry Christmas".

But such moments of levity were few and far between. Why? Ignorance. On their part. And that's where I'll finally get around to the question of trust.

You see, there were two distinct types of antis. First, there were the ones who just stood on the sidewalk and prayed. They were mostly college students. We called them "the long skirt brigade," in reference to the way most of the women (and I use that term loosely - they were very young) dressed, no matter how cold it was. I could have done without the part they played in making patients feel guilty (or at least trying to), but at least they stayed out of the way. Then there was the other type, the aggressive ones. The ones who got in the patients' faces and yelled and screamed and waved disgusting signs and did everything they could to make a visit to the clinic as miserable as they could.

What does that have to do with trusting women? Well, obviously, they didn't. And that their mistrust seemed to be linked to ignorance - ignorance both of what Planned Parenthood actually did, and what the patients were there for. Many of them believed - really and truly believed - that PP encouraged abortion, didn't even mention adoption as an option, and offered no other services. There were patients who were there for services that had nothing to do with abortion (exams, pills, etc.), but they made no distinction. They never even stopped to think about it. If we bothered pointing out that there were other services available, well, we were still supporting an institution that supported abortion, and they didn't approve of contraception anyway.

And that's because they didn't trust women. (Or men either, but that's another rant.) As one anti calmly explained to me once, his beef with us was that we didn't tell the patients about adoption on our way to the clinic. How arrogant, you're probably thinking; and so did I. Out loud. His response: "Adoption isn't mentioned much as an option, and I think you're arrogant for not mentioning it!"

The sheer stupidity of that comment was one of the things that kept me getting up at 7:00 on Saturday mornings for two years to go to the clinic. But it could be discouraging, too, when you realized that was the level of ignorance we were dealing with. They thought trusting women with their own bodies was "arrogant". How on earth do you even rationalize that? How do you put up with that week after week, along with the nasty pictures and slogans and female antis who were born long after Roe v Wade and thus don't even know what they'd be in for if they got their way?

Well - and this would be where the big climax comes if I were writing a movie screenplay or something - the answer didn't just come to me. It's a real incident that happened one Saturday morning. One of my fellow escorts was a grad student in women's health policy (or maybe the official title of the program was just "women's health"; I forget), and she told me about it during a lull in visits. Remember the Long Skirt Brigade from several paragraphs ago? Later on that morning, while my fellow escort and I were still chatting, two of them came over to us.

"Excuse me," one of them asked. "Did I hear you say you were studying women's health?"

"Yes."

"How come?"

"To fight back against people like you, frankly," my friend said.

The girl laughed, surprisingly politely, and went on to ask my friend what she knew about polycystic ovarian syndrome. It turned out she had several symptoms of PCOS (unexplained weight gain, irregular periods, etc) and hadn't been able to get any help for it because...well, because she lived in a world that doesn't have a place for addressing women's health problems. My friend answered her questions as best she could, and made some recommendations for how to get help. And then they were off to return to their very conservative Christian college out in Virginia somewhere, where she probably wouldn't have access to a doctor who could or would help her.

That is what "trust women" means to me. We were (and back in the States, others still are) fighting a battle that features almost constant hate and ugliness and occasionally results in somebody getting shot, but every now and then, a young woman figures out that she needs to cross the line for her own good. Why? Because we trust women, and they don't.

(A big shout out here to anyone from WACDTF if you happen to read this. Give my regards to 16th Street!)