I dreamed I lost my reproductive rights in my Maidenform bra
At first glance, it was easy to miss the armed guard.
Split-level ‘business centres’ are a common sight around Los Angeles – those L-shaped terraces of shops and services overlooking a parking lot (or if you’re lucky, some sort of nod in the direction of a garden) with a dozen or so unrelated businesses crammed next to each other like architectural non-sequiturs.
There might be a bubble cup shop next to a dry cleaner on ground level, up top maybe a script-printing business or a personal investigator, acrylic nails or an MMA McDojo, a vegan soul food cafe next to a wireless router repairer, a Subway underneath an abortion clinic.
I was sniffing around in a rear parking lot near Santa Monica and Vermont, trying to work out which dingy staircase to the upper level of a business centre was the one that would lead me to Planned Parenthood; you could see the sign, plain as day, from Vermont, but from the back of the building everything felt eerily nondescript.
It had been a year since I moved to Los Angeles and, having discovered that my Australian script for Yaz – The Pill – was next to useless on American soil, had made an appointment at my local Planned Parenthood – the evocatively named Hollywood Health Centre – to get checked out for a prescription. At least, that was the plan, which on that hot April morning felt dangerously close to being scuppered given I couldn’t seem to get into the damn building.
After a few more minutes of hopeless pacing, I squinted into the shadows and noticed a security guard hovering near one of the staircases and thought, ah, this must be the place. And the armed security guard – despite the Hollywood Health Centre being in the heart of liberal-minded Los Angeles, in the predominantly Democrat state of California, where a relatively low 45 per cent of counties are without abortion providers, and where there are no mandatory ultrasound or counselling laws – was a reminder that there are still plenty of people in America who would like to see Roe v. Wade overturned – violently, if necessary.
Like improbably broad Strine-isms and Pizza Shapes tucked in our suitcases, Australians bring to America our unwavering – and perhaps cock-eyed – assumption that life across the Pacific continues as it does on our shores: that everybody votes, people indicate on the freeway, and that women’s reproductive healthcare is a given.
This is especially true of Victorians, like me, where abortion is legal on request until up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, and with the agreement of two doctors after that point if the woman’s current and future physical, psychological or social circumstances are in question. Abortion is, though we’d never be complacent about it, a given: just one of those things we know, solemnly, we’d be able to access if necessary.
Before I moved to L.A, the worst I’d had to deal with was walking by the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants ‘sidewalk counsellors’ – inevitably white, usually male, and in their sixties or older – outside the East Melbourne clinic that I passed on the way to my therapist.
(My long-held vigilante daydream of kung-fu-kicking the pro-life/anti-choice ‘protesters’ in the temple while torching their ugly pamphlets was quietly laid to rest when Victoria introduced safe access zones around abortion clinics in 2015. Those laws have already been challenged by Kathleen Clubb, the first person fined for breaching a safe access zone; in her 2018 submission to the High Court, Clubb had the mind-boggling temerity to compare her ‘political communication’ to the 1998 Australian waterfront dispute, Eureka Stockade and the Freedom Ride of 1965.)
Once I passed the armed guard, I climbed the stairs to the upper level. Having conquered a slightly byzantine intercom system (another nod towards the presence of anti-choice ‘activists’), I was welcomed into a reassuringly dull waiting room. Dotted about the plastic chairs were all sorts of people: young women, older ladies, new parents, couples, punks, workers. Who could ever want to bring a gun into this friendly, quiet space?
Planned Parenthood looms large in the American psyche, the name almost a code for ‘abortion’ in many circles, though it’s not the only place one can, in Juno MacGuff’s words, ‘procure a hasty abortion’ – nor is abortion (at around 3 per cent of the organisation’s overall healthcare services) the only service Planned Parenthood provides. Indeed, it provides many other vital services including contraceptives, STI testing and treatment – and even prostate, colon and testicular cancer screenings vasectomies, male infertility screenings and sexual-health services for men.
L.A. – like California – is one of those places where you can almost pretend the rest of America doesn’t exist. Not just because of the eucalyptus trees that make Melrose smell like Fitzroy when it rains, or because of its friendly Southern Californian people who are always up for a chat, but because like my Australia, women’s reproductive rights are – relatively, at least – secure. It’s one of the many reasons that L.A. feels like home to me even now that I’ve returned to Melbourne for the foreseeable future.
In order to get a sense of how bad it could be elsewhere, I’d travelled to Louisiana a few months earlier. I mean, I travelled to Louisiana to visit friends, not to suss out the state’s mood on reproductive rights, but once I disembarked the Amtrak in Lafayette it was hard to avoid pro-life sentiment. The more I travelled through the state, the more the pro-life bumper stickers and billboards began to scream at me from across bayous and under graceful willow trees.
‘IT’S NOT A CHOICE, IT’S A CHILD’ was plastered across a passing truck. ‘ABORTION: IT’S AGAINST THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH,’ one billboard on the freeway trumpeted, ‘58 MILLION DEAD’. They were some of the more polite offerings.
Louisiana is one of a number of states with ‘trigger laws’ that would, as the name suggests, immediately come into play if Roe v. Wade were overturned. The state’s law, which would outlaw abortion in all cases but those where a woman’s life was immediately threatened by the pregnancy, would also allow the prosecution of any person who performed or aided in an abortion, with penalties including up to a decade in jail and maximum fines of $100,000. The possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned, which once seemed like a flight of dystopian fancy, feels ever more real in the Trump era, especially with the ascendancy of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court – but back in 2012, with President Obama sworn in for a second term, it seemed a distant possibility at best.
In the first of many classic ‘an Australian in Louisiana’ experiences, I dragged my friend Burt to the local gun show; guns, like draconian reproductive rights laws, are one of those things that are so alien to Australians as to draw us like moths to a scary flame. What enthusiasm I initially had for this weird holdout of Americana soon dissipated as I moved about a hot and stuffy community hall crammed full of trestle tables heaving with firearms. The most sinister were the pink guns – pink for ladies, or breast cancer, or both – and I was not surprised to find a significant showing of pro-life sentiment on the bumper bars and rear windscreens that populated the parking lot. The right to bear arms and the belief that a woman’s body is not her own might initially seem like disparate issues, but they’re cut from a similar ‘founding fathers’ cloth.
Increasingly, as I spent more time in Lafayette, I became fascinated by the commonplace nature of so much pro-life propaganda; blood-curdling bumper stickers would nestle up against ‘My Family’ stickers and sparkly, love-heart daubed decals about jazz ballet or dog breeds. In much the same way I occasionally find myself drawn to stare at a traffic accident or click on a news article I know will haunt me, I felt compelled to attempt to fully engage with this alien notion. But how?
Happily, the Christian pro-life movie October Baby – tagline: ‘Every Life Is Beautiful’ – was showing at the cinema down the road. What better way to immerse myself in pro-life sentiment than with a giant cup of root beer as I thrilled to the story of an abortion survivor? October Baby concerned a young woman, Hannah (Rachel Hendrix) who discovers she survived an attempted abortion and was later adopted, experiences a crisis of faith, and so sets off on a road trip to find both her birth mother and herself.
The film was inspired in part by the story of Gianna Jessen, a pro-life and disability rights activist, who was born after an attempted late-term saline abortion, and consequently diagnosed with cerebral palsy. True ‘abortion survivors’ like Jessen are rare (according to a 1985 study, in ‘33,090 suction curettage abortions performed at less than or equal to twelve weeks’ gestation, the rate of unrecognised failed abortions was 2.3 per 1000 abortions’), but many pro-life organisations confusingly also use the term to describe twins who survive ‘selective reductions’, and even children born into families where one or more pregnancies were terminated.
October Baby was, like many Christian movies, a surprise hit in 2012. (Fireproof, a film about a firefighter’s marriage breakdown and crisis of faith, was 2008’s highest-grossing independent film, taking in over $33 million.) With a budget of around $1 million, it made roughly five times that at the box office, going from a limited release to a relatively wide expansion of 500 screens nationally; when I went to the movie theatre that hot afternoon, October Baby was #8 in the box office rankings.
The film itself is typical of the ho-hum nature of many evangelical films – lots of padding, no frisson between nominally romantic leads, plenty of ‘magic hour’ shots – but its one effective scene is also its most chilling.
In it, Hannah finally tracks down the nurse (Jasmine Guy) who assisted in the abortion attempt. The kindly but rattled nurse – ‘There were things that happened there, terrible things, things they had me do …’ – explains that Hannah was a twin, and her late brother fared far worse than she did: ‘His arm was missing, torn off during the attempt.’ Of the scene, Roger Ebert generously wrote, ‘Jasmine Guy’s monologue here is so well-performed and effective that we almost forgive it for being such a contrivance that shoe-horns in all the film’s necessary background detail.’ (The AV Club’s Alison Willmore wrote, more in line with the general critical consensus, ‘This isn’t a movie; this is propaganda for the already converted.’)
Even as October Baby trundled to its inevitably uplifting conclusion (Hannah finds a way to love herself, forgive her birth mother, and even – as a Baptist – find salvation in a conveniently located Catholic church), I found myself haunted by Guy’s monologue.
Such descriptions of mutilated babies and callously discarded body parts are common to much pro-life propaganda; even the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants are not above bewildering already upset women with graphic ‘evidence’ of the cruelties of abortion. In the minds of the militant pro-lifers, late-term abortions are commonplace, are carried out in subpar conditions by ethically dubious doctors (‘AGAINST THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH’, as the billboards put it) and ordered up willy nilly by women who don’t care a jot for the precious life they are about to snuff out.
The women in question, I don’t need to tell you, barely figure in the hair-raising fantasy. (Ironically enough, October Baby presents Hannah’s birth mother’s decision as wildly irresponsible and cruel, when in fact it seems an utterly mundane reason a woman might seek a termination: she’s in law school, and concerned about the effect a child – much less one born after a one-night stand – might have on her studies and career.) Every abortion is a selfish act against God’s will, no matter the circumstances of the pregnancy or the likelihood of the child in question having a happy and healthy life.
This is, of course, not something that needs to be told to anyone who is pro-choice; even writing the words feels like an exercise in futility. But being confronted with such unbridled anti-choice propaganda tends to spark in you an intense need to recite the obvious facts of abortion (even though, you quickly realise, most anti-choicers are impervious to things like ‘facts’ and ‘rational thought’).
October Baby, like the gun show, put a dead-end stop to my macabre fascination with the worst excesses of conservative sentiment. In that dull but disturbing tract, I’d seen and heard everything I needed to see and hear, and saw out the rest of my Louisiana holiday meditating intensely on beignets and Zydeco (all the better to ignore the billboards of dead foetuses) before fleeing back into the welcoming arms of California.
Which brings us back to the business centre on Vermont and Santa Monica.
I thought – briefly – of October Baby and those bumper stickers and billboards while I sat in the Planned Parenthood waiting room, but for the most part, the sheer boredom of the experience was intensely moving. It’s impossible to know who, if any, of the people waiting there that afternoon were seeking an abortion (if we apply the aforementioned statistics, maybe a couple of them), but if so, they did it freely, without being yelled at, shown a horrible placard, or forced to undergo an ultrasound and ‘counselling’ session beforehand.
Eventually, I got called in for my appointment, and had a very matter of fact discussion about my reproductive health with a kind doctor, stood on one of those sets of American mechanical scales (just like in the movies!), and was dispatched with my prescription for drospirenone. I smiled at the armed guard on my way out; he either didn’t see me, or chose not to acknowledge me.
In the years to come, as the dark cloud of the Trump era gathered, Planned Parenthood would once more become a flashpoint for debate about reproductive rights; I posted a photo of my Planned Parenthood card along with the hashtag #IStandWithPlannedParenthood when talk of defunding spread. But on that sunny afternoon, as I strolled to Rite Aid to fill my prescription, I thought: there’s no place like home.