I once worked with a woman who made too much money to qualify for the organization’s modest fund. She lived paycheck to paycheck but within comfortable means. Because my organization, as well as several other organizations, could not afford to assist her, she chose to obtain surgery at one of Steve Brigham’s clinics in Maryland—one of the cheapest clinics in the region.
She delayed her surgery to accrue the money on her own and spoke with me throughout the process because she intended to tell no one. Our conversations were completely centered on the expertise I could provide but there were limits to my services and I could offer little beyond confidential abortion information and referrals over the phone.
The conversations were brief but serious. At times, I felt her calls were taking over my life: on lunch, at the laundromat, making dinner, late night. She called me after her second trimester procedure. She was driving and pulled over to vomit. She had been sedated and released from the clinic without an escort to drive her home.
Avoiding and counter-referring the cheapest clinics in the Mid-Atlantic region is difficult and bothersome at best. Demoralizing, confounding, heart breaking that this is how the system works.
The existence of terrible abortion providers—those who make a business out of the desperation women feel when they know they cannot carry a pregnancy to term—creates an ultimate conundrum for Abortioneers—those who believe abortion helps society because they see how often it does. Abortioneers spend free time helping women navigate barriers to obtaining safe abortion care.
Case managers and patients alike desired abortions from Steve Brigham’s clinics because they needed to end pregnancies that were not meant to be but also feed children, pay rent, pay for school, pay bills. In a field so terrorized by anti-abortion monsters, there is urgency in the fight for women’s proper destiny that transcends the demand for safe health care. In other words, history has proven over and over that women will risk their lives to end doomed pregnancies.
An abortion at a shady clinic that’s not a back alley kitchen table seems somewhat more promising—the only option for some of your neighbors and you're okay with that as long as you don’t have to really talk about abortion, the abortions women are actually having, not the political weapon invented by the GOP.
My dear colleague and I visited one of Steve Brigham’s clinics soon after the case of the woman who drove home quasi-sedated. I took a pregnancy test. The medical assistants were kind and accommodating but the atmosphere was unsettling. My dear colleague and I resolved to find the money to help women get to the good clinics, the slightly higher-priced clinics—licensed and certified to provide safe, legal abortions.
In other words, as a non-medical, grassroots organization, we were not obligated to care whether the women we assisted received licensed and certified surgeries but we did care because we’re Abortioneers. The United States of America was founded under the governing principle that all people are inherently free, equal, and due justice. I would add that most people are just trying to get by. Laws have been implemented to protect the general good from the (rare) deviant.
Placing further limitations on the abortion procedure and tighter regulations on abortion facilities in the state of Maryland will not necessarily catch the rare and deviant Brigham-types any sooner in the grand pile of paperwork. However, caring about women having abortions will.
Most to the point, how about cracking down on New Jersey for failing to provide adequate health care? Often, abortion restrictions involve room measurements, time periods and additional hoops for abortioneers and pregnant women to meander through, or just plain prohibit necessary health care all together. I’m all for each state getting to know its abortion providers. Many abortion clinics in this country are quite stellar, but damn if a congressperson or state official ever walked through the doors just to say hello and thank you/ how can I help?
I can’t think of how this story might unfold in any other field of medicine because I do not know. But I can suggest that persecuting perfectly good abortion care providers—arguably some of the best in the country—detracts from a far more pertinent need: taking care of our pregnant citizens.
Steve Brigham was operating a business off the inevitability of abortion. He had a record. He was criminal, a rule-breaker who spotted a need and families willing to pay him for his supposed expertise.
Send him to jail but please do not hunt down the good clinics and treat them in the woods where no one not having an abortion cares to hear. There is a noble world ahead. One where Cheryl of Operation Rescue is not quoted in the Baltimore Sun like she’s some kind of reasonable and credible source.
When a woman resolves to have an abortion she has no choice. There is no world where some pregnant women will not have abortions. In exploring our disgust and misconceptions with abortion we find a real world—one where humans make complicated decisions and dying is a part of living—interwoven, like, death is happening right now inside and everywhere at the same time as life.
Your support starts with listening. Like, being able to hear the truth.
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