I’ve Always Cared About Abortion Rights. It’s Never Been Enough.

Guest Essay by Debi Lewis

She was sixteen and one of the best callers at the long, brown folding tables I oversaw. I was fluffed-up at nineteen with my new title of Supervisor, earned after a year of telephone fundraising for progressive, liberal causes. Our task that night – and for most of 1993 – was to raise money for the National Abortion Rights Action League. We were paid by the hour, 50 cents extra for every donation made with a credit card.

She was fantastic, sweet-talking housewives and straight-talking old men and sweetly waiting for children to summon parents to the phone. Seated sideways, doodling on one cream-colored Chuck Taylor tucked against her hip, her knee brushed her chin. Despite her ripped jeans and algebra homework, she sounded like an adult on the phone, and when I worked non-supervisor shifts, I often sat next to her. Between calls, we talked about music, her high school drama, and office gossip. She seemed to have none of the imposter syndrome that would have plagued me in her position. I’d have felt small. She clearly did not.

“Nah, I can’t be smoking,” she told me one night on our break in the cement courtyard. I lit up, dragged deeply, raised my eyebrows. “I’ve got this…thing. In my arm. They said I probably shouldn’t smoke.”

I asked her what it was.

“My mom made me get it,” she said. “Because I pissed her off getting pregnant last year.”

Last year, I thought. When you were fifteen?

She didn’t say much about the pregnancy or her abortion, but apparently the clinic had told her mom about this new implantable birth control. Great for kids like her, they said.

“I hate it,” she said, “but it stays in for five years.”

Her periods had been awful ever since she got it. She rarely stopped bleeding for more than a few days and was suddenly anemic, but her mom said it was better than getting pregnant again.

It seemed crazy to me that this was someone’s life, someone I knew. I thought she should just stop having sex. Then she wouldn’t need the thing in her arm. I told her that, probably thinking I, a wise older coworker, was “mentoring” her. She rolled her eyes at me.

“I mean, I’m not gonna have sex when I’m bleeding all the time, so at least there’s that,” she said.

I was Supervisor on the night she stood up from her chair at break and crumpled to the floor. I ran to her, checking to see she wasn’t having a seizure. Someone alerted my boss, a perpetually-stoned six-foot blond guy who spent most shifts in his office with printouts of our call data. He said we should call her mom. She was woozy, eyes closed, barely moving.

Her mom didn’t answer. I knew she worked late as a nurse’s aide; the girl took the city bus home at 11pm. Sometimes they didn’t see each other for days, the way their schedules worked. We left a voicemail, then called 911.

By the time the ambulance arrived, I remembered the thing in the girl’s arm. I told the paramedic about it, said she was having long, heavy periods. He said they’d take her right to the hospital.

The ambulance was long gone when her mother showed up. By then, the shift was over; I was finishing my paperwork. She ran in, clutching an oversized purse and a sweater, black hair poking straight up and out around a headband.

“Why the hell did you call an ambulance?” she yelled, when I told her where her daughter was.

We couldn’t reach you, I said. We hadn’t known what to do.

“How’m I gonna afford a ambulance?!” she cried, sinking into a chair. She put her head in her hands.

Her health insurance would cover it, I reassured her. (My mother’s public school teacher insurance was amazing; I’d just gotten $2 antibiotics for strep at the university clinic. I thought all insurance worked that way. If you needed it, it would be covered. Right?)

“Insurance,” she sighed. “You stupid, stupid child. I don’t have insurance. Oh, my god.”

I ran to my boss’ office, told him the mom couldn’t afford the ambulance. I asked if we could cover it. We, meaning the company, since we’d called.

He laughed. “No way,” he said. “Look, you did the right thing. We couldn’t just let her lie on the floor unconscious, right?”

When I got back to the call center, she was grabbing her daughter’s backpack and heading for the door. I offered to help with the ambulance cost, from my pay, even though I wasn’t sure how much I could give her today.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “Don’t even…just…Jesus.”

I never saw her again. The sixteen-year-old came back to work the next shift and rolled her eyes at me again. “Girl,” she said. “My mom is so pissed at you.”

Here’s what I learned, sitting at the table I supervised until one day, my friend stopped coming to work:

Abortions happen in context. People don’t always have the tools or resources to change their behavior, recover from their mistakes or the mistakes of others, advocate against injustices heaped upon them. At nineteen, white and middle-class and virginal, I had never met anyone like my Black, uninsured, sexually-active sixteen-year-old friend. I had never noticed the system so completely designed against her welfare. I was so, so dumb. I was so, so young, so much younger than her. In my ignorance and privilege, I suddenly saw how it might feel to be in that world, trading hardships for hardships, while smug people around me fundraised for NARAL and suggested I make better choices.

Years later, I learned about “reproductive justice,” a concept penned by Black women from Chicago in 1994. It asserts that people must have the right to have children; to not have children; and to raise children in healthy, safe environments. It makes sense to me to connect these rights, not because I’m so perfectly attuned but because the world keeps putting these systems of oppression and injustice in front of me. After I moved to a bigger city, married and had children of my own, I kept seeing their insidiousness reinforced: the college friend who could barely afford a post-broken-condom abortion on her waitressing tips; the broke fellow mother who texted me late one night to ask if she could borrow money for children’s Tylenol.

Most of all, I saw the absence of justice in the life of my daughter’s friend whose family was evicted just before her fifth-grade graduation. She and her little sister lived with us and other friends for a month while her father sought housing. Whispering to me in the dark one night, the little girl worried she’d get pregnant when she got her period. She was only ten, but she already needed a bra. I walked her through the basics of periods and pregnancy, my own privileged little girl wide-eyed at her side.

How we protect and preserve our wombs and their potential has become the most pressing issue of my life, not because I have been threatened myself but because I have borne witness to the threat in others. It is the subject of my first novel, my activism, and my nightmares. The law gives us, technically, the right to an abortion (sometimes); the right to bear children (if possible); the right to live in a safe, healthy place (if we can find and afford it). Reality is often very different.

It's been more than thirty years. I can still feel my sixteen-year-old friend sitting next to me, doodling on her sneakers; she could be any girl, any woman, then or now.

Debi Lewis is the author of Kitchen Medicine: How I Fed My Daughter Out of Failure to Thrive. She holds a BA and an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, where she was a recipient of the Eudora Welty prize for fiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Pangyrus, Eureka Literary Magazine, Bon Appetit, Wired, Hippocampus, and more. Her first novel, a story of abortion in the mid-century midwest, is on submission now.