Happy pills

The other day when I answered the phone at the clinic, a Spanish-speaker was on the other end of the line asking about "the pill that brings on your period." I've gotten used to breaking it down on the phone after chatting with clients who ask for a Pap smear, then end up incensed that the Pap didn't test for HIV because that's really what they wanted to check out, and what do you mean that "Pap smear" doesn't translate into "all things vaguely gynecological"? (But that might be another post for another day.) I asked her a series of questions about "Did you take a pregnancy test?" and "Is this the first period you've missed?" because maybe she really DID want to start birth control that would regulate her period. But no, she definitely was referring to the series of pills that would cause an early miscarriage and soothe the conscience into believing it's only a late period, not an abortion.

Women of all demographics are drawn to the RU486/Mifeprex & Misoprostol regimen because it's kind of like Abortion Lite, but women from conservative, Catholic countries where abortion is illegal and money is scarce especially like this route. And when they end up here, in a country where they don't speak the language and they don't have the time to navigate the laws of choice, they often do the familiar thing and buy the pills (usually only one type of pill--the cheaper one that doesn't really cause an entire abortion) on the street. Of course this is dangerous for a variety of reasons, and it ends up being pricey when they have to come to the clinic for a D&C, anyway. So, on the one hand, I appreciated this woman on the phone calling a clinic so that she could get the medication from a medical provider and be overseen by a doctor.

On the other hand, though, I struggled with the desire to give her accurate information and be straight with her with the lingo of "abortion," not "inducing a period" and also respecting her need for coping with this unintended and unwanted pregnancy in a way that she knew how, and especially, not scaring her off an into the streets where she would acquire the tablets from someone who would fully go along with her "bring on the period" plan. Women aren't dumb, and they know full well that a period of this type comes along with a fetus, but where does that leave as as providers and as advocates for women? Readers or co-bloggers, have you ever been faced with this situation? Do you fully disabuse the woman of this notion of the innocuous pill since eventually, they will end up having an ultrasound that clearly diagnoses a presence in the uterus? (That's what I ended up doing.) Or do you go along with the plan a little bit, allowing the woman to see the experience as she wants to see it?

Will "web 2.0" change abortion, too?

Yesterday Bob R tipped us off to the story of a Florida woman named Angie who's been live-tweeting her medication-abortion process for several days now.  That's right: 140-character updates about her nausea, cramping, bleeding, clotting ("some women also experience dizziness headache fever and diarrhea") for all the world to read on twitter. The process is winding down now, but it was interesting while it lasted. 

Cool!

Unfortunately, her tweeting, which started out as a way to let her friends know how she was doing and describe to others what the process was like, has also attracted negative attention in spades. Angie's gotten insults and death threats. Some responses are weird, creepy or violent ("I'd like to pull on her ear til it rips from her head"?). I really appreciate what she's doing for all of us despite the creepsters. I also respect that she agreed to an interview with an extremely anti-abortion dude who asked absurdly leading questions and didn't fall apart laughing; her answers were thorough, compelling and supportive of all other women's need for reproductive choice. (To give credit where credit's due: the extremely anti-abortion dude was also extremely polite.) 

Then, not 24 hours after we read about Angie, I came across another woman doing the same thing: live-tweeting her medication abortion. She's just begun it. I also saw some more creepy twitter people messaging her every other minute trying to change her mind: "puke [the pills] up. please puke them up. i'll adopt your child. please save your child." I am not making this up. So the notion of Web 2.0 has been on my mind: it's revolutionizing everything else, so why not abortion? 

On this site we already have a permanent link-list of blogs started by women in the midst of an unwanted pregnancy, blogs dedicated to what happened once they decided to have an abortion. Presumably/possibly, these women have their own blogs in "real life" where they write about their jobs, how their day went, and maybe they even use their real names or post pictures; this blog and that blog will be registered to different email addresses, and never the twain shall meet. And that's understandable. I already can't thank them enough  for sharing their experiences with fellow travelers in a way that providers cannot. They're not responsible for changing the world in one blog. 

But what happens when someone who has a personal website and a personal twitter feed updates us about her abortion like it's no big thing? To me this is looking like the next step. The internet (version "1.0" or whatever) at first enabled us to have more information at our fingertips than ever before -- but only the authoritative or the moneyed could provide that information. Blogging has allowed some of us to share day-by-day accounts of a procedure we formerly only discussed in our living rooms. Now tweeting: by-the-hour, by-the-minute details -- a scale where little things like "cramping got worse for a while but I curled up on my side and that seems to help" are worth mentioning. And where some of us may feel that we can incorporate this little thing into our account of daily life -- our primary account, that is -- not segregated or anonymous, just normal, like it really is. 

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Update: turns out Salon just wrote about this, too, and includes a Youtube video of Angie explaining the situation (found via abortion clinic days, one of my very favorite sites).