Deciding Where to Stand—Why I Volunteer for Planned Parenthood
Miss Didi
Web Correspondent
Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund
On November 3, 2004 the atmosphere around my office was like a wake- all grim disbelief and wallowing in collective self-pity. The catalyzing moment came when my mother called me and broke through the haze. She had phoned each of her four children that day with the same terse message, "Now is the time to survey the landscape around you and decide where you will make your stand." On the eve of a new year and a new presidential election, I offer up the reasons I chose on to make my stand with Planned Parenthood.
My dad is a doctor and my mom is a nurse. They taught me that human life, subject to disease, injury, chemistry and death is a messy, complicated and undignified business. One of the primary tasks of health professionals is to educate people about their bodies and restore some of the power, control and dignity to their lives. Take a look at Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, South and North Dakota's teen education programs, volunteer training and informationalresources. They are entirely focused on sharing accurate health information with all comers. Their goal is to give away their knowledge in order to empower the women, men, teens and families who turn to them for help. They hide nothing. Their information is available to anyone who wants it.
I grew up during the 1970s and 80s in a rural Wisconsin town where the healthcare changes wrought by the feminist movement and the legal changes brought by Roe v. Wade might as well have been fiction. The made-for-TV biopic of Margaret Sanger that starred Bonnie Franklin was pre-empted by a Billy Graham special on our local CBS affiliate. There were women in the community raising 10, 16, 20 children. My mother who had birthed only four was the subject of open speculation, "Four's a nice start. When do you plan to have more?" Doctors regularly refused (and still do refuse) to prescribe contraceptives. The Catholic hospital- the only hospital within a four-hour drive- would not perform tubal ligations, much less abortions. It was only after my mother's uterine hemorrhaging became so severe it threatened her life that she was given the hysterectomy she had needed for almost a decade. The Planned Parenthood office in town had closed due to a combination of zero local support and a glut of bomb threats. Having grown up in this rural American, I am a big fan of the fact that Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, South and North Dakota maintains 19 clinics outside the Twin Cities metro area.
I also claim my support of Planned Parenthood and its mission as a way of honoring several girls and young women. I volunteer in honor of my favorite babysitter whose family told her she didn't matter so often that, when her first cousin manipulated her into losing her virginity in the barn, got her pregnant on the first try and then left, she accepted single motherhood, poverty and abandonment as her "well-deserved fate." I volunteer to honor the girls at my boarding school who, during the Regan 80s, stealthily amassed the diaphragms and condoms that allowed them to have safe sex with clean-cut and uniformed Episcopalian boys.
Finally, I support Planned Parenthood in memory of one young woman I never met. She was twenty years old and working as a cocktail waitress at the Playboy Club in downtown Chicago in 1963. Finding that she was pregnant and in imminent danger of losing her job, she became frantic. Her roommate discovered her, bleeding and unconscious, on the floor of their apartment bathroom where she had tried using a wire coat hanger to terminate the pregnancy. The young woman was admitted to Cook County Hospital with a massive, all-body staph infection the hanger had given her. When my mother, a young nurse in training, entered the room she found the woman shaking and delirious from fever and fear. That girl died holding my mother's hand. She died before openly offered and legal choices could have saved her life.
So on the eve of a new presidential election in which many political candidates aspire to an abortion free America, touting their "culture of life," I think about my parents, my babysitter, my classmates and that long-dead girl, and I make my stand. I volunteer for Planned Parenthood.
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