(Above: me, quite a few years ago).
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In 2007, I had an abortion at the Morgentaler clinic in Fredericton. But first, I had gone to the hospital. I had no money, and I was in, what was to me at the time, a terrible situation. At the Perth Andover, NB, hospital, I was told by an especially condescending, sanctimonious and self-righteous male doctor that “abortion is illegal in New Brunswick, unless you have a doctor’s permission”. The implication was that he sure as hell wasn’t going to offer his.
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I am strongly in favour of reproductive choice for all women, everywhere. This includes the right to abortion in any context, for any reason. This also must include the right to give birth to our children wherever, and with whatever birth attendant we choose.
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But I’m not sorry to see the Morgentaler clinic close.
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At the Morgentaler clinic, after I handed over my $800 cash (which I had, humiliatingly, borrowed), I had a 3 minute “counselling” session during which my sadness over destroying my baby was unabashedly minimized and belittled. I was then funnelled through a conveyor belt system in what felt like slaughterhouse-fashion along with the 20 or so other women who sat silent and sullen in the waiting room. I was forced into a mandatory (“or you don’t get your abortion”) ultrasound, and then sent to wait in another holding-cell. During the actual procedure, the sadistic practitioner sneered at me when I told her it was painful, told me to “shut up” when I started to cry, and threatened to send me out “without your abortion”, if I didn’t “control myself”. Afterwards, weeping, I was sent into the recovery room, a hallway lined with cots. Someone walked by, handing out apple juice and a handful of crackers to each woman.
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This experience at the Morgentaler clinic solidified my personal decision not to ever engage with the industrial reproductive medicine industry for any reason, ever again. I already knew that I wouldn’t be giving birth anywhere near medically trained professionals (and all 5 of my children have been born at home, without any intervention or interference). My first pregnancy several years earlier, had ended with a hospital miscarriage during which I was mocked, coerced, denied consent, and treated like a slab of meat. But in retrospect, my hospital miscarriage was nothing compared with my horrendous ordeal at the Morgentaler clinic.
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My experience at the Morgentaler clinic was traumatic, and not just thanks to the trauma inherent in being a young pregnant woman whose life felt so desperately wrong that she felt she had no choice but to kill her unborn child (sorry, I just can’t do the euphemisms). At the Morgentaler clinic, I was treated with the utmost disrespect, I was shamed for showing emotion, and I was definitely given the impression that if I were a good feminist, I’d be more grateful. As though the the d & c was a privilege that I should be enthusiastic about receiving, rather than a service I had just purchased for a considerable sum of money, under duress.
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So why aren’t I more grateful? Wasn’t I exercising my freedom of choice?
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Don’t get me wrong. What I want is for the New Brunswick government to uphold the law, and to immediately offer unrestricted clinical abortion services in all hospitals to all women. (I would also like to see *all* pregnant women and mothers with children generously subsidized financially so that the “choice” as to whether or not we give birth or terminate a pregnancies is made in the context of knowing that we will, if we choose, have a real option of staying home to raise our children with proper food, clothing and attention, but that’s another conversation, isn’t it).
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Wait a second, New Brunswick doesn’t have the money to fund abortion! Here is a solution: how about starting tomorrow, we diminish the rate of c-sections in the province by two thirds? Right now, about 30% of New Brunswick women are deemed incapable of giving birth naturally, and we all know that doesn’t actually reflect reality. With only 10% of women getting cut (still unnecessarily high, don’t worry)–ta da—I have suddenly “found” the funds to uphold women’s right to reproductive choice.
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But there is another very important aspect to this issue: women, in New Brunswick and throughout North America, are functioning under the fallacy that their “choice”, when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, is limited to what allopathic medicine has to provide. When we give birth, we can either choose a hospital birth, or find a registered midwife. Uh oh!, New Brunswick has no registered midwifes! The medical birth industry has convinced us that giving birth at home, outside of the medical system, or simply seeking guidance from experienced women in our community—which describes the true meaning of the word “midwife”—is out of the question, and even illegal. This, despite the fact that only in the past 100 years has birth had anything to do with medicine, and we had clearly very effectively procreated without medical interference up to that point.
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Similarly, women have been convinced that when it comes to terminating a pregnancy, our choice lies exclusively with receiving a clinical abortion from a doctor, when, since the beginning of humanity, women have sought, and found, ways to terminate pregnancy. (And it’s still none of your business why.) Some of these methods were effective, some ineffective. Some of these methods were safe, some were not.
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In the 70s and 80s, women like Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman who formed the Feminist Women’s Health Centre in L.A., were showing women how to perform “menstrual extraction” on themselves. This is a *safe* and *effective* abortion method, that allows women to terminate their own pregnancies, without the involvement of the medical community. And it’s *free*. But the medical establishment didn’t like this very much. Abortion is a business. After all, a doctor makes more money performing abortions than they do attending a normal birth. A d & c takes 15 minutes! Medicine is a hegemony.
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When it comes to abortion, and to birth, the medical community is terribly threatened by women taking responsibility for their own health. Carol Downer was, absurdly, charged with practising medicine without a license—when she had only ever instructed women on how to help themselves. The only evidence for her prosecution, was that she had, at one point, admittedly, inserted yogurt into a woman’s vagina to help her treat a yeast infection. Downer was acquitted.
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It is absolutely true that many many women have died or have been rendered infertile from the horror of back-alley abortions. But this isn’t because non-clinical abortion is inherently unsafe. This is because in our culture, we hate women and women’s sexuality, and because misogyny leads to exploitation, and because women are not safe to have sex, or to give birth to children (or not) outside of the patriarchal structures imposed by our society, and because talking about sex and reproduction and birth openly, was not allowed. It’s still not allowed. And the dangerous practitioners who took advantage of women, maiming them with coat-hangers, after they got their cash in-hand, were often men, and they were often trained doctors.
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But we forget that this kind of maiming still occurs every day. And it occurs most often in “labour and delivery” wards in hospitals, where women are tortured and cut and denied their human rights during childbirth, and still told to smile and thank the OB afterwards.
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I will absolutely join with my sisters to demand that New Brunswick immediately implement, free, accessible, clinical abortions throughout the province. I think the closing of the Morgentaler clinic will propel this movement forward.
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But I would also like to stand up and let women know that their scope of choices are much much broader than we have been led to believe, by the medical community, and by abortion activists. I will continue to stand up and advocate for a woman’s right to give birth where, and with whom she chooses, including with an independent non-medically-affiliated birth attendant. Similarly, I have no doubt that women will be interested to know that her choices for terminating pregnancy can include methods that are free, private, non-medical, and entirely self-implemented. Perhaps if more women took reproductive health into their own hands, it would go some way to removing our bodies from political and social scrutiny, and grant us greater authentic freedom.
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Links:
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CBC’s The Current on Self-Induced Abortions
Book: Natural LIberty: Rediscovering Self-Induced Abortion Methods (Sage-Femme Collective) and Here on Good Reads
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