“I wish we talked about ‘choices’ instead of ‘choice’” [View all]

[Novara]

“I wish we talked about ‘choices’ instead of ‘choice’”: A Texas abortion counselor on how to change the conversation about abortion

Even allies oversimplify by reducing the debate to “abortion on demand, without apology” vs. "safe, legal & rare"

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Even our allies are torn. On the one hand we have “abortion on demand and without apology” and on the other we have “safe, legal and rare”—the sense that every abortion is a tragedy. These positions are oversimplified, and they miss the point. Some women are single-minded and clear about what they want, and they just need their self-determination respected. On the other side of the spectrum are women who are deeply troubled and struggling with what to do about their pregnancy.

What abortion providers bring to the political conversation is a recognition of this spectrum and an honoring of the fact that the issue is not abortion so much as it is the reality of women’s lives: What kind of insanity permits the same people who want no access to abortion or birth control to also gut every program to support families, to care for children, to make sure no one goes to bed hungry? How can this level of hypocrisy be permitted? This I still don’t understand.

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If a counselor was working with a woman and had a sense that she was not prepared for an abortion that day, we invited her into a process. We never said you are not ready for an abortion, because that is a judgment. We said, from the conversation, we are not prepared to provide you with an abortion today.

This was quite a process. We used a triage form designed to help identify which women were clear and confident about their choices and which women had significant choices that they needed to work through as part of coming to a sense of resolution.

By sense of resolution, I mean that her heart breaks open wide enough to accept those contradictions that I was talking about. I mean that she can forgive herself for being human; that she can on most days remember her goodness and courage; that she can stand the days that she might feel guilty or bad; and that she will understand in her gut the complexity of her choice to not bring new life into the world and in fact to end life. This is controversial even within the pro-choice movement because we don’t know how to talk about the life and death part of abortion.

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/05/i_wish_that_we_talked_about_choices_instead_of_choice_a_texas_abortion_counselor_on_how_to_change_the_conversation_about_abortion/