Cherry Hill Abortion

Arrest of Steven Brigham

jencherryhill — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:35:49 +0000

Last week, Dr. Steven Brigham was arrested and charged with several counts of murder related to his provision of illegal abortion procedures. You can learn more about his arrest here and read what the Abortion Care Network has to say about it here. Below is Cherry Hill Women’s Center’s statement regarding the arrest:

December 30, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

We at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center were relieved to hear of the arrest of Steven Brigham. CHWC has been working hard for several years to draw attention to the dangerous and substandard care that he and his facilities have been providing to women in our community. For too many years, Dr. Brigham has been allowed to prey on the most vulnerable and voiceless women who are simply seeking access to safe and legal medical care. We were shocked and appalled to hear of the crimes that transpired in Maryland and trust that the authorities will deliever justice for the women and families affected by Dr. Brigham’s dangerous actions.

We must acknowledge that current public policy and our culture has helped to create this environment of silent shame that surrounds the decision to end a pregnancy and allows those who provide poor quality and sometimes dangerous care to thrive. Until all reproductive health care and abortion services are accessible to all who need them, women will continue to be vulnerable to exploitation and harm by those who offer substandard care.

Moms have abortions too.

jencherryhill — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:21:42 +0000

This fact is not so surprising to those of us who work in abortion care. In fact, it’s so unsurprising that we often forget that the image of “that kind of girl”– you know, the one who has an abortion– is generally the opposite of what society defines as a good mother. Fortunately, the good folks at the Guttmacher institute and the new breed of academics that are focusing on abortion in society, stigma and how we approach reproductive justice, are starting to talk publicly and publish the facts that abortion care providers already know: moms have abortions too! In fact, the majority of women who choose abortion are already mothers. That’s right, THE MAJORITY.

So why don’t we talk about this? Why is it that we’ve allowed “that girl” (you remember, the abortion girl) to be defined as the anti-mother? The selfish, mean, child hating, sleazy, irresponsible girl. Why don’t we embrace that the women who choose abortion are instead, mothers– responsible caregivers making decisions that ensure a strong, healthy family? I suppose it would help if the women who choose abortion could feel safe when they share their stories– safe from judgement, shame and stigma. Maybe then they would be willing to provide a true image of the abortion majority and maybe then we could see some real, positive change around abortion and reproductive decisions in our world. Until then it will fall to the brave few, like Lauren Sandler, who shared her story on Slate.com and the academics to pave the way to change.

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The Mother Majority

Women with children have more abortions than anyone else, and by an increasingly wide margin. So why is the topic taboo?

A few months ago, I was late. You know what I mean: My usual period day came and went without a spot, and suddenly every wave of exhaustion, every twinge of anxious nausea, became a harbinger of a very unintended pregnancy, a sign that my NuvaRing had failed me. I’m married, happily at that. And I’m a mother, happily as well. But our family feels “complete,” as demographers put it, at one child. And so my husband and I had to make a choice—or so we thought, for a very tense week before my body made the choice for me. As we lay awake at night whispering pros and cons for continuing the pregnancy, stopping only when our daughter padded in to snuggle under our covers in the predawn hours, I wondered if our mere deliberating might call into question my soundness as a mother. If I, already happily immersed in parenting, chose to terminate, wouldn’t I be unusual for doing so, maybe even stigmatized as a sort of prenatal Medea?

I was wrong. Women who are already mothers have more abortions than anyone else, and by an increasingly wide margin. When Guttmacher Institute researchers last ran the numbers in 2008 they found that 61 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy in this country already have at least one child. That was before the recession, though—before the poverty rate rose to swallow 40.7 percent of women who head families, many of whom know they can’t afford another child.* So I asked the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, to run the numbers on the women visiting their clinics and calling their hotlines in the past few years. The resulting figures shocked NAF President Vicki Saporta, who called to tell me that every year since 2008, a whopping 72 percent of NAF clients looking to terminate a pregnancy were already mothers, up at least 10 percent from the years before the economy crashed.

But while the typical abortion patient is a mother, very few people seem to realize it. Lawrence Finer, Guttmacher’s director of domestic research, told me that this fact is “one of the most unknown and surprising statistics across the board.”* Guttmacher is trying to correct the public’s misperceptions with a YouTube PSA designed to show that women who have abortions aren’t necessarily who we think they are. But why are these misperceptions so skewed in the first place? Is the intersection of motherhood and abortion a minefield that activists choose not to navigate?

NAF’s Saporta told me she thinks anti-abortionists have successfully depicted women who choose to terminate a pregnancy as sexually indiscriminate. “It’s much harder to demonize the mother who is struggling to support the kid she already has,” she says. But then why doesn’t the group that she leads make this very point? “Good question—I think we should,” she replied. I also put the question to Gloria Feldt, the former longtime Planned Parenthood Federation of America president. “I believe the whole movement has made a terrible mistake,” she said, referring to the pro-choice movement’s decision to avoid talking about mothers’ motives for having abortions, and instead focus “on the less frequent reasons, which are rape and incest or teens who are simply not ready to be parents.”

For her part, Rachel Jones, a senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute, thinks that public perceptions of who aborts and why are skewed mostly as a result of all the political heat around late-term abortions and adolescent abortions (minors have only 7 percent of all abortions). In other words, she argues, mothers who abort are invisible not because anyone is conspiring to keep them that way, but because so much attention is focused on other women.

But why do mothers have so many abortions in the first place? Jones co-authored a qualitative study titled “I Would Want To Give My Child, Like, Everything in the World: How Issues of Motherhood Influence Women Who Have Abortions,” which found that most mothers who abort say they are doing so to protect the kids they already have. As Jones points out, that rationale is tough to demonize politically, especially when you consider that most women making this choice are contending with some combination of low income, unemployment, and a lack of health insurance, or are struggling to raise kids on their own.

These are the kinds of stories Anne Baker hears daily across the little round table in her office at the St. Louis-area Hope Clinic for Women, where she has been counseling abortion seekers for 35 years. In 2008, the last year for which the clinic has available numbers, 62 percent of its patients were mothers. But Baker says the number of mothers coming in has swelled markedly since then, just as it did during the economic slowdown of the late ’70s, when she was first starting out at the clinic. She has compiled a list of 25 reasons mothers commonly give her for not having another child. By far the No. 1 reason is a desire to protect the families they already have. Most of the time, this calculus is an economic one, though Baker has also noted a growing number of women like me, women who are “less apologetic than they used to be about saying they’re a good mom and for them to continue to be a good mom, they choose to do it with one.”

Of course, when it comes to public opinion, it’s one thing for a mother to choose an abortion out of desperation, and another to do it out of preference. Feldt says the motivations behind a mother’s choice to terminate place her on a sliding scale of public opinion. Recalling her days polling voters at PPFA, she describes the American view of who gets to have an abortion like this: “The less in control of a woman’s life she is, the more the public supports her right to make that choice [to have an abortion]. The more she is in control of her life, saying this is the life I choose, the less people support it.” So if a mother who is destitute chooses to abort, we might accept her decision. But someone like me, who could support another child if only I moved to a less expensive ZIP code and got a job with a steadier paycheck? I’d be a moral pariah.

“It’s scandalous for white women like you and me,” Jennifer Baumgardner recently told me over coffee. When Baumgardner gathered women’s abortion testimonies for her book Abortion and Life, she had yet to terminate a pregnancy herself (on the book’s cover, she’s pictured pregnant with her second child). But when she subsequently found herself pregnant again, she chose to abort rather than have a third child. When we start talking about why the pro-choice movement hasn’t made mothers more of the story of abortion in America, Baumgardner rolls her eyes. “Women in the movement have this enormous disconnect between actual lives and what they believe in,” she says. “They’ll talk about other women but they think their own story can be used to undermine them.”

Is all this true, though? Is the stigma that attaches to abortion actually compounded if one makes this choice as a mother? Are we right to think that terminating a pregnancy after carrying another one successfully to term will undermine our standing not just as women but as good parents?

At the University of California-San Francisco, Kate Cockrill directs the Social and Emotional Aspects of Abortion Program, and is trying to measure sources of stigma. She has found that many mothers deliberately explain their choice to abort in the context of their motherhood, thinking that doing so will ward off judgment. “Motherhood is an assertion of their humanity,” Cockrill told me of women who fear condemnation, “and claiming their motherhood is part of managing the stigma of abortion.”

Still, Cockrill has found that once they have established social identities as mothers, many women will do everything they can to avoid tarnishing that identity. For example, she found women who had babies delivered by an OB-GYN refused to see that physician when they found themselves in an unwanted pregnancy. “They wanted to be seen as a mother,” she said, “not an abortion patient.”

Corrections, Oct. 18, 2011: This article originally stated that 42 percent of women live in poverty. This statistic refers only to women who head families, and the correct percentage is 40.7, not 42 percent. (Return to the corrected sentence.) The article also misidentified Lawrence Finer as Larry. (Return to the current sentence.)

“Outing” Abortion Providers

jencherryhill — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:37:37 +0000

Everything about this story makes me a little bit nauseous. While I am one of the people who feels pretty comfortable about being an “out” abortion provider, it’s taken me a long time to get comfortable and I still disclose that information on a case-by-case basis in my daily life (of course if you google me, all you get is abortion, but assuming I just met you on a plane, you might not have immediate google access and I probably didn’t give you my whole name anyway).

Some folks in abortion care are worried about stigma and harassment and those concerns often at least make them careful about when and to whom they disclose their work. With physicians, not only are they concerned about stigma, but most are concerned about their physical safety as well. It’s not every line of work where you need to be worried about assassination attempts and violence following you to your home, but when you’re an abortion providing physician, that is often exactly what you are concerned with. So, it’s not surprising that this physician would be concerned for her safety after being “outed” publicly by Operation Rescue.

Sadly, this type of public exposure is exactly the type of tactic that groups like Operation Rescue use to try to force doctors to stop providing abortion care. And while their website officially asks members to “pray” that this doctor (and others) stop providing abortions, history (and murders of 6 abortion providing physicians and the attempted murders and assaults of 5 others) shows us that this type of publicity and extreme language leads to increased violence against abortion providers. Hence my nausea.

See below for the complete story.

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By Erin Gloria Ryan

Operation Rescue Reveals Identity of Anonymous Abortion Doctor, Because Abortion Is Like Bank Robbery

Operation Rescue, the radical anti-abortion terrorism group responsible for the murder of Dr. Tiller, has not-so-subtley found a new target. This time around, they’re focused on an anonymous female doctor who travels in a mask to underserved areas to perform abortions to women in need. They’ve released her name, sketches of her face, and information on how to find her mom. Nobody’s more classy than those anti-choice terrorists.

The doctor in question travels to dangerous and hostile parts of the country, but she does so in a mask so her picture can’t be plastered all over the internet by homicidal weirdos. She also operates under an assumed name. It’s hard to harass someone performing a legal medical procedure that benefits women when thy don’t have a real name or a picture!

Operation Rescue to the (operation) rescue! They’ve found out who the Mystery Doctor is and basically told their maniacal followers to sic ’er. They take time to emphasize that the doctor is unmarried, isn’t from the US, and was educated at Yale (pretty much the SHE IS A WITCH trifecta, right there). But the whole bit gets even creepier when they start talking about how the doctor’s mom looks. Her aging, elderly mother. Out of respect to the doctor’s wish to remain anonymous, we’ve omitted the names that Operation Rescue published.

Freedom from relationships made it easy for Dr. X to travel abroad providing abortions in third-world African and South American countries. But in 2004, it was her relationship with her aging mother, who she strongly resembles, that brought her home. X continues to stay with her mother, X Mom, Professor of Anthropology, Emerita at Harvard University, at her home in Cambridge, Massachsetts.

Whoa, what the everloving fuck? Are you people out of your minds? (Don’t answer that.)

Their justification for revealing the doctor’s identity of the doctor and where the doctor’s mother lives is that no “abortionist” deserves anonymity. Says the organization’s post,

Abortionists don’t deserve anonymity,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “It keeps them from being held accountable for their actions. In some states, patients aren’t even told the full names of their abortionists and when things go wrong, women don’t even know who to file a complaint against.”

Identifying abortionists has helped Operation Rescue and other pro-life groups to warn women of abortionists with histories of abortion abuses.

Newman then goes on to say that no one would possibly wear a mask unless they were doing something bad or illegal, and therefore abortion must be bad and the doctors must know it. But the cherry?

People who are proud of their work are willing to put their names on it. People who are ashamed or are trying to get away with something, like bank robbers and abortionists, wear masks

Yes, abortionists are just like bank robbers. If an unhinged group of gun toting anti bank robbing activists traveled the country shooting them. And if robbing banks were legal.

Operation Rescue Unmasks the ‘Fly In Abortionista’ [Operation Rescue]

Image via Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Shutterstock

Stigma. It’s the new black.

jencherryhill — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:28:03 +0000

CHWC is part of a really great organization called the Abortion Care Network. As part of this Network, we get to have really amazing conversations with others in the abortion care community, about best practices, legal challenges and of course the stigma that surrounds abortion care in this country.

Most of the time, conversations about stigma center around the women and families that we serve. We try to find ways to create an environment in our clinics where women feel safe. Where they can find some relief from the protestors outside, the negative images of women who choose abortion and our cultures general silence around any pregnancy outcome that doesn’t result in a happy baby.

Every now and again though, the conversation comes back around to us. How do we, as abortion care providers, experience stigma and how do we care for ourselves. One of our members even has a great saying about it: “Stigma is like rain. Everyone gets wet.” So much of the time we focus on caring for our patients and we forget about ourselves. Fortunately, folks are starting to realize that the stigma that surrounds abortion doesn’t just impact patients, but providers too.

It’s stigma that keeps many who would like to provide abortions from seeking the training– or even being able to access the training. It’s stigma that keeps some of us from saying where we work. It’s stigma that forces providers to give care almost exclusively in specialized clinics– not in hospitals or family practice offices. Stigma. It’s the new black. We’re all wearing it.

Now that people are noticing (namely, fabulous progressive researchers, many who have worked in abortion care at some point) we’re starting to see some great research and articles about the impact of this social stigma on providers. Check out this great article from RhReality Check (it’s posted below too for those not-so-tech savvy folks) about how stigma is contributing to the lack of abortion providers in the U.S.

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Pivotal Positions: Transforming Abortion Provider Stigma

This post is by Jennifer Coletti, and is part of Tsk Tsk: Stigma, Shame, and Sexuality, a series hosted by Gender Across Borders and cross-posted with RH Reality Check in partnership with Ipas.

Few of us would sign up for a job that would pose risks to our personal safety and our family’s safety, threaten to stifle or derail our career, cause our community to ostracize us, and cause us to continually face judgment and stereotyping from people we see every day. Yet that is exactly what many—if not most—health-care providers sign up for when they decide to deliver abortion care in the United States. And it’s the same for providers in many countries around the world.

The tentacles of social disapproval around abortion don’t end with women, but reach everyone—including family and community, all the way up to hospital administrators and lawmakers. Within this complex web of influences, abortion providers wage a daily battle to provide safe abortion care to women.

“Providers are not all on their own,” explains Anu Kumar, Ipas executive vice president. “They’ve got to relate to the health system, the legal system and the educational system, and they’ve got their bosses and their family. So it’s not so simple. When you walk into the provider’s office, you’re not getting just that person, you’re getting the institution behind that person.”

Of course, abortion providers experience stigma in drastically different ways depending on their country and community. For example, in Uruguay abortion providers may be viewed as accomplices to murder due to deep-seated Catholic opposition to the procedure there. On the other hand, communities in Zambia tend to respect the professional judgment of abortion providers but severely disapprove of women who seek them. And provider experiences differ vastly even within the United States: Some physicians who work in more progressive urban settings face less discrimination and fewer social effects of stigma than their counterparts working in conservative rural communities.

Guts Has Nothing to Do with It

Given the complicated history of U.S. abortion politics, Americans often assume that physicians who provide abortion believe it’s morally acceptable and have the guts to go through with it, while those who do not are morally opposed and/or intimidated by society’s stigma. But in truth, who provides abortion in the United States often has little to do with moral or political resolve. For her book Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care, author and University of California, San Francisco researcher Lori Freedman interviewed physicians practicing obstetrics and gynecology nationwide and found many providers who were willing to perform abortions but unable to overcome the structural barriers that abortion stigma and U.S. politics create.

“While several of these physicians would have liked to continue to perform abortions after residency and even took steps toward it, they found that there would be significant professional and social costs in doing so—costs that they were not willing to bear,” Freedman writes. Professional obstacles cited by physicians included workplaces with an anti-abortion climate; the surprisingly widespread “no-abortion policies” that quietly exist in many private practices, HMOs, and hospitals across the country; the risk of being pigeonholed as just an abortion provider; and the risk of being ostracized by the local medical community and patient population. On a more personal level, some physicians worried that providing abortions would cause their families to suffer discrimination and even danger.

In addition, many providers are stigmatized by the very patients who come to them for abortions. Physicians who staff specialized abortion clinics report disheartening interactions with patients who ask “How do you do this on a regular basis?” or “Isn’t this really hard for you?” Even though these patients are willing to have abortions, they have absorbed society’s beliefs about abortion providers and convey that to their doctors.

Specialized Clinics: Separate but Not Equal

Separation is a hallmark of any stigmatized practice, and the fact that 93 percent of abortions are now performed at specialized clinics is no accident. Years of abortion prohibitions, threats and a professional medical culture that refuses to treat abortion inclusively has caused “multilevel, institutionalized buck-passing that marginalizes abortion practice,” Freedman writes.

While specialized abortion clinics are often able to cultivate a more positive environment for women in need of services, their complete separation from all other health-care facilities only perpetuates the idea that abortion is not a “normal” part of women’s reproductive health care. And now that abortion practice is firmly established as a very separate type of patient care, there are professional incentives for providers to stick with the model.

“If you’re going to do something that’s highly stigmatized in our culture, it’s not surprising that many people would like to do it in a setting where it’s not stigmatized, in a setting where everyone feels it’s normal and good, rather than in a setting where everyone is questioning what you’re doing,” Freedman tells Because.

The separation of abortion services from mainstream health care here in the United States is mirrored in many countries abroad thanks to U.S. foreign aid policy that strictly prohibits funding to any organization that provides abortion services.

“The he assessments of the impact of the global gag rule and the Helms Amendment shows that these policies have led to the isolation and separation of abortion, effectively delinking it from reproductive health and family planning,” explains Leila Hessini, Ipas director of community access.

Solution: Add More Settings and More Providers

To reduce the marginalization of abortion care in the United States and abroad, one solution is obvious: “If you simply diffuse abortion provision across many more sites and many more providers and many more contexts, then the clinics aren’t so targetable and aren’t so focused on by protestors and people who want to perpetuate violence,” Freedman tells Because.

“If there are more providers in more places,” Kumar agrees, “it will become more routine and less specialized.”

In addition to expanding the settings where abortion is provided, diversifying the types of providers performing abortion is also key. In the United States, only physicians are permitted to perform first-trimester aspiration abortions—except in a few states which have granted limited rights for some nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified nurse midwives to perform the procedure.

“The diversification of this provider pool is so critical,” Kumar stresses. And many countries in which Ipas works are already doing this. “Ethiopia, Nepal, Ghana and South Africa all permit midlevel providers to provide abortion services,” she points out.

Researchers and advocates are working to make this a reality in the United States as well. The Primary Care Initiative (PCI)—a project of the University of California, San Francisco’s research group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH)—is in the middle of a training and evaluation project for certified nurse midwives, physician assistants and nurse practitioners that seeks to prove the safety and effectiveness of allowing these types of providers to perform abortions, with the ultimate goal of affecting policy changes.

“With our study we’re looking to normalize abortion within women’s primary care and within reproductive health care, and so part of that is training more clinicians and health-care workers and teams of workers in providing safe abortion,” says PCI’s Principal Investigator Diana Taylor. Many states now allow midlevel providers to administer medical abortion pills, and this “is certainly normalizing the experience” for this abortion method, she adds.

Support for Providers = Support for Women’s Reproductive Rights

The complex tapestry of abortion stigma and its negative influences on providers, patients and society at large won’t unravel easily. But supporting abortion providers could be a critical first step.

“Providers are in a really pivotal position, and how we as a system and a society treat them translates into how we treat women,” Kumar explains. “So if we really hope to change how women experience abortion and to save women’s lives with safe abortion services, then we also really need to change the way we treat providers who perform these services.”

Jennifer Coletti is an editorial associate at Ipas, following several years spent training future journalists as a high school journalism teacher. This post is adapted from an article appearing in the Fall 2011 issue of Because, the Ipas magazine that connects U.S. readers to women around the world, highlighting reproductive health and rights and making connections between U.S. policy and global health. For a free subscription to Because, click here.

Finally– Some good news!

jencherryhill — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:27:21 +0000

“Forcing a woman to divulge to a stranger at a pregnancy help center the fact that she has chosen to undergo an abortion humiliates and degrades her as a human being,” — Federal Court Judge Karen Schreier

For the past several months we’ve been watching some ridiculous, unnecessary and potentially unconstitutional laws make their way through the states. In Kansas and Pennsylvania, licensing regulations threaten to close most, if not all the clinics in those states. In South Dakota, the nations longest waiting period and most draconion counseling law was passed and signed into law, requiring women to wait 72 hours before an abortion procedure and mandating counseling at a non-medical, anti-abortion pregnancy center. And in Ohio, there was the trifecta: regulations requiring abortion providers to follow non-evidence based regimens for medical abortions, the “heart beat bill” that would ban abortion as early as 4 -5 weeks in pregnancy and a ban on abortion past 20 weeks.

None of these laws are being passed based on real science or real evidence that these regulations will make abortion safer for women. In fact, these laws are being passed to further stigmatize women and make them feel bad for making complex life decisions. As one law after another is signed into law, many of us in the reproductive justice movement have felt anger, despair and a bit hopeless. Until finally! Some good news– not only has the law in South Dakota been deemed unconstitutional by a federal court, but the Cheif Justice included in her opinion that the purpose of the law is not to increase safety or inform women of their health care choices, but is in fact to stigmatize women and ”…effectively force[d] against their will to remain pregnant until they give birth.”

This marks on of the first times that a Justice has acknowledged in a written opinion that the purpose of one of these anti-abortion laws in to stigmatize women. Let’s hope that as the legal battles surrounding abortion and reproductive health care continue, that this is not the last time this fact is recognized. The more we can understand as a society that these laws are created to harm women emotionally, not protect them physically, the more likely it is we can see an end to this legal harrassment of women and abortion providers.

School Days

jencherryhill — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:12:04 +0000

It didn’t take long for folks at the clinic to realize that I love nothing more than the sound of my own voice and to talk about abortion all day and all night. So when the “high school abortion days” came around, it wasn’t a big surprise that they got turfed to me.

Now you are probably thinking, “what on earth is high school abortion day?” Well, let me tell you.New Jerseyhas a pretty great comprehensive sex education regulation that states that by senior year, all NJ public high school students must receive a curriculum that includes birth control and all pregnancy options (including, the big, bad “A” word, abortion). How a school chooses to enforce this curriculum is completely up to them. Some teach these topics in-house with their own staff, some have outside “experts” come to speak on these topics. For a few local schools, CHWC is the local abortion expert, so we’re the ones who come in and talk, specifically, about abortion (generally they’ll have someone from an adoption agency and an anti-choice organization come in on another day to address adoption and parenting options).

High school abortion days are, perhaps, the best thing that I get to do each year. I love talking to teens because they have an active interest in reproductive health (even if they don’t realize it before hand), they are generally trying to figure out their own feelings on these complex topics as they prepare to go into the world and they have a really low tolerance evasive political language, so you have no choice but to go in ready for some open, honest and challenging conversation, especially when the topic is abortion.

I’m one of those folks who does best when having a conversation with people—I can lecture, but it gets boring fast, for me and for whoever is listening. So my rules with the students are that no question is off-limits, even if it’s strange or a little hostile, and everyone’s opinion is worth while and worth listening to, even if we disagree. These rules make the day so easy—and apparently are a real novelty for students. Even staff have told me that no other speakers allow for such open conversation and questioning—especially not the anti-choice speakers, who I’ve been told, invest a lot of time in trying to change minds and shutting down students who disagree with their point of view.

I’ve learned throughout the years that the best way to challenge the stigma surrounding abortion is to answer all the tough questions head on (even the ones that make you a little uncomfortable, like the student who once asked, “So what you do, it’s like going around to a bird’s nest full of eggs and smashing the eggs with a hammer?” To which I replied, “Well, that’s not the best analogy. In my world, the mama bird would bring me her nest of eggs and ask us to smash them with a hammer for her.” Big laughs, defused tension and the kid even came up to me after class to thank me for answering his question even though he knew it was silly. He then told me he tried a similar tactic with the anti-choice woman who had been speaking a few days before and became angry and refused to answer any other questions during the day).

The most rewarding part of these days is when, a few weeks later, I get notes from the students. Not all the schools make them do it (and all I can think is how annoyed I would have been at 17 to have to write a random “thank you” letter to some lame speaker in my health class) but I’m grateful to the ones that do because they prove to me that I’m not wasting my breath when I wax poetic about abortion and how much I love my work and what I do. I really am changing the conversation that is happening in the world, even if it’s just in a small corner of New Jersey.

Here’s what some of the kids had to say this year…

“Your support for women changes the world and many lives. “

“I had no idea that protestors always stood outside your clinic. I thought that only happened in movies. Out of all the guest speakers, you were my favorite”

“I feel more confident in coming to the Cherry Hill Women’s Center if there was a possibility I was pregnant. Girls and young women like myself have misassumed what abortion clinics do”

“Thank you for answering all of the questions and for explaining the reality of the process of abortion”

“You made the topic of pro-choice seem so easy and understandable. It has always been a topic I couldn’t easily talk and think about. I feel more open about it now after you spoke to our class and I appreciate your confidence and opinion”

“You really informed me of a lot of things. You changed my perception of abortion.”

“There are those who need to realized that everyone has a choice. You speaking with us may have helped them see that and look at things from a different perspective”

“It’s tragic to realize that there are people who protest and antagonize your establishment even though your intentions are pure and moral. Keep up the good work… it has a great, positive effect on young students like me”

“I used to think abortions were bad, but I know that it’s a hard choice to make and sometimes it’s the right thing to do. I will take your words into consideration if I ever am in this situation”

“I personally believe everyone deserves to choose because the government should have no control over how I treat my body. Thank you for presenting your program with facts and personal stories but without pressing your views upon those that disagree. I think everyone left the class respecting the information that you presented”

“It was nice to be able to listen to someone who was calm and not so much “in your face” about the issue, especially since strong opinions tend to dissuade people. Your laid back style, along with amusing stories made it interesting and enjoyable to listen about abortion”

“I really enjoyed your presentation, unlike the other six we were forced to go to. I think abortion is treated too black and white and you did a fine job of showing the circumstances that many go through during a pregnancy. No offense though, I hope I don’t see you again because if I did, I would be pregnant in the clinic and I hope that doesn’t happen for a while (but your company would be enjoyed)”

“I appreciate you coming to educate us on what you do at the woman’s center as well as the procedures for abortion. It gave me more insight on a topic that I was never totally sure about”

“A woman’s right to choose is something crucial to human rights and it scares me how some want to take it away”

“I learned some things that I didn’t know before and it gave me a better view on abortion”

“I always believed that abortion doctors pressured people to have abortions. However, you have showed me this isn’t true. Also, even though I still am opposed to abortion you have shown me that there are more things to consider at this issue”

Singing Our Truth #3- La Femme Fetal

jencherryhill — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:02:02 +0000

I was in the 8th grade the first time I heard this song that addresses many of the intersecting issues (race, gender and class) that surround reproductive justice in America. My friend Nicole played it in class that year and it was one of the first times I remember really understanding the power that music can have in making bold political statements.

The song talks about the complex emotions of the pregnancy decision, the nightmare of going through protestors in front of a clinic and the shame and stigma that they make women feel. It also addresses the political landscape of the time, name dropping Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Souter and bringing up the hypocrisy of government cutting support to families and parents while at the same time seeking to limit access to family planning services like abortion.

Finally, it makes the statement that abortion and the desire to control our reproductive destinies is a basic part of human history that cannot be legislated away:

“If Roe v Wade was overturned, would not the desire remain in tact

Leaving young girls to risk their health

Doctors to botch and watch as they kill themselves”

The song gave me the chills then and still does now. Looking back at how this song affected me then, it’s not so surprising that I’m an abortion provider now!

My Abortion, My Life

jencherryhill — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:33:02 +0000

Preterm, an amazing abortion provider in Ohio, has just launched its “My Abortion, My Life” campaign to decrease stigma and normalize abortion. It’s a courageous campaign that encourages the 45 million women who have accessed abortion care in this country to speak out and tell their story. When you consider that 1 in 3 American women will have an abortion in their lifetime, it is truly shocking that so few share their experience. The silence certainly contributes to the shame that many women feel when making an abortion decision and the feeling of being alone. I can’t tell you how many women I meet who say, “I thought I’d be the only person here today!”

The “My Abortion, My Life” campaign goes a long way towards changing that silence and turning the voices of millions of women into a powerful tool against the stigma that the anti-choice movement wants women to feel when considering all the complex options that come with making a pregnancy decision.

Criminal acts are NOT the norm.

jencherryhill — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:40:39 +0000

You may have seen news reports last week about a physician in Philadelphia who was arrested and charged with several counts of murder (along with a laundry list of other charges) after a search of his abortion clinic found the remains of babies and fetuses and evidence that he had been responsible for the death of at least one woman.

The Grand Jury report from this case reads like a Stephen King novel. What was found in this clinic represents the most despicable, unsafe, dangerous practices that can happen in medicine. That being said, this case does not represent the standard of care found in most abortion facilities. The Grand Jury report does an amazing job of researching abortion care, in Pennsylvania and the nation, and comes to the conclusion that the majority of abortion facilities that exist “adhere to strict, self-imposed standards of quality. But the excellent safety records and quality of care…are no thanks to the Pennsylvania Department of Health.” In fact, the report goes on to say that, “Many clinics…are inspected by NAF, whose standards are… more protective of women’s safety than are the state’s regulations.”

Of course this begs the question: if most clinics are safe and provide excellent care, why would a woman choose a sub-standard provider? And once she sees that she is in a potentially dangerous place, why would she stay?

It is easy to blame this solely on the issue of insurance coverage and public funding for abortion care, as it is clear that some women make this important decision based on cost and not quality of care. Certainly this issue is extremely important, but it is not the only contributing factor.

We live in a society that stigmatizes and villainizes not only the women who choose abortion, but also the physicians that provide care. Oftentimes, when I speak to women who come to us they will remark that “I didn’t expect it to be clean here” or “I didn’t think there would be a real doctor” or “I can’t believe you are being nice to me! I thought everyone would be mean.” The stigma that surrounds abortion has led many women to believe that not only is abortion care something that “real doctors” don’t provide but that they deserve sub-standard medical care. We have created a world where women expect to be treated badly, physically and emotionally, because of their life choices.

In a nation where 1 in 3 women will have an abortion at some point in her life, it is this culture of silent shame that surrounds the decision to end a pregnancy that allows those who would provide poor quality, and sometimes dangerous, care to thrive. As a nation, we must address the stigma that surrounds abortion and support women and families as they make these complex decisions for their lives, health and families.

There is so much that can be said about what this case tells us about abortion in America. And poverty. And healthcare. And state regulations. In fact, this case is all about those intersections– this gets to the heart of the fact that pregnancy and abortion decisions don’t happen in a vacuum– they happen in the context of women’s lives.

Of course, CHWC isn’t the only place examining this case. Below are some other great responses to this case that will (hopefully) inspire us all to think critically about what this case really tells us about abortion in America.

*******

Response from Charlotte Taft of the Abortion Care Network

Response from Vicki Saporta of the National Abortion Federation

Why the Pa. docs case is about poverty, not Roe v. Wade

How anti-choice zealots force women to go to dangerous clinics

Gosnell, Saletan and the reality of late-term abortions

On the racial segreation of Gosnell’s practice

Singing our Truth #2: Brick

jencherryhill — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:52:46 +0000

I love this song. Everytime I hear it I think about a particular teenage couple that I counseled several years ago. Which leads us to the how universal all the complex feelings surrounding these decisions can be. But I’ll let Ben Folds speak for himself about that: “People ask me what this song’s about… I was asked about it a lot, and I didn’t really wanna make a big hairy deal out of it, because I just wanted the song to speak for itself. But the song is about when I was in high school, me and my girlfriend had to get an abortion, and it was a very sad thing. And, I didn’t really want to write this song from any kind of political standpoint, or make a statement. I just wanted to reflect what it feels like. So, anyone who’s gone through that before, then you’ll know what the song’s about.”