A Conversation with Ann

and congratulations to Annie Ernaux

Hello Everyone,

It’s been a while. I hope you’re all well.

Last month, I sat down with my friend Ann at a coffee shop and, with her permission, recorded our conversation. I’ve known her a long time but just recently learned that she worked as a director for two Planned Parenthood clinics, and I wanted to ask her about it.

When Bryan, her third child, got badly burned at 10 months old, she took him to the ER where Dr. Ping Tsao, a plastic surgeon, treated him and did skin grafts. She said with self-deprecation that she realized her children could get hurt with her around, so she’d better go to work. At a follow-up visit for her son, she said she’d like to work there, and Tsao called her. She started as a receptionist but was soon trained in the operating room. She wasn’t sure she would be able to handle it, but she could, and she found she loved it. She especially loved the surgery part— it was her favorite job. It made her feel good about herself.

Later she went to work for another plastic surgeon, Jim Thornton. As a plastic surgeon, he did cosmetic surgeries, but he also volunteered twice a year for the Flying Samaritans, a group that sends doctors down to a rural clinic in Baja, Mexico every month. The volunteer pilots use their own planes to fly down the doctors and other volunteers. I went once before my children were born to volunteer as a translator; I will never forget flying down there with Clifford Clark (of the Clark Center, the performance art center in Arroyo Grande), just the two of us in his little plane. But in 2010, the small plane Thornton was flying down in crashed. The Tribune wrote that Thornton had treated people during these trips for cleft palates, serious burns, and clubbed hands. “He never missed a clinic in his 25 years of service,” the article stated. All four people on board, including the pilot, a friend of my in-laws, tragically died in the crash.

Before this, while Ann was working for Thornton, she saw a job advertisement for a healthcare director that caught her eye. She applied for it and got the job as director of the San Luis Obispo Planned Parenthood. She said she was shocked she got the job. She justified the move like this: She’d been taking care of people for cosmetic stuff (not all but a good portion), and now she was going to do something on the other end of the spectrum. She’d help those whom a lot of people don’t want to help.

I’d personally gone to Planned Parenthood for healthcare as a youth and young woman: I’d gotten annual checkups and birth control there over the years; I’d also gone there for an abortion.

Ann knew about Planned Parenthood’s services, but had never used them. What happened to her was this: She got pregnant at 15 and had a baby at 16.

“He’s my funny one—so quick-witted.” She said it wasn’t the right time to have kids and that there’s so many things she wants to apologize for—and sometimes does. But “life is what it is,” Ann said. “I would not change it for anything.” Having an abortion did not cross her mind—and she also wanted to get out of her house, she said. “That’s how smart you are when you’re 15—this is how I can get away from my mother!” She had the baby and she and her boyfriend got married.

At the time of her getting the director job, Planned Parenthood California Central Coast had four clinics: San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Ventura, and Santa Barbara, where the headquarters were. (Now there are six clinics, including the recently-opened Oxnard, and Thousand Oaks.) She went down to Santa Barbara and trained for three weeks. She said it was supposed to be an all-administrative position.

“But it was such a small clinic, that I often found myself in the back on abortion days,” she said. They would do abortions one day a week. “It’s hard….I mean, it really is.” She said she tried to avoid working in the back but almost always ended up helping. The reality and gravity of what’s happening, she said, “is undeniable.” Although the clinic did not offer abortions beyond 10 weeks, it still hit home in a visceral way. And yet, despite it being difficult, Ann said she was—and remains—fully supportive of abortion rights. She said that she found the overturning of Roe v. Wade “just shocking.”

“It breaks my heart,” she said.

Ann eventually also took over as director of the Santa Maria clinic as well. While San Luis Obispo had more middle-class women or college students, Ann felt particularly bad for the women in Santa Maria, many of whom were Hispanic and incredibly poor. Ann saw their desperation, especially the women who, as fieldworkers, worked long, physically exhausting hours. She said it seemed that most of their husbands didn’t believe in birth control, that some of the women would come in without telling their husbands.  

“Where’s their access?” she asked, echoing something I learned long ago: Wealthy people will always have access to birth control and abortion; when you restrict access, it’s really poor people who are hurt. “For me, that was quite an eye opener,” she said, when she really experienced the differences between the two clinics.

Most of the Santa Maria staff spoke Spanish, and Ann found it difficult to show the compassion she felt for the patients since she didn’t speak their language. In SLO, connecting was easier since there was rarely a language barrier, and she even knew some of the girls who came in. “But I’ll never forget those ladies in Santa Maria.” Most of the women who came in, she said, already had kids. That’s a fact about abortion: The majority of women who seek an abortion have already had at least one child.

“It was an education for me,” Ann said.

Even though she was working for Planned Parenthood and supported abortion rights, I asked her if she felt judgmental toward people who opted for abortion since she herself had gone through with a pregnancy and had—and raised—a baby as a teenager. “No,” she said. “I never felt that way. I just felt like, if you’re not ready and you don’t want to have a child, absolutely make this choice. I’m 100 percent behind that.”

She worked for Planned Parenthood for about four years. She said she burned out because she tried to be director of two clinics—no director had ever run both. It was a mistake on her part, she said, to think she could do it. The Santa Maria clinic was bigger and had “so much more need.” Not that the need in SLO is not justified, she clarified, adding, “Again, everyone should have that right without anybody having any input.”

We talked about how political Planned Parenthood is. Politicians on the right are always demonizing the organization and trying to defund it. “So many things are political that shouldn’t be,” she said.

“Like climate change,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Or like Covid.”

But, she said, abortion has always been political. Always.

She said they used to have interns, usually Cal Poly psychology majors, who would counsel patients at the clinic. The women and girls wouldn’t be able to just make an appointment, come in and have an abortion; they had to speak with the counselors, who would let them know all their options, let them know they had choices. “We covered all the bases. We weren’t pushing abortion,” Ann said.

She told me about talking with her second ex-husband, who said he didn’t understand what the big deal was about Roe v. Wade being overturned. She said to him, “You don’t get the big deal?” She explained that 50 years ago, Roe v. Wade had made abortion legal in the whole country, but that now with Roe overturned, many states were severely restricting or banning abortion. He responded the way so many people do who don’t understand: “Well, the women can just go to another state.” She said, “If you’re a teenager and you have no money, how are you going to get to that other state?”

“Well, I know why we’re not still married,” she said, and laughed.

We talked about how states banning or restricting abortion often border or are surrounded by other states with Draconian abortion laws. (The Guttmacher Institute has the most up-to-date interactive map showing this.) Many states require two visits to a clinic and have waiting periods, some 24 hours, some 72. “And where do you stay—a hotel?” Ann asked with exasperation. “And how do you get all that time off work? And if you have other children, who takes care of them while you’re gone?” All this organizing, if it is even feasible, takes money and time—and meanwhile, the pregnancy is advancing….

And, according to the Guttmacher Institute, if you live in Idaho, South Dakota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, or West Virginia, “Abortion is completely banned with very limited exceptions.”

“No one has the right to tell me what is right for me to do,” Ann said. “I mean, whatever decision I make, I have to live with it. You don’t—I do. And you think about all these babies we’re going to have. What? They go into foster care?” She wondered whether the people against abortions are going to step up and give more money to foster care or adopt the children themselves.

I asked her whether she had always had strong pro-choice views or if those feelings intensified after her time at Planned Parenthood. She said she had always held those views. “But it definitely made me more vocal,” she said.

We talked about the 10-year-old Ohio girl who had to go to Indiana for an abortion because she was six weeks and three days pregnant—and Ohio had banned abortion beyond six weeks. (In August the governor of Indiana signed a bill into law that would ban abortion from conception on with few exceptions for incest or rape, but a judge halted it, so for now, abortion remains legal in Indiana up to 20 weeks.)

“I’m just shocked that this is where we are,” Ann said. “It scares me. We’re going backwards, frighteningly—not just with women’s rights, but in so many ways. We’re going backwards. When did that start happening?”

We talked about how she gave birth at 16. That she was so “fortunate” that her boyfriend married her, and gave her, she said laughing, “time to let my brain develop!” She was grateful too that she was able to stay home with her son. Soon, they had another baby. Eventually though, she said, her husband’s brain developed too, and “he fell in love with someone.” After 10 years of marriage, they divorced.

I told her that I had Diego and Charlie at 35 and 36. That even though I had a master’s degree, a job, health insurance, a spouse, and a house, it was still challenging. “I continue to be astounded,” I said to Ann, “at how much time, energy, resources, and patience is required—"

She finished my sentence: “To be a mom!”

My gratitude goes out to Ann for our conversation.

Just a couple more things before I let you go: I’m so excited to share that the French writer Annie Ernaux, whose novel L'évènement was the basis for the movie “Happening” that I wrote about here, has won the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature!!!!!!! Here’s a list of her books with reviews from Publishers Weekly.

This is part of a speech she gave upon winning the Nobel Prize; it was posted on The Guardian, translated from French:

“The Nobel it hasn’t sunk in yet. But it’s true I have a new responsibility. The responsibility is about carrying on the fight against injustice, whatever it is. I use the term ‘injustice,’ but it has different levels. Everything that is a form of injustice towards women, towards those I call the dominated ones. I can tell you I will fight until my last breath so that women be able to choose to become mothers or to choose not to. It’s a fundamental right. Contraception and the right to abortion are the core of women’s freedom.”

Over the last two months, I’ve been taking a figure drawing class at Cuesta, our local community college (I taught there many years ago; now I’m back as a student). This drawing was of Elle. We’d had a couple young models, and then Elle came into the classroom. Hers is a mature body, a beautiful, voluptuous female body. It harbors secrets about which the tattoos of words and images on her skin only offered hints. My teacher reminds us: You’re learning how to draw; you’re not making art—yet.  And since I’m just starting to learn, it was a challenge to draw her, but also an honor. A body is a powerful, sacred, autonomous thing. Model, lover, mother—a woman should get to choose when and how she shares it.

Thanks for reading!