Mary and Maria
“You can start now.” Dr. B smiles over at me expectantly as Ann snaps latex gloves on her hands and pulls them to her elbows. I move closer to the procedure table and touch its cool blue vinyl with the tips of my fingers, my other hand clenched tightly at my side. Maria’s eyes flutter open as she feels my presence.
“¿Cómo estás?” I whisper, folding my five-ten frame to be near my client.
“Bien,” she mouths back, then stares at the ceiling.
I follow her gaze and take in the room, a large rectangle, clean and open and somehow beautiful to me. At my back the entrance is concealed by a patterned curtain that circles around door, adding a layer of privacy for the client. Next to the door is a sink, the kind with foot pedals. The walls are lined with windowed cabinets, filled with the medications and medical supplies needed for a D and C, including chucks, gauze, gloves, sanitizer, antiseptic, and dozens of wrapped flexible curettes of various sizes.
The procedure table, where Maria lies, sits toward the back of the room. A white paper barrier rests between her and the slick vinyl. Her legs remain flat across the table, not yet fitted into the metal stirrups dangling at its sides. Tucked into the basket that holds the blood pressure cuff behind Maria is a box of tissues, a staple of doula care. At the foot of the table is a tray wrapped in soft, sterile cloth. I would come to know its contents well, their curves and sheen a second nature to me: dilators, clamps, sharp curettes, forceps, speculums, and long needles to reach into the cervix.
My attention rests on Ann, the head nurse, who is standing opposite me. Ann appears disinterested in me. She avoids eye contact as if she can sense I am seeking her approval, that I need something from her. I desperately want her to like me in a way that makes me feel twelve years old again, meeting my sixth grade teacher for the first time. This dynamic is established within seconds of my arrival, and in a way, Ann does become one of my teachers.
As I hover awkwardly near Maria, I realize I know very little about her. This unsettles me. I imagine the next fifteen minutes to be intimate, overwhelming. We are bound together by a few square feet; our bodies nearly touch, we breathe the same air. We had met briefly during precounseling earlier in the week, yet my mind at this point is a sea of facts and faces, times and names. My own ego swims and splashes through them all until my eyes are squinted and blurred, and I can only see myself pooled at the center.
Pop music plays softly on the portable radio, and Dr. B’s metal instruments clink on the procedure tray as Maria breathes deeply at my side. This combination of sounds would become a part of my being as a doula. Warm morning sun pours through a picture window and down onto my client and me. The blinds are raised, revealing a fifteen-story drop, and I watch the cars multiply on the highway outside, stuck in the Manhattan commute. The river flows just beyond, and I try to make out the silhouette of my own apartment building on the other side in Brooklyn. I picture myself tonight on my roof under the sticky August moon looking back at City Hospital.
I stand above Maria, unsure of my next move. To say that my mind went blank would imply that I had some sort of plan that I had momentarily forgotten. But there isn’t a plan, not really. Only a purpose: to help this woman feel safe and supported during her abortion. Whether or not I know how to do that, I am about to find out.
“I’m a doula.”
“A what?”
“A doo-lah.”
“Huh?”
“D-o-u-l-a. I attend births and abortions.”
“Oh! Wow! That’s amazing!”
So have begun many conversations in the lives of full-spectrum doulas. While doulas are all Lauren and I have thought about for the better part of the last decade, we are never surprised when we meet someone who has never heard of them. Even in 2016, many small towns and big cities still have no knowledge of or access to doulas. We attribute this in part to the abysmal state of reproductive healthcare in our country, the dearth of resources available for women to have an empowered and woman-centered pregnancy experience. More than that, we believe it is reflective of how society feels about women, about what they deserve and don’t deserve—especially when pregnant.
Pregnant people are not to be trusted. This message is deeply ingrained in our culture. It’s everywhere: in our laws, in our media outlets, in our homes. It’s rooted in the patriarchal fear of female power and sexuality, and its pervasiveness reaches into the psyches of women themselves.
I can relate. Coming of age in white, working-class southern Indiana, a swath of the country where conservative roots grow into all its children—long before the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Purvi Patela—I was terrified of anything having to do with sex or my body. With good reason I thought: I could get pregnant. And that would be the worst thing that ever happened to me; pregnant girls dropped out of school and stayed in Smalltown, Indiana.
In the spring of 1995 I sat in my seventh grade health class, attention rapt as two high school seniors, a girl and a boy, gave me my first lesson in sex. She played varsity volleyball and had dated my friend’s older brother. Her skin glowed gold as though she had just emerged from a tanning bed, and thin blond streaks ran through dark, gelled hair. Her raspy voice was confident and a little bored, as if she’d had this conversation a million times before. “Sex,” she began with authority. He wore a letterman’s jacket and didn’t say much.
My best friend Meredith sat next to me, passing notes and rolling her eyes. Meredith already knew about sex, at least theoretically. She’d had boyfriends for years. She was “wanted.” I was completely virginal and had only gotten my period that summer. At its inauguration Meredith had been over, and we sat on the edge of my claw-foot tub in the upstairs bathroom—door locked—while she told me about tampons. I was horrified at the thought of sticking something in my vagina. I went to find my mom. She gave me a big hug and an even bigger pad. Meredith took me for a walk to try to ease the cramps, the giant pad making a deafening noise with each step. We passed by the houses of boys we had crushes on. She was always appalled by my choices in love: “Mary! No!” Even with my latest crimson leap into “womanhood” we both knew they would never be more than a fantasy: I was not having sex.
There was a singular view of premarital sex in my hometown: Don’t do it. That’s what the high school seniors were preaching on this sunny day in southern Indiana: “You are worth waiting for!” They gave me a sticker to prove it. I eagerly stuck it to the cover of my notebook.
This message of abstinence hovered over my Christian community, a town that became quiet as a ghost on Sunday mornings. I myself went to worship the Lord every now and then. My mom even taught Sunday school to the pre-K crowd at a stuffy church attended by the hundred or so rich people in our town—but mostly she did it to throw an extra twenty-five bucks a week in our family coffer. In church, God was the one whispering, “No premarital sex.” I don’t remember ever thinking much about God. If anything, I wasn’t a fan because he reminded me of the way the snooty old ladies in pews looked down on me, my brother, and my sister. I had no idea at the time that a big part of my adulthood would be dedicated to navigating God and spirituality as a doula.
As the years passed, I learned I was far from a “good girl.” I had run drunkenly from the cops through my fair share of cornfields, smoked cigarettes on the floor of my car during lunch period. But God or no God, sex still scared me. Sexually transmitted diseases? Pregnancy? Getting stuck in Indiana? I chose to keep my legs tightly closed.
By the time I was a high school junior, it was 1998 and the welfare reform law had set in motion an abstinence-only campaign valued at $50 million per year. In other words, still no premarital sex—no how, no way. I became a “Lifesaver,” along with many of my friends. We went from class to class and school to school, showing photos of genital herpes and pregnant teenagers to underclassman. “Do NOT have sex!” we told them gravely. The words abortion, birth control, and even birth were never uttered. (Not long into the program, rumors started flying that