Posted by Benjamin on: 03.10.2009 /
I was surprised to learn that March 10th is the National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers here in the U.S., and has been since 1996.
Doctors, nurses and technicians are reluctant to work in clinics in anti-choice places where they will be picketed, socially ostracized and forced to protect themselves daily against possible violence. Low pay is another factor: anti-choicers love to talk about abortion as a business, but adjusted for inflation, the price of a first trimester abortion is about what it was thirty years ago, although security-related costs have skyrocketed — one reason why clinic staffers make about half what they would in another specialty
Some abortion opponents like to claim that abortion is a big profit making industry. It makes more sense to me that while perhaps a select few are making a lot of money, most people who work for “abortion providers” are people much like me, making enough money to make ends meet and trying to do something which they feel matters.
I really liked this story about a church in Virginia who invited a Planned Parenthood Representative to come and help teach their teens about preventing teen pregnancy. At the start of the evening, Elder Frankie Fells prayed
We come together as a team, working to try to pass down wisdom to the young ladies and young men who are part of this pandemic we call teen pregnancy.
Rashti, the Planned Parenthood representative, talking about her organization message, admitted that some find it difficult to hear their talk of “abstinence and ….” However she clearly had the cultural sensitivity required for her presentation, and never mentioned abortion during the church’s evening called “Teen Pregnancy: Dreams Deferred.” Instead, she encouraged the teens and the adults to talk openly about sex and what it means, and its emotional and physical consequences. Rashti, an unpaid volunteer for Planned Parenthood in Virginia, strikes me as just the sort of person who would probably me encouraged and helped in a good cause by receiving some appreciation on this day.
Comment by: Helen
1Benjamin, did you read the comments on Judith’s article? I thought they were interesting.
It’s interesting too how people use words. I noticed Judith used ‘anti-choice’ and referred to abortion as a ‘relatively simple procedure’. It might be relatively simple in some senses but it often is not relatively simple in an emotional sense and also, I think it’s profoundly unnatural to interrupt pregnancy, which is a normal healthy condition of a woman. (I do realize it happens spontaneously sometimes, though - women have miscarriages all the time).
I am not against abortion because I don’t think a pregnant woman should lose the right to say what happens with her body just because she’s pregnant. However I do think preventing pregnancy in the first place is much better than abortion in all sorts of ways.
I like the step the Baptist church took too, in inviting a Planned Parenthood rep in. And it’s neat that she was willing to be culturally sensitive rather than inflammatory. I suppose maybe they knew ahead of time she would be (maybe someone knew her personally or they discussed it ahead of time) otherwise they wouldn’t have trusted her to come talk to their teens.
Comment by: Benjamin
2Helen,
I have no idea what I think about the legality or illegality of abortion. Megs says it’s illegal in Australia after a certain point of gestation (22 weeks or something?). This makes enormous sense to me. But then a lot of things Australians do make enormous sense to me. This may be because I’m a foreigner and thus am not quite as critical as I tend to be when I’m an insider.
Yes, of course it makes a thousand times more sense to prevent a pregnancy than to have an abortion. And if we could funnel some of the money that gets spent on the abortion debate into this area where mostly everyone agrees, no doubt we could make a lot of headway =)