Dispatch from Ohio
Women (and Girls) Haunted
Dispatch from Ohio
I spent last week in Toledo, Ohio, visiting family. Those who ingest the news du jour are probably aware that a 10-year-old had recently been raped in Ohio by her mother’s boyfriend, that she had become pregnant, and that because of Ohio’s ban on abortion after six weeks, the 10-year-old victim could not obtain an abortion there since she was six weeks and three days pregnant. Ohio’s law, the “Human Rights and Heartbeat Protection Act,” was signed into law by Republican Governor Mike DeWine in 2019, but enforcement of it was blocked until Roe v. Wade was overturned in June. So the girl, a fourth grader by my math, had to travel across state lines to Indiana where obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Caitlin Bernard gave her an abortion.
I don’t want to spend too much time on the shitstorm that followed, how right-wing media tried to deny the truth of the story, how the attorneys general of Indiana and Ohio grandstanded by attempting to turn the doctor who provided the abortion into a pariah. In Indiana, at the time the doctor gave the child the abortion, state law allowed abortion until 22 weeks. But Indiana legislators five hours ago today (August 6—I’ve had to revise this post since I began it) passed legislation banning all abortion from conception with exceptions for rape and incest or to save the health of the mother, which means that rape victims may still be able to get an abortion, to a point. How kind. Still, Indiana has joined a few other states with the strictest abortion laws. On Twitter, Dr. Bernard responded to the law:
“Indiana banned abortion in our state. I am devastated for the state I call home and for the countless people who will be harmed by this. How many girls and women will be hurt before they realize this must be reversed? I will continue to fight for them with every fiber of my being”
I asked one Ohio family member about her take. She’s involved with her church, Rotary, and other service organizations and is quite social. I broached the subject with her in part to hear what her peers are saying, as she has a lot of different female friend groups but also told me that none of them is talking about Roe v. Wade being overturned. It’s frankly shocking to me that groups of older women are getting together and that no one is bringing it up—is willing to bring it up. But yes, it’s polarizing. And to bring up abortion is to bring up politics—that seems inevitable. And maybe people going out to lunch together are just looking for common ground. I told her I would love to join one of her luncheons and ask questions. That’s all I would do—inquire. Because everyone—everyone—has at least some experience or thought or opinion about this heated topic. It’s not like people aren’t thinking about it. But it seems that at least the very people who could or should be talking about it—women!—aren’t. “Not many women are that open about it,” she told me. We could rabble rouse together!
I asked my husband’s sister Lindsey Hickey, who has worked as a women’s health nurse practitioner for the last 17 years, including many years in Chicago, if she knew of a health practitioner affected by Roe’s overturn whom I could interview while I was in Ohio.
“Interview me!” she exclaimed over text.
I told her I was hoping she would say that, as she’s someone I’ve always genuinely liked, and I’ve always admired that she works in women’s health. Once I got to Ohio, we talked at the pool while our kids swam. She was of course horrified about the 10-year-old girl and very distressed about Roe v. Wade being overturned. She said her patients, most of whom are under 21, are very worried about their health and reproductive futures. Would they be able to get birth control, including IUDs? Would they be able to have an abortion if they found themselves needing one? We talked quite a bit but then she asked me to email her some questions so that she would have time to think and write out her answers.
Lindsey is a registered nurse—an RN, MSN, B-CNP. She’s been in women’s health for the last 17 years, including 10 as a labor and delivery nurse. Growing up in Toledo, she watched her mother, Joan Durgin, care and guide young pregnant teens through their pregnancies. Joan began her career working in Toledo public schools where she found her calling and developed a love for her students. When Lindsey was 13-years-old, her mother opened a school called Polly Fox Academy. The school, which provided a complete academic program and comprehensive social services, was dedicated to pregnant and parenting teenage girls in grades 7-12. Lindsey spent many days shadowing her mother at the school, watching her devote her time and knowledge to care for the young girls. Lindsey wrote:
“My mother’s impact on the girls and their children was truly what guided me to want to dedicate myself to a career in women’s health.”
Lindsey graduated from nursing school in 1996 and started her career as a labor and delivery nurse at St. Joseph Hospital in downtown Chicago. For the next 10 years, she was a floor nurse caring for women during their “antepartum, intrapartum, and postpartum phases of labor”—before delivery, during delivery, and after delivery of a baby. She went on to receive her Master of Nursing degree and also earned a degree as a Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner. She spent the next 13 years working in the inner city for a federally-funded healthcare facility caring for women in underserved communities. The patients received well-women exams, prenatal care, prescriptions, and healthcare counseling. She explained:
“I truly enjoyed my role in the clinic as my patients’ primary caregiver. I was able to counsel many of my patients, especially the younger ones, on the importance of their right to choose how they how they care for themselves and the decisions that they made about their healthcare. It was very rewarding to be an active role model for these young women.”
Lindsey clarified that she is not pro-abortion but rather pro-choice. I asked her if her friends and family know her position—and if she could voice it to most people she knows. She wrote:
“The majority of people who know me know the position I take with a women’s right to choose. I feel very strongly about advocating for the legal right to obtain an abortion. Taking the right to choose away from a woman is unprecedented and concerns me greatly for the future of women’s rights in this country. When I heard that Roe v. Wade had been overturned, I was utterly appalled. My first thought was having to counsel my patients and help guide them to make appropriate choices regarding their fertility rights.”
I asked her to what she thought the repercussions of Roe being overturned would be. She answered:
“It is my belief that restricting abortion access has negative consequences for pregnant people, who are at increased risk of physical and mental-health issues when they are denied an abortion, and for infant health.”
She also worried about people trying to end their pregnancies without clinical supervision:
“Some are likely to do this with abortion medications, but the problem is that many people don’t know much about abortion medication and how much to take to successfully terminate a pregnancy which could lead to potential physical and harmful outcomes.”
I asked her what she thought of Ohio’s law, which bans abortion past six weeks and makes no exception for rape or incest. She said she was “sickened” by the law. She wrote:
“I can’t understand Amy Coney Barrett and her radical vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. She is a mother of four girls. What would she think if one of her daughters was raped and sadly got pregnant?”
Although Lindsey was not trained to do abortions and does not perform them, she feels strongly about reproductive rights:
“A woman’s mental and physical health, she said, is greatly affected by her not having the right to choose the decisions about her own body.”
She worried that her office would no longer be able to prescribe misoprostol, a drug that can be used to induce labor by initiating contractions and that can help a pregnant person achieve vaginal delivery within 24 to 48 hours. It’s a useful drug for inserting an IUD; anyone whose had something go in or out of their cervix knows how excruciating it can be, and misoprostol can “soften, efface, or dilate the cervix,” thus making the process more manageable. But misoprostol is also used for early abortion—hence, the potential for no longer being able to prescribe it. (Medical abortion usually involves a two-step process: mifepristone, which stops the growth of the fetus, followed by misoprostol, which causes cramping and contractions). Lindsey wrote:
“A spontaneous miscarriage occurs on its own; however, often we prescribe misoprostol to help move the miscarriage along so a women can move past this trying time at a quicker pace. If misoprostol is banned, it may complicate and prolong the miscarriage process.”
When Lindsey has a patient who needs an abortion, she sends them to Michigan, because her office is near the border. I remember her telling me a year into Covid that people from Michigan were coming to Ohio to get their dogs groomed due to stronger Covid restrictions in Michigan, and people from Ohio were going to Michigan to get abortions, due to stronger abortion restrictions in Ohio. The number of abortion clinics in Ohio has been declining in recent years, going from 83 in 1982 to 70 in 1992 to 20 in 2014, and according to Pro-choice Ohio, today there are only six full-service, ambulatory surgical abortion clinics left in Ohio and three additional clinics that offer medical abortion.
When I asked Lindsey if I could use her full name, she said absolutely. I appreciated the boldness. We’re seeing more of that boldness—and risk—from people who support abortion rights and from those who provide women with healthcare. Dr. Bernard said in an interview with the Times:
“Physicians who provide abortion have been harassed, they have been murdered. And for too long, I think, because of that, they’ve had to be silent to protect their families, and it’s created an idea that we’re doing something wrong or something illegal. And we’re not. And I feel compelled to say that.”
I imagine most doctors want to do their work without being put in the spotlight or on the chopping block. But many people—doctors, nurses, protesters, musicians, politicians, and people from all walks of life—are being compelled to speak up, because to sit by and watch what is happening is unacceptable. So I am grateful to Lindsey for speaking so openly to me.
You know, I remember every single time a woman has opened up to me about her abortion—including the first time one of my dearest friends told me about hers. I listened in awe at her honesty and boldness, and yet didn’t tell her about mine. I’m sorry to say that happened more than once. I was afraid of judgment. But really, I was still judging myself. Judgment and shame and stigma must end. Abortion is commonplace normal. Abortion is healthcare. Access to safe and affordable abortion should be a legal right. You may not know it, but odds are quite good that someone you know and love has had an abortion.
In response to the raped and impregnated 10-year-old, abortion opponents doubled down. Republican legislator Wendi Stearman who brought forth Oklahoma’s restrictive abortion law, apparently said “It’s horrific what happened there, but even more horrific is taking the life of another child.”
A reader from that article commented:
“This article made me feel physically sick. Republicans are now flip flopping on what is considered a medically necessary abortion all over Twitter. Political actions have consequences. How they cannot have bothered to fathom or care for the potential outcome of child rape boggles the mind. Oh wait, many individuals in this article don't care about the children and families whose lives will be touched by sexual violence. This country is a failure.”
But maybe it’s not.
On Tuesday, August 2, voters in Kansas—a conservative state that went handily for Trump in the last two presidential elections—voted overwhelmingly against removing the right to abortion from the State Constitution, which allows abortion up to 22 weeks. According to the New York Times:
“Supporters of abortion rights won a huge and surprising victory on Tuesday in one of the most conservative states in the country, with Kansas voters resoundingly rejecting a constitutional amendment that would have let state legislators ban or significantly restrict abortion.”
And it wasn’t just voters in the major cities: “Abortion opponents underperformed even in conservative areas.” The article and the accompanying video of celebration brought tears to my eyes. If the referendum had allowed the constitutional amendment to be overturned, conservative legislators (of which only 27 percent of 165 seats are women) likely have banned abortion outright in Kansas. The Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade said it should go back to the states—to the people and their elected legislators. But in Kansas, the people spoke and sent a clear message to their state lawmakers:
Don’t ban abortion.
What if every state that banned or severely restricted abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned also put forth a referendum for their constituents? What would the people say? In the aftermath of the Kansas vote, Zack Gingrich-Gaylord, a spokesperson for Trust Women, stated in an interview with Vanity Fair:
“I think that people are kind of getting in touch with how they actually feel about abortion rights in this state and that it is something that they value, and that it is something that most people view as a public good that they want meaningful local access to, even if they never intend to use it.”
I think—I truly hope—he is right.
In the absence of more referendums, we’ll just have to till the midterms and gubernatorial races in November to see. And they should prove interesting. In Ohio, for instance, Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, will be running against Democratic candidate Nan Whaley, currently Dayton’s mayor. She’s endorsed by Emily’s List:
“With dangerous abortion restrictions moving through the Ohio legislature, it has never been more important to elect a Democratic pro-choice woman as governor of Ohio.”
Today, when someone offered me reward money for diving into a lake to fish out a kayak chair they had lost the day before (not joking), I told the person to send my reward money to her campaign.
I want to thank the voters in Kansas who put a stop to the Draconian anti-women’s healthcare measures their MOSTLY MALE legislators wanted to enact. And I really want to thank the people who have boldly made it their life’s work to support pregnant women and girls, the Lindsey Hickeys, Joan Durgins, and Dr. Caitlyn Bernards of the world. You give me hope.
Thanks for reading.