![]() We’re covering for each other at school and work and helping each other stay safe from parents, partners, police. We’re giving each other rides to the clinic or hospital or airport. We are paying for each other’s abortions, or crowdfunding, or connecting each other to the funds. ![]() Doulas, anonymous hotlines and textlines, self-managed abortion support, independent clinics, legal defense organizations, mail-order pills, and information passed between friends are, increasingly, the care we can give one another. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, amid the escalating aggression of state bans and restrictions and their enforcement mechanisms, and as the powerful anti-abortion lobby pushes to strip us of our rights to reproductive autonomy, we are working to fill these systemic and institutional gaps–as quickly and as safely as we can–with community care. Read More: Abortion Access Is Affecting Where College Students Decide to Study The givers wanted to make this complicated moment of my life a little brighter, a little warmer, a little easier, a little less lonely. The gifts I received told me that no matter how I felt about my abortion, and no matter whether my loved ones could relate to those feelings, they honored them. The intent was neither to celebrate my decision, nor was it to help me mourn my loss or to extend that dreaded, white-lilies-and-angel-statues declaration of “sympathy.” After an abortion, someone may be grieving deeply, someone may be buzzing with relief and contentment, someone may be physically exhausted, financially stressed, hormonally fluctuating–and someone may be all of these things, depending on the moment or the day. These were not performative, one-dimensional offerings. (And if I don’t know that last part, I certainly don’t guess or assume.) And so when I was going through an experience of my own, I was grateful for the generosity and creativity of those who showered me with presents both large and very small. The gifts themselves, of course, depend on the person–their sense of humor, their current health and abilities, what they’re going through and how they’re feeling about it. A meal, a coffee, a gift card, a blank journal, a heating pad and fuzzy socks. A book that made me think of the recipient, my notes scrawled in the margins, or a bottle of nice champagne when my bank account will allow it. I love to mark an occasion or a transition with something tangible–a letter in the mail with a dried flower pressed between its pages, or a succulent plant left on a doorstep. I’ve always been a punctual and enthusiastic gift-giver (and, to my mother’s chagrin, a delinquent thank-you-note sender). ![]() But I’m also lucky that people in my life understood that this was not a moment for silence or pretending that nothing was happening. In short: I’m lucky to have received not just the care and support I needed, but the care and support that any of us would dream of. ![]() Hannah’s having an abortion,” and be met only with compassion. I’m lucky my husband could show up at his workplace and say, “I’m leaving early today and I won’t be in tomorrow. I could speak openly with friends and family–and even with coworkers and providers–about my decision: my grief, my physical discomfort, my resolve. I could safely and honestly share what I was going through with people close to me, without prosecution or (overt) social judgment. I was (and am) lucky, in more ways than I can name. It didn’t mean I could go it alone, pretending I had the flu or a bad period, or just white-knuckling through my work and social commitments with a smiling mask of Nothing much! or I’m fine, you? as it was unfolding inside me. Knowledge and experience didn’t slow the bleeding, or ease the cramping, or remove the logistical stressors. (My only abortion, maybe, but there’s no way to be sure of that yet–our reproductive lives are long, if we’re lucky, shifting and changing like a landscape we travel as we age.) My husband and I knew, as soon as that pregnancy test returned a positive result–our son having not yet taken his first steps–that neither my health nor our finances could bear another pregnancy, birth, or child so soon.Īs an abortion doula and a clinic worker, I was intimately familiar with the mechanics of abortion, and had supported many people through their own processes, but that didn’t make the experience unfolding within my body and life any less intense, confusing, or emotional. A year after having my first baby, I had my first abortion.
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