I was unsure how I felt about abortion when I was in college. I identified as a feminist, and was nominally pro-choice, but I tended to assume a certain moral high-ground when the issue came up.
\I support abortion rights,"" I'd explain, ""but I feel abortion is wrong for me, personally. I could never actually have one."" I was pretty smug about that little trick, and thought I'd invented it. What an excellent way to throw my lukewarm support behind an idea, without implicating myself in an issue that made me (and makes most people) uncomfortable. Besides, I was gay, so what did I care?
A few months out of college, unemployed and living at home, I was offered a job as a counselor at an abortion clinic. That experience changed everything. The Riverside clinic was one of the few left in operation in the entire state of Pennsylvania. The harassment of family-planning workers was making it hard for clinics to stay open in conservative states like mine. As a consequence, Riverside's patients came from hours away, enduring all-day bus trips and hotel arrangements just for a 15-minute medical procedure.
Pro-choice advocates like to tell horror stories of women facing impossible situations to demonstrate the importance of abortion rights. I certainly have my share of those: the 12-year-old who claimed to not even know how she got pregnant, the 17-year-old aborting a very wanted pregnancy because she'd just discovered she was HIV positive, single mothers already trying to raise their children with low-paying jobs without health insurance, without the money to arrange childcare, without help from anyone.
I met people whose lives more closely mirrored mine, though, too. College students who didn't want to drop out of school to raise an unplanned baby, and couldn't honestly see their way through to bearing the child and giving it up, people who didn't want children yet and people who didn't want them at all. Some of them were using birth control and it failed (yeah, it's more common than you think) some of them got careless, got drunk, forgot (yup, that's common too ... and many nice, smart, responsible people will do this a few times in their lives). Some get lucky, some get ""caught.""
It was ironic, I thought, to suddenly find myself in the position of having to manage the consequences of all of that rampant heterosexuality. Still, I'm glad I did it. I couldn't do much for my patients except give them information about the procedure and offer them contraception.
They were in a position I cannot fathom having never been there myself. Who the hell was I to say I wouldn't abort a pregnancy I didn't want, resulting in a child I couldn't take care of? How can anyone know what they'd do in that situation having not gone through it? All of my patients came to Riverside after thinking for a long time about what they were doing, and all were fully aware of their other options (of which there were often none). If clinic staffers like me did anything for them, it was just to treat them politely and with respect. Unfortunately, I've found, we were among the few people who do.
