Awful. Just awful. And from the comments:
being helped from the exam table. He had her sit up and put her arms
around his neck, and then he lifted her into a wheelchair. “You give
good hugs” she whispered. He paused just for a moment. “You’re just
fine,” he told her.
I’ve been on intimate terms with the fertility-medical-gynecological complex for going on three years now, and I have to say, never in my life have I met more tone-deaf compassionless sexist assholes than in that time. I’m not kidding, the meanness and stupidity and judgmental dickitude is constant and egregious. This at a time when you’re either pregnant or trying to get that way, being shot full of hormones and given well-meaning advice by every fucking busybody on the planet, so really, you’d think people would be gentle and kind. BUT NO.
This isn’t just my experience, everybody I know has had at least one episode of professional dumbassery so profound it makes me want to bang my head against the wall. I’ve been seeing like eight doctors and there’s only one of them I can remotely stand, and that’s just because he barely speaks. And I’m a relatively run-of-the-mill patient. I cannot fathom going through what the commenter DougJ quotes went through with any of the doctors I currently have, nor at all, nor with anyone less than absolutely merciful and kind. In this field, decency and warmth seem to be in short damn supply.
And it strikes me, having ducked my head into some of the Freepi threads about Tiller’s murder yesterday, that most people who rail against abortion even under these kinds of circumstances just have no honest-to-god fucking clue how any of this stuff really works. The dangers, the fears, the very real medical complications pregnancy can cause and what that MEANS for the people involved. I get that, I mean, it’s easier to maintain your worldview if you don’t think about what Tiller did as anything other than the horrendous thing it sounded like. I get that it’s easier not to think about this except as the clinical description, and not as some situation where a woman and her husband were expecting a baby. Were happy. Were hopeful. And then had that all taken away.
It’s easier not to think about it and to hold up the anecdote of some irresponsible, stupid girl as what we think of, to make the distinction. But this is the reality of the situation. This is the way this stuff actually works. There’s nothing about it that isn’t awful, and those standing by and cheering Tiller’s death would do well to remember it.
A.