Stacey Simmons.
“Enough!”
© Stacey Simmons.
Used by permission.
All rights reserved.
In 1994 I moved back to my home town of New Orleans from Los Angeles. When I got back I needed a job, and one of my friends told me she could help me get hired where she worked, in a women�s clinic in a New Orleans’ suburb — that provided abortions for women. I was a little hesitant. I was pro-choice, but only nominally so — I had never been pregnant, and didn’t have a clue what I was about to learn about women’s lives.
Though I had experienced trauma, I was completely ignorant of what the world was like for MOST women. I was incredibly naive and unprepared for what lay ahead. My first day of work was a “non-procedure day”. I was shown the facilities, the phones, and the way we let the doctors in. It was all to be kept completely confidential. I couldn’t tell my roommates or my partner any of this. The director explained that they had all endured death threats, and recently a doctor had been murdered in another state. Suddenly the rules about how the staff parked clandestinely, and the secret ways in and out of the building became much more important. I was afraid for my safety. Did I need a job this badly? Yes, I did.
I had been mostly ambivalent about having children. If it happened fine, if it didn’t fine. As a result, I hadn’t given much thought to my reproductive or gendered freedoms until I worked at the Women’s Clinic. Male doctors older than my dad provided care for the women patients who came in. One was a general surgeon, another an Emergency Room physician, one was an OB-GYN. They had all been doing this work for over 20 years, and all of them told me stories of having lost very young patients to botched abortions.
One told me the story of being an attending ER doctor, and very full of himself to the point of being proud of the fact that the other residents hated him. He talked openly about his god-complex, and how smug he felt about having the skill to save lives. That changed when a 13 year old girl came in unconscious and bleeding out from her vagina. Her uncle stood at her bedside, beside himself not knowing what to do. She died. Her uncle had “helped” her get a back alley abortion — because the uncle had gotten her pregnant. He knew he was culpable, but didn’t feel responsible. The doctor telling the story STILL became enraged, and it had been 20 years since he had lost that patient. He said plainly that he lost his god-complex that day, and instead realized with his deep Christian faith that he had to help these female children — the ones that the Godly men in his small town didn’t seem to care about — they used them freely for their own selfish, and immoral abuses, throwing them away like tissues. He took it upon himself to protect female children, he called it his ministry. He gave away birth control and spirited abused women to their relatives. He helped women who wanted adoptions, and women who wanted abortions. He gave abused women money to get out of town and drove them to bus stations. He examined children who had been sexually assaulted, and helped develop practices in the emergency room to ensure that there was evidence when they’d been abused.
I saw terrible things in that clinic — and not in the ways the anti-choice lobby want you to believe. I worked there for three years. In that time the incidents I could never shake were the child rapes. I probably saw at least three children per month who had been raped by someone they trusted. AT LEAST THREE PER MONTH! Almost all of these children were raped by a family member, family friend, or mom’s boyfriend. The youngest I saw was 9 years old, let’s call her Sarah. I will never forget Sarah. She had chocolate brown eyes, fair skin, and freckles on her cheeks. She had recently moved in with her grandmother, because her mother was addicted to drugs after losing her husband to a work-related accident.
Sarah’s grandmother brought her to the pediatrician because she noticed that this tiny little girl was gaining weight around the middle. They thought it was cancer. They did a pregnancy test just to rule out the option, perfunctory really — when they finally conducted an ultrasound, she was 12 weeks pregnant. The pediatrician obviously didn’t specialize in this, and a criminal investigation would follow. But before her little body broke under that pressure, they needed to terminate the pregnancy.
Normally on a clinical day, protestors line the streets starting at five in the morning. There is a full staff, and a bursting waiting room with a steady flow of patients being seen. Not when Sarah came in. The doctor came in on a non-clinical day. No one wanted her walking through the protestors that were always there on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Sarah’s pediatrician was on call, an anesthesiologist was called in, and Sarah’s little body that had been violated by her mother’s 32 year old boyfriend, was put through another trial, this time to save her not only from the psychological issues, but also from the life-threatening physical toll of what it would have meant for this child to carry a child. Every single person who worked there cried uncontrollably after she left the clinic. We were all beside ourselves with the terrible things human beings do to other human beings, and especially to children.
Another case that stayed with me was a woman a little older than me at the time, her name was Rosemary. She was about seven years older than I was at the time. She showed up at the clinic dressed very modestly, looking like a school teacher from the 1950’s. Her hair was in a tight bun, with thick red hair beautifully coifed. She had a black eye, and her arm was in a sling. She walked with a bit of a limp. She came with another woman, who I later learned was her sister, Jeanne. Jeanne was dressed more like other women in the 1990’s, she had short hair and wore tight acid-washed jeans. Rosemary had escaped a violent marriage where she had two children, with an abusive husband who raped her nightly. He claimed that Divine Right from God gave him the right to her body, and she was supposed to submit to him, like a good Christian wife. It took Rosemary almost a year to escape her husband, and when she did she left her two children behind. She was bereft, guilt-ridden, and pregnant. She was desperately trying to get her children away from her abusive husband. But she knew that if she was pregnant, that this would make it much more difficult for her on multiple levels. Her husband would put up more of a fight, the court might not look upon her case as favorably, and her husband would get a ton of sympathy from his congregation that would embolden him. Her sister had helped her escape only 10 days before, and Rosemary hadn’t even known she was pregnant when she left. She looked shell-shocked, as though someone had taken something precious and fundamental from her.
When Rosemary’s procedure was over, she kept saying, “I’m free. I’m really free?” over and over again. She sounded at first like a disembodied voice on a tape recorder, a ghost trying to find her body again. After about an hour in the recovery area she started wailing and crying. Her voice had rejoined her physical being. I learned later that she had married her husband the same week she graduated high school. She was now twenty nine, and had endured almost twelve years of physical and sexual abuse. In the recovery room, her sister held her hand and stroked her hair whispering into her hairline, occasionally placing a soft kiss there. None of us could walk by the door without tearing up.
My anger is usually at people, however well-meaning their intentions might be, who look away from the reality of what is happening for women and children who need the service that abortion clinics provide. It is not “just” a form of birth control, indeed, if we had better access and education, then abortion “as” birth control would be less prevalent. No, what abortion provides is a safe option for people like Sarah and Rosemary. It allows people like Sarah and her grandmother to have privacy, to tend to their wounds without judgment. It gives Rosemary room to breathe, so that she can begin to heal from more than a decade of abuse.
I used to have arguments about abortion with my mother. A devout Christian, my mother would argue for the life of “the unborn” and promote the idea that these “babies” should have rights. I would ask my mother about Sarah’s and Rosemary’s rights. My mother would argue that these cases were horrible and that they shouldn’t happen. I agreed and offered in response, “But they DO happen”. She would gloss over my protestations and talk about beautiful babies as a gift from God. I had asked my mother at different times whether she had ever been sexually assaulted. She claimed that she had never had any misfortune that way. But, my mom was an enigma to me, she could force herself to believe anything, so even if she had been, I doubt she would have let herself believe it. She loved innocence, and the ideal of children as innocent vessels of God’s grace. While this idea is romantic and maybe even beautiful — it is also a trap. It is a false flag that ignores the horrors women and children endure to maintain a patriarchal system that idealizes passive womanhood and obedient children.
This is always the case with the women in the so-called “pro-life” movement. It is not that they are pro-life, or even pro-birth, it is that they fetishize motherhood. They love the IDEA of babies and motherhood for themselves so much, that they ignore the reality for anyone else. What upsets me most of all is that it is these women who are holding up the pro-life movement’s misogyny. They cleave so strongly to their patriarchal role as the protected female, that they completely ignore, and demonize, women and children who are NOT protected. Their stance implies that if you are unfortunate enough to be in those circumstances then you were put in them for a reason. Either you are a victim of your own sin, or God is using you for a greater purpose.
I call bullshit.
Men hurt women. Men rape women. Men rape children. And THESE RIGHTEOUS women are complicit. They hold to their ideals clutching their pearls, as though the rapist and the rapist’s offspring are more important than the victims’ life and well-being. I am sick to death of it. I am sick to death of women protecting bad men. I am sick to death of men and boys who feel entitled to women’s bodies being given a pass in society.
The laws and opinions seeking to limit or ban abortion are saying explicitly, that rapists are more important than their victims. Child molesters are more important than children. The potential for a life that we can claim for God is more important than the broken life before us. It’s disgusting, and news-flash to all the angry Christians, this is the most un-Christlike stance you could possibly take. Jesus would have been comforting Rosemary and Sarah not screaming at them on a protest line.
I am pro-choice, because I am pro-life. Between the potential life, or a life that’s already here… I’m going to chose the life that is already here. Women deserve to make their own decisions about their lives without being abused or raped. Children shouldn’t be treated like dishrags for sinful men who can’t control themselves. And government bodies run by men who are disdainful of women, shouldn’t have a single word to say about what happens to people trying to save the Sarah’s and Rosemary’s of the world.
I’m disgusted and sick, and I’m going to dedicate resources, time, money, and more to defeating this particular lie of patriarchy.
Want to help? EXPOSE THEM ALL — the rapists, the molesters, and the women who let them get away with it. ENOUGH.
Text prepared by:
- Bruce R. Magee
Source
Simmons, Stacey. “Enough.” Facebook, 4 May 2022, 10:30 a.m., <https:// www.facebook.com/ sunnystacey/ posts/ 10159703057324631>. Accessed 5 May 2022. © Stacey Simmons Used by permission. All rights reserved.