Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Dream Keeper

It is an incredibly strange thing to attend the annual conference for your former employer—an otherwise hostile work environment, trickling from the top to the bottom in strict linear detachment and communication via barking—and learn that the pain and dysfunction that seem to be crippling beloved abortion mavens, bohemian warrior doctors, women who abort, society at large, above all else—you, some of the ones you love most—that creeping feeling inside, that perpetual illness is *secondary* trauma seeping in.

You are choosing to work in a tornado because general consensus refuses to see how you see yourself hoeing in a garden.

So what: public opinion says support for abortion is on the decline in this country. I have never met a patient or man involved or mother, father, sister, brother, grandma, grandpa, aunt, cousin, friend, daughter, son, spiritual counselor or protestor who couldn’t get to a place where they accepted the humanity in their own abortion experience.

We needed an opinion poll about what people who submit to opinion polls think about abortion to prove that people who submit to opinion polls like abortion less today than yesterday or ever? Really? How much did that cost?

Can we conduct the next poll standing outside the abortion clinic recovery room? Sooner we can get there, sooner we can see your trauma and raise you a kite and a kaleidoscope, an open field for breathing deeply and rolling in grass and things.

The Dream Keeper, by Langston Hughes


1 comment:

  1. There are at least a dozen reasons not to take that poll too seriously, or let armchair analysts make it speak from a vacuum like they have been doing. I will post explanations and other polls for context, as soon as I can.

    ReplyDelete

This is not a debate forum -- there are hundreds of other sites for that. This is a safe space for abortion care providers and one that respects the full spectrum of reproductive choices; comments that are not in that spirit will either wind up in the spam filter or languish in the moderation queue.