Today was my first day greeting patients on the sidewalk and escorting them into the clinic since 2019. It’s pouring rain, of course, with gale-force winds, so initially clinic staff was hopeful that the protestors wouldn’t show. That they’d congregate inside their little popcorn-ceiling strip-mall chapel, keep their bibles and their poster-boards dry. But they came out, in matching blue rain ponchos, and preached at the doors and the sky and the traffic passing by. And of course, at the four of us escorts on the early shift, in our reflective pink vests, huddled under the overhangs until the next person who needed shielding or connection on their way into the building would arrive.
In a strange synchronicity, I’ve spent the last few evenings reading Bodies on the Line, Lauren Rankin’s rigorously researched and gracefully told history of abortion clinic escorts (out in April 2022). The cover is a beaut: a phalanx of simple, anonymous faces peeking over solid rectangles in a spectrum of colors. They could be shields, they could be signs, but the people holding them flock together, no leaders or hierarchy immediately visible. The view from my morning reflected this cover back to me through the rain; the protestors in their uniforms, us in ours.
Writing a book - reaching out for interviews, sharing research and craft and process, publishing the various ribbons that run through the story I’ll be telling in 2023 - involves an uncomfy amount of self-promotion even in the best of times. But centering myself, a cis white woman in a high-access state, in the conversation around reproductive justice at this moment of deliberately inflicted terror and suffering, when the State is seeking to manage those inhabiting criminalized and marginalized bodies more violently than ever—it’s something that is helpful to exactly nobody. Including to me, as it happens—but there I’ve gone and centered myself yet again.
I miss my clinic scrubs; I miss the movement of a flock. When I worked in front-line abortion care, we would frequently receive cards and love letters addressed in our general direction: “Dear Planned Parenthood,” or “Dear nurses and staff.” The safety I felt reading those words, the complete lack of desire for individual recognition or visible status, it’s something I’m realizing I need desperately as I dive into this book-writing process, a long and lonely project that my (brilliant and wonderful) editor has described as “wandering in the woods.”
The days are getting darker, the abortion bans are proliferating before our eyes, Black and Indigenous and trans people are being so harmed and neglected by our compounding denials of adequate care—and thereby our denials of their humanity, dignitiy, autonomy, and worth—and I’m retreating into a space to work, alone, on a book about community abortion care work.
Thankfully, my abortion doula clients continue to need connection and collaboration just as badly as I do. As do my friends, as do my coworkers, as do my beloved little family.
Rather than shrinking back into the anonymity of a clinic uniform, or a pink vest, or a collective address on an envelope, I can carry my own identity, the unwieldy baggage of all my privilege and complicity and responsibility clanging along behind me. I can do the hard work of wandering alone, meeting each of these people exactly where they are on the trails through their own dark woods, bringing them toward the center of the story I hope we’ll tell together.
Moving, as adrienne maree brown would say, at the speed of trust.