Abortion Abortion Abortion
An excerpt of Natalie Beach's memoir, Adult Drama.
The women’s clinic is twenty minutes outside the city, and when you walk from your parking spot you’re met by the smells of overwatered lawns, frying bacon, truck exhaust, and then all at once, the sweat and church perfume of a dozen Evangelicals accusing you of infanticide. They clog the sidewalk like a chorus line out of step with reality. It feels like you stumbled upon a hateful community theater production—the scenery chewing and AV equipment and props, the banners featuring badly photoshopped fetuses. Who are these people? The answer is both irrelevant and the reason you’re out here on this bright Sunday morning, applying sunscreen and summoning courage. You slink through their barricade and feel extremely female, fragile as an Olsen twin in a paparazzi photo, gripping your iced coffee and cowering behind your biggest sunglasses.
At the clinic’s side entrance you find your supervisor, a woman with purple hair and no last name. She tosses you a neon vest that reads “Clinic Escort” and “Escolta de la Clinica.” It’s the kind of garment you’d wear while hiking so a hunter won’t shoot you. You think, Out here I’m the target, and then get embarrassed by your histrionics. You find out where you’re needed. You take your place on the line.
In a previous life (like eleven weeks ago) you were of the mind that life was pretty good and only getting better, and sure there were storm clouds gathering but they were way off in the distance. Then you realized you had been viewing the world through the wrong end of the binoculars.
So you feel like shit. Your leaders have been stripped of power. Your enemies have mobilized. You look for hope in all the wrong places, like Twitter.
Online, everyone is screaming. Your phone becomes the window from which you witness a thousand interlocking catastrophes: emaciated polar bears and caged children and millionaires celebrating the end of healthcare, GoFundMe cancer campaigns and Patreons for unemployed journalists and shaky videos of police murder and arguing, just so much arguing, which is productive you think, but also maybe killing you. Beneath it all, the constant thrum: no one is coming to save us and for the love of god somebody do something.
They clog the sidewalk like a chorus line out of step with reality. It feels like you stumbled upon a hateful community theater production—the scenery chewing and AV equipment and props, the banners featuring badly photoshopped fetuses.
So you spend mornings calling your representatives, shrieking into the phone, “Why aren’t you trying harder?!” At night you barricade yourself in your apartment and watch all the Buffy episodes about depression. And when you do sleep, in clammy fits, you dream of moving stones. The stones are round and weathered and cool to the touch, just heavy enough that you need two hands to carry them from one pile to another. In the dream it’s understood that this is your sole responsibility. Not podcasts or petitions or any thinking or talking at all. Your assignment in the group project to save the world. Just move the stones.
At the start of your clinic shift you’re stationed in the back lot. It’s your job to accompany the client and her companion (that’s what you’re taught to call them) from their cars to the clinic door. There are more ways than you’d expect to screw up something so simple. Despite the vest, you’ll be mistaken as part of the group of “antis” blocking the sidewalk. (The terminology is tedious but important, because we live in a world where the movement that assassinates doctors still gets to call itself “pro-life.”) You will learn that even your most innocuous small talk can go wrong; “How are you?” is a loaded question. “Good morning” comes off as presumptuous. Safe areas: weather, football, loungewear. The one thing we can all bond over, you’ll learn, is the bedraggled clownishness of the antis themselves, who never stop embarrassing themselves. It’s a universal language, dunking on bigots, and the clients love to get in on it.
“Tube sock motherfuckers.”
“Fake Christians.”
“Bunch of virgins.”
You watch as a teenage girl rolls down the window of her white PT Cruiser and exhales a plume of fruit-scented smoke into the face of the man telling her that whores go to hell.
Your favorite, the old woman who couldn’t stop giggling as she shouted at the protestors, “Find something else to do!” She accepted a high five from her granddaughter as they passed through the doors.
With ninety minutes to go you’re moved to the front lines. You square your shoulders in a performance of bravery. You bring your toes up to where the asphalt of the clinic’s parking lot meets the cement sidewalk. In and of itself, the line is nothing more than a millimeter of air between different types of pavement, but property rights being stronger than women’s rights, the antis are legally prohibited from crossing into the parking lot. Your body is there so they don’t try to anyway.
You are recognized immediately as fresh meat. The antis’ attention swings toward you like the Eye of Sauron in cargo shorts. Your haircut: lesbo. Your soul: doomed. They demand to know how much blood money you’re getting paid. They tell you there are plenty of other jobs you could have, for instance, lounge singer(!). And in response, you don’t say a goddamn thing. In your training session in the meeting room at the library, you were told it’s not your job to listen, persuade, rebut, reason with, or reach across the aisle. The opposite, in fact. You placidly absorb their sound and fury like foam stapled to the wall of a garage recording studio.
Later, your friends say they wouldn’t be able to silently take that abuse, pull off the whole guard-at-Buckingham-Palace thing. But it’s been so long, maybe never in fact, that your body was a tool for good. So you keep going back, and you hold the line.
One night as you’re going to bed you hear screams and shattering glass from the apartment unit below you. You hear a woman shouting, “Don’t touch me!” You step onto the landing and one story down you see your neighbor Lauren running to the parking lot. A door slams and then her fiancé is running after her. You lean over the metal railing and call to her and she dashes up the stairs and into your living room. You remember your training and fill the doorway and shut the door in the fiancé’s face. He fumes outside until Lauren gets a push notification that he’s taken a Lyft to a bar. “I’ve never loved anyone more than him,” she tells you. “My parents have already paid for the wedding.” She has a tattoo of half an avocado on her forearm, and you hope that the other half belongs to someone who can talk some sense into her. You exchange numbers. She takes him back. From then on, when you run into the fiancé at the trash cans, you give him the look that says, “I know you, asshole.” When you hear screaming and crying through the floorboards you text to check in. Eventually Lauren responds, “Adults have disagreements. We will keep the noise down. My relationship with my husband is none of your business.”
At the start of your clinic shift you’re stationed in the back lot. It’s your job to accompany the client and her companion (that’s what you’re taught to call them) from their cars to the clinic door. There are more ways than you’d expect to screw up something so simple.
Your fellow escorts are mostly queer ladies who compost and adopt-don’t-shop, at least judging from the stickers on their travel coffee mugs. You’ve committed to small talk so nondescript it evades short-term memory. This is how it has to be. No last names, no jobs, no alma maters, for the same reason some abortion providers go to work wearing rubber Halloween masks. Given the chance, the antis will figure out who you are. From there, addresses, phone numbers, names of family. Throughout the shift they film you, probably for their ghoulish YouTube channel, but also to search for identifying clues. They’ve long known the names of your supervisors, whose social media posts they’ll read aloud and mock.
That’s another rule: no posting. It feels good, right? To be forbidden from taking a social justice selfie. To just be in the moment, unphotogenic and banal.
Just as the antis start to recognize you by your haircut, which they’re deeply offended by, you come to know them as well. The women arrive in their Sunday service clothes, patent leather kitten heels and tight sweaters the color of Hawaiian Punch. And Jesus Christ, these bitches. Through the megaphone they tell women they’re mutilating their wombs, will die of breast cancer, that it’s God’s will they bear children. “Edify the body of Christ!” they shout at teenage pedestrians just trying to buy a donut next door. Sometimes a client will whirl around and plead, “I wanted this baby!” You watch as a mother and father walk into the clinic, each gripping their small son’s hand and singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to drown out the crowd, which only becomes louder in the presence of a child. On the rare occasions their AV equipment is working, the antis will broadcast the sound of infants crying and crying. Apparently there also used to be Catholics praying the rosary, but the Evangelicals kicked them off their turf. “It was hilarious,” your supervisor tells you.
Online, it’s become a common refrain that there are no adults in the room. The real problem, you think, is that the room is full of adults, and the adults are craven dunderheads.
Some mornings the antis bring their own kids. There’s a young Black girl always dressed in pink sequins. She’d prefer to sit in the shade with her chapter book, but a few times each hour her mom will stick a microphone in her hand and make her sing hymns, her voice rising above the traffic. (Is this meant to rattle you? You’re thrilled for the musical interlude.) The smaller kids play wild games of tag in their clip-on ties, wrestling inches from the six-lane boulevard. In the early months, you daydreamed about rushing into traffic to shield the children from an oncoming lowrider, proving to the antis that you are not Team Child Death. Over time, this fantasy fades. Maybe it’s possible to convert these people, but you’re not the one who is going to do it.
Indiana: 1978. The history of abortion clinic defense traces its lineage to the Fort Wayne Women’s Health Organization, where a small but dedicated feminist chapter—ok, let’s be real, you don’t have time for historical context! The work before you is immediate and blunt. A patient walks up to the clinic, the antis lunge toward her. You step between them. She reaches the door and you prepare to do it all over again.
Through the megaphone they tell women they’re mutilating their wombs, will die of breast cancer, that it’s God’s will they bear children. “Edify the body of Christ!” they shout at teenage pedestrians just trying to buy a donut next door.
Brick by brick, you build yourself into a wall. When you do speak to the antis, it’s to issue a demand. They bum-rush a woman arriving on foot and you say “let her pass” in a voice you don’t recognize as your own. You learn that courage is a muscle. But more important than courage is commitment, the ability to make a recurring appointment in your calendar and stick to it. A good day is when nothing happens. It’s simple, mindless as bench-pressing. Hold the line, help where you’re needed. If the answer to life exists, you think you might find it on the loop from the parking lot to the clinic doors and back again.
The only antis who make you nervous are a pair of squirrelly white dudes. They carry signs from a special street preacher outlet store, and match their outfits—camo and the kind of sunglasses pro golfers wore in the ’90s. You’re not sure if they’re militia members or just dress like they are. Either way, costuming is an early step in the journey toward fascism. Pepper spray and knives weigh down their belts, and Mitch, the leader of the two, wears a big political button that just reads Homo with a red X through it. Mitch has a real failed-preacher energy. For all his enthusiasm, his proselytizing never finds the flow.
“Social Justice is idiots!”
“Pagan stupidity alert!”
“Hitler didn’t kill his own people! You people are worse than Hitler!”
“You guys are racist against babies!”
“Someone put LSD on your cereal! You’re not hip enough to be a hippie! Fake news, fake life!”
“How dare you ignore God? God will ignore you! Trap door, lick of fire, AHHH! That’s eternity! Ask a fourth grader. That’s fair.”
These are all direct quotes. You carefully write them down in your Notes app to savor the asinine transcendence. “An abortion of the mind, this purity,” wrote William Carlos Williams.
Anytime a client who looks remotely Latinx arrives, Mitch launches into flailing Spanglish—“No la familia? Muy loco. Living la vida loca!”—eventually devolving into grade school vocab—“Cumpleaños! Escuela! Mamasita!” And when the words really fail him, Mitch marches up and down the sidewalk, jaw slack, moaning “Duhhhhhh duh duhhhhh,” his impression, you suppose, of your stupidity.
As clownish as Mitch is, he speaks better with his actions, and in this sense, his message comes through loud and clear. As anti-choice leader Barbara Beavers so succinctly put it, “Mothers should die for their babies, not the other way around.”\
When you first volunteered you were one in a massive influx of new recruits. In the three intervening years, your fellow escorts have fallen off, left town, needed to take weekend work. On one shift you’re stationed alongside a rich lady (the Hermès tote gave it away) who you’d never seen before. Another presidential election is barreling toward you, and she reveals that in the upcoming primary she’s excited to vote for a certain small-town mayor, a candidate you distrust, who you could argue lacks the political will to meaningfully protect abortion seekers, and anyone who doesn’t recognize that is either gullible or complicit. But then you tally the escorts who showed up that day. You realize if the group was down just one more person, the shift would be canceled. This woman’s vote doesn’t have the power to swing the election, but her presence on the line makes the difference that day. Incrementally, you learn to extend potential allies the benefit of the doubt, a tactic that in a certain light, could be grace. As the critic Michele Wallace wrote, “For a feminist these days, the trick to feeling coherent is to quickly determine what is irrelevant so that you can ignore it and to keep a strategically flexible concept of what really matters.” It helps that at the clinic, what really matters is obvious.
Later that day, two cars peel in bumper to bumper. The first car skids to a stop and two women scramble out and jog toward the clinic. A man exits the second car and chases after them, yelling. The women don’t turn around as you usher them inside and close the door. You link arms with your partner, the wealthy woman, as the man tries to force his way past you. When that doesn’t work he resorts to screaming through the door how serious he is, that it’s his child you bitch. He returns to his car and waits with the door open and the motor running. Your supervisor walks over and tells him that the clinic staff have called the police and he should go before they arrive, that the police belong to the same nutty church as the antis do, and he’s not safe. He insists on staying. He’s crying now. Two squad cars lurch into the lot and the police confront him. As you’re taught, you film the encounter. Finally, the man leaves, wiping his eyes. You hope desperately that he never gets the woman alone.
In this line of work, the failures stack up until your knees buckle. And so next time around, when Roe falls and we lose the legal right to an abortion, you will be prepared for the bad news, little good that will do.
And you just keep at it. You greet women, compliment their pajamas, mock your oppressors. Maybe you take time off to visit your parents, or spend a few months canvassing for a congresswoman who’ll get harassed out of office eleven months into her term. Meanwhile, friends of yours have gone down their own paths to radicalization—the anti-car movement, prison abolition, the Extinction Rebellion. Other friends are the same as always. This strikes you as willful, like swimming in one place in a rushing river. It’s a common question: Can people change? Yes, of course, constantly, you think. Each day the world devours and digests us all, and when we’re spit out we’re different.
You receive a text from Lauren. She asks if it was true that several years ago she spent the night in your apartment to escape her fiancé. You haven’t spoken in ages, not since she told you to mind your own business. Since then you’ve moved to a different part of town, but heard she had a baby. “We’re in couples therapy, and he’s saying that I’m making it all up. He’s saying I was the one who was violent,” she texts you. “But I thought I remembered running into your place. That happened, right?” Yes! Of course it happened! Lauren, he’s a liar! You send her a blue block of unpunctuated text, listing off the fights and the crying you heard through the floor, how that night after putting Lauren to sleep in your bed, you sat on the couch in the dark and listened to the man return from the bar and stagger up the stairs to your apartment, rattling the door.
In this line of work, the failures stack up until your knees buckle. And so next time around, when Roe falls and we lose the legal right to an abortion, you will be prepared for the bad news, little good that will do.
Again, you will feel like shit. A while ago you thought courage was a muscle and you had made yourself strong, but thanks to six unelected psychos you’ll slide right back to thinking of yourself less as a person than a fragile assemblage of organs. You will grow sick of carrying stones, tired of the whole Sisyphean rigmarole. Where is the peace in constant struggle?
No wonder the antis love to go on about the end of days—praise God, a stopping point! In the Evangelical worldview, on the Day of Reckoning the sinful and unbelieving (that’s you!) are tossed into the lake of fire, while eternal life awaits the true believers and aborted fetuses, who get a special exemption. That’s because to the anti-choicers, no human is more perfect than the one that doesn’t exist. They worship helplessness and innocence as it’s a danger to their project to be otherwise. In your darker moments the horror of this will bowl you over: these people are ascendant. Mitch is winning. Maybe he’s already won.
But listen. I’ve been down this road before, and believe me: nothing is over. In fact, pull yourself together because you’ll be holding this line for the rest of your life. Would it help to think of the work not as a choice but a conscription? It’s just a thing you do, dealing with these assholes. To them, the very fact of your body makes you impure, fallen. They’re smart to fear you. Just look what this body of yours can do. Walking women to their appointments isn’t so unlike carrying stones. See? You’re already strong enough. You are not helpless, or innocent. You are the opposite of unborn.
Excerpted from Adult Drama by Natalie Beach, Copyright © 2023 by Natalie Beach. Published by Hanover Square Press.
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