atrium-issue-12-BadGirls

Forgiveness in the Abortion Clinic
Lori Freedman
During her abortion procedure, the patient turned to Claudia*, a fifty-year-old Latina licensed
vocational nurse who sat beside her, holding her hand, and whispered, “Can you lean this way?”
Claudia perched forward on her stool to get closer to the patient and suddenly the patient grasped
the crucifix that dangled from Claudia’s necklace. The patient implored her not to move. Claudia
recalled her surprise: “I had everything done to me, but I never had this.” The patient was very
focused on the crucifix and seemed to stop paying attention to what was going on in the room.
Claudia asked the head nurse to take the patient’s vital signs; the patient was medically high-risk
and Claudia couldn’t take vitals from her position. Claudia stayed fixed in place, back aching
slightly, throughout the rest of the fifteen-minute procedure while the patient held the crucifix
close to her own heart. At the end, Claudia recalled, “I said to her, ‘Mi hija, it’s over.’ And she
said, ‘It is?’” And then the patient took Claudia’s hand, kissed it, and said, “You’re an Angel.”
Claudia was shocked and moved by the gesture. No patient had said that to her before. When
she went to check on the patient later in the recovery room, the patient thanked her repeatedly.
With visible emotion, Claudia finished the story: “I almost keeled over when she told me
this—she goes, ‘Now I know I’ve been forgiven.’ And that was it. I think I’ve had that in my
head—you know how you think about stuff like that—that thing lasted me for the whole month.”
6
Claudia told me this story thirteen years ago, while I was conducting ethnographic research
as a participant-observer in a hospital-based abortion service. I spent considerable time there helping,
observing, and intermittently conducting as many interviews as I could with counselors, doctors,
and nurses, in order to gain a rich view of abortion clinic life. This study became my master’s thesis,
but nothing else. I feared publication might amount to a gratuitous exposé of people I respected
dearly. I couldn’t think of any policy or academic imperative that necessitated revealing the intimate
dynamics of this particular social world—certainly nothing that could make the potential feelings
of betrayal worthwhile. Ultimately, I just tucked it away.
But recently, I heard the Rev. Rebecca Turner speak about how some abortion patients
have unmet spiritual needs, and my ethnographic memories came flooding back. Her organization,
Faith Aloud, like another organization called the Clergy for Choice Network, connects pro-choice
clergy with religiously diverse women to help address their spiritual concerns about their abortions
in ways that counselors, nurses, and doctors often cannot. The Faith Aloud website tells potential
clergy volunteers, “Many women have felt shame and stigma forced on them by their religious
groups, their families, and the society. We want to provide women with the spiritual comfort of
knowing that God is with them through all things.”
Listening to Rebecca Turner talk about the work clergy members do to spiritually meet
women where they are, I remembered how surprised I had been during my ethnographic work to
find that the counselors, nurses, and physicians often informally addressed women’s spiritual needs.
They ministered, in a sense, to their patients, some from a spiritual place of their own, and some
from a gut feeling about what women needed to hear.
The counseling and nursing staff in the abortion clinic where Claudia worked were mostly
middle-aged and vocationally trained. They were predominately Latina, like their patients, but
some were Filipina, African-American, or white non-Hispanic. One particularly intriguing aspect
of this abortion service was how these staff members were largely recruited from other parts of the
hospital rather than from the ranks of the college feminists who staff many outpatient abortion
clinics. In many ways the hospital clinic felt and looked much like any other ward, but for the
simultaneously unsettling and reassuring lack of clinic-naming signage and the visible emotionality
of some patients.
* Names of clinic personnel are pseudonyms.