Thursday, July 09, 2009

Abortion Mill

I lived in Garden Grove, California, with my family, while I was growing up, between 1959 and 1969. In a better area of town than we lived in but not far, lived a doctor and his family. I knew his kids. We went to the same church. We went to the same schools. We saw each other at social events. He was the team doctor for my high school's PE department. He gave me a few sports physicals.

This doctor had his own little clinic and convalescent facility downtown, close but not too close to the town hospital. We drove by it all the time. I never thought anything about it. My parents said he did therapeutic D&Cs. I had no idea what that was. When I got older, in the school yard and streets, along with the facts of life, I learned that this doctor could "get rid of babies", from pregnant women. A lot of kids talked about their mothers or sisters or aunts, getting just that done at his clinic. The reason was always that "she needed to have it done".

This doctor ran his clinic for twenty years. It was perfectly legal. He decided it needed to be done, for whatever reason and provided the service. If you had insurance, it was usually covered. If you didn't, it wasn't terribly expensive. He wasn't unreasonable. If your credit was good, he would work out payments. I don't think he turned away too many people. He didn't do pregnancy tests. That would have been unethical. You just had to tell him that you had skipped a couple of periods and he decided you needed a therapeutic D&C. No law broken there. He couldn't advertise. Word of mouth had to do. Some poor naive girls, with nobody to advise them, had babies they didn't want. Some girls had babies even knowing they could have an abortion. It was a harder thing to endure, then, than now.

What's interesting is the gossip didn't start, the tongues didn't click until after a single girl started to show. Nobody ever gossiped about, criticized or thought less of a woman or girl who went down to this doctor's clinic and had a D&C. It was considered to be a legitimate medical procedure even though everybody knew what was up. The criticism was about choosing to bear an unwanted or illegitimate baby, not getting pregnant. Another gossipy criticism you would often hear, was when a married women whose children had already reached a certain age, got pregnant again. All the ladies would ask each other why didn't she do something about that. It's not fair to her husband or the other children, they would say. People are funny, no?

Most towns of any size had an establishment like the one run by this doctor. I'm sure it was a good thing. I think most women that had illicit abortions performed by untrained individuals, running the risk of dangerous complications, at least in my area, in those days, were trying to hide it from all their friends and family and felt if they went the clinic, others would know. That's probably true.

I guess the point of this is that abortions have always been taking place. In every society in the World. Nothing is going to stop it or even decrease its frequency. The whole anti choice movement is predicated that abortion can be stopped by force. What's interesting is, even the anti choicers never blame women for wanting or getting abortions. None of them want any criminal penalties for women, just the abortionists. Once abortion is criminalized, the rate of other therapeutic intra uterine procedures will simply increase mysteriously. Ah, a rose, by any other name. Abortion will still be legal, easy to obtain, medically justified and covered by insurance, just like always. Those that don't have insurance can get theirs on easy credit terms. Doctors that do abortions will still go to church and live in nice neighborhoods. People don't change and neither does the way they live their lives. It's a given.

These anti choice people aren't too bright. Mostly Republicans. Most of them are pretty religious. Don't really do too much thinking on their own. It figures.

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