More thoughts on the NPIC (and on "When the 'movement' disappoints")

Recently we hosted Steph's cross-post with Feministe (go read it there) about her weird experiences as a freelancer trying to find fulltime employment among, as she called them, the "big-girl organizations" of the reproductive health/rights/justice movement. It's well worth reading the thread there -- she got both support and pushback in the comments, and both provided some good points as well as some fodder for dismay.

While I was drafting a long follow-on post, a panel in New Hampshire was saying it all much better than I could. The very excellent @ClinicEscort livetweeted "Careers in the Movement," a session at Hampshire College's Civil Liberties and Public Policy conference on reproductive justice this weekend.

The words of Andrea Ritchie complicated the whole thing. In her activism to end violence against women and LGB&T people, she's worked within non-profits and outside of them, and her career is a good argument for being thoughtful and critical of the non-profit world we probably all picture when we think about a "Career in the Movement." (Let's bear in mind going forward that "the movement" is erroneously equated with the assortment of 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations that are its professionalized face.) From the livetweet: "Nonprofit-industrial complex is a subtle form of social control. Funders set agendas & can be driven by priorities outside the movement." "It's easy to find yourself doing work tailored to funder agenda & preferences, not the community the organization is meant to serve." 

Maybe this sounds super cynical or just far-fetched. The first time I heard such ideas, that's how they sounded to me. Non-profit employment was supposed to be a values-driven, agenda-free, "helping people and doing good" environment. But most 501(c)(3) orgs are grant-funded, and many of those grants come from foundations, and foundations have historically served as a tax shelter for the extra money of families who got very wealthy from owning a company. Say you run a reproductive health or rights organization and your operating funds come from a foundation like that. What are the chances you'll feel safe rocking the boat of capitalism by talking about how unjust labor practices affect reproductive health, or how even Democratic legislators would only vote for a Health Care Reform Act that preserved the role and profit of insurance companies because all legislators are owned by corporate donors? And so forth.

So maybe you don't want to hire anyone -- writers, activists, other freelancers -- who've ever had a public opinion on such topics; after all, guilt-by-association is a popular tactic in this country's informal politics. You might even shy away -- even if your whole mission is abortion-related -- from hiring someone who's written matter-of-factly about the existence of and need for second trimester abortion, as Steph has, because second-trimester abortion must be handled delicately lest someone out there twist it wrong (they always will) and must be discussed only 0.1% of the time since as we already know it only accounts for 10% of abortion procedures anyway. Maybe you'll ask prospective employees to give up writing, blogging, twitter-ing, and even volunteering for grassroots abortion organizations, just in case it makes them a liability in some nebulous way that you're reluctant to spell out up-front.

Steph reports that after blogging about her hiring misadventures, she received some personal communications from some big-girl orgs' reps intimating that she had "messed up" by talking about this publicly.

(O RLY? I didn't know you were reading blogs these days, big-girls! Maybe if you were reading them 6-12 months ago you'd have noticed the furor you ignited by claiming that young women just aren't interested in doing pro-choice activism? Maybe you wouldn't have even said that in the first place? Maybe you would have gone down to the intern pod where some eager young women were making your photocopies and your coffee and asked them what they thought of this hypothesis? But instead you talked shit about them to the media as if they weren't even there; and thank goodness there was no one to call you up and admonish you that you "messed up" for talking about this publicly.)

Here's the problem. Raising questions or criticism, even with the best of intentions, about a systemic issue within the field is so often written off as "infighting" and "distraction" because we "need to focus on the real problems" (or the enemy at the gates or what have you), etc. And yeah, we do have important work to be doing, and I'd love to get to it with 100% attention. But maybe if these conversations didn't devolve into defensiveness and secret phone calls over things that should've been out in the open in the first place, it wouldn't BE a waste of time and energy and a distraction, but an opportunity for progress and for strengthening our movement.

Because they overlook this opportunity, sometimes I really worry about the established orgs in the field: maybe they're so used to being on the defensive externally that the best they can do within the movement is defend their position as "leaders," and fight to keep the movement, and its unofficial hierarchies, just as they are. In a parallel way, the leaders of these orgs may falter in creativity and end up mostly working to keep their own positions as leaders. But in doing this, the professional organizations of our movement (and other movements, progressive and not) are replicating power structures that some of us thought we were aiming to undo. (More from Andrea Ritchie: "was a Greenpeace canvasser as first movement job; learned there that organizing a union at your nonprofit workplace will get you fired." Hell to the yes it will, and discovering that will fuck with your mind.)

I've said before that some older orgs seem to engage new technology only if they feel able to "manage" it, and so it is with web 2.0 platforms -- they tweet sanitized and non-conversational tweets, they publish "blog posts from the CEO" that are really just press releases written by the communications associate. And maybe in a similar way they only use new people if they feel they'll be able to "manage" us (does this mean use us as warm bodies and footsoldiers? mold us to their style of leading before allowing us any agency? what else?).

...These are some thoughts I keep coming back to over the years, and not intended as an exhaustive thesis. Which means I'll be back with more, soon enough. But I'd rather hear your thoughts on my thoughts -- those of you working inside and outside of nonprofitland -- and ideas on how we can push past this disappointing state of affairs: how activists can claim authentic leadership in our own movement; how we can maybe do meaningful work AND have a comfortable bed (I know, that's a whole can of worms). Anyone?


I owe all these thoughts to a lot of other activists and writers but most persistently to the INCITE! collective whom I always mention and to bfp, who discussed and argued with me over at Feministe but probably has no idea how much her writing has shaped my perspective and values since I first found her old blog (RIP) about five years ago. I'd be embarrassed to tell her directly.

Guest Blog: When the Movement Disappoints

A warm welcome to Steph, a fellow blogger at Abortion Gang and the founder of I Am Dr. Tiller, a site for abortioneers to make their voice heard. Steph is guest blogging at Feministe this week and has graciously agreed to cross-post here because the topic is so important to me, and one we've discussed privately many times. Expect to see more on this in the near future. Steph can be reached at twitter.com/iamdrtiller

~~~~~~~~~

When the Movement Disappoints

I moved to Brooklyn from Philadelphia almost a year ago. My partner got his dream job here, so I left my decent reproductive health gig to live in the feminist mecca. I had high hopes – almost every major feminist and/or reproductive health organization has a presence in NYC. Surely, I thought, it will take me no more than a few weeks to find a job that I love.

You can imagine my excitement when over the course of a few months, I landed interviews at many of the big pro-choice organizations here. I don’t have to name them. You know who they are. I interviewed for jobs at these places that fit my experience, jobs at which I could’ve kicked ass. But each interview ended with some version of this: “I’m sorry, but you are too radical/too much of an activist to work for us.”

At one particular organization, a senior executive looked me in the eye and said, “If you work here, you have no voice on reproductive rights.”

Another organization wanted me to delete my twitter account. Some wanted me to stop blogging. Others said that because I have a published opinion on later abortion, I would be a liability. One wanted me to resign from all my volunteer pro-choice activism, namely being on the board of the New York Abortion Access Fund.

These requests were not implied. They were said to me in no uncertain terms.

I have a few theories about why this happened. Each theory deserves its own blog post, but I’ll summarize them in three bullet points.

1. New media is still, somehow, an intimidating enigma to these organizations, and they have no clue how to deal with it and with people who know how to use it well.
2. The thought of new leadership coming in means the old leadership has to go somewhere, and, well, where would they go?
3. Fear of the anti-establishment approach and of hiring someone who could potentially offend your board/donors.

Or I just could’ve been wearing the wrong outfit.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many reasons I could’ve been rejected from these positions. I’m not on some kind of vengeful rampage against these organizations. What I AM on a rampage about is this: how can a pro-choice organization tell a job candidate that her dedication to pro-choice activism disqualifies her from a job? How can you STILL, in 2011, not understand the activist potential of new media? The necessity of using anti-establishment approaches every now and then?

I can’t tell you how profoundly disappointed I was in the movement-at-large every single time this happened. Not because I’m special and deserve to be hired, but because I can’t be the only one having this experience. There is something perverse about not wanting to hire people who are so committed to the movement that they work in it in their spare time.

How many other young activists are being cast aside because we are “too radical”? How many people who do great work on their own are disqualified for being “too established?” How is a young, fired up activist supposed to pay her rent in this town without selling out?

It breaks my heart that so many of the organizations I admire mirror the corporate world: they are just as hierarchical and scared of the power of young people. We should not have to apologize for our experience or our passions. I ultimately got lucky and found a job at a place that does great work AND doesn’t force me to compromise my extracurricular activism. I remain furious that young people are treated this way, this profoundly un-feminist way, in our own movement. If your organization isn’t going to treat young, committed activists with respect and dignity, it has no future in the feminist movement.

Blinded with science

When I was very little, I decided I would never be a doctor because kids disliked doctors, and I didn't want to be disliked. In middle school, I eschewed the sciences because they gave me anxiety attacks. As a high schooler, I declared that I would never work any place that had stirrups (I disliked both horses and what little I knew of gynecology, so it worked out). And in college, I avoided the math and science buildings like an anti-choicer avoids logic and reason. When I started working at the clinic, it was because of the opportunity to advocate for women and reproductive justice, and for those causes, I could overlook the stirrups.

I was never the number one candidate for the really clinic-y part of clinic work. For a while, I focused on counseling, administrative work, advocacy, and interpreting, and I left the medical side to the professionals. But the more time I spent at the clinic, the more I found myself jumping at the chance to observe procedures and asking clinicians about the hows and whys. For fun, I learned how to prick my own finger and test my own hematocrit. I taught myself medical abbreviations and Googled hypothetical drug interactions in my free time. I became fascinated by the way a chromosomal shift can wreak havoc and also, how a body knows how to restore itself.

I also became the amateur gynecological resource for friends, and I offered my party trick of suggesting the best contraceptive for your life in under five minutes. And I never felt like more of a true science nerd than when I saw Iron and Wine in concert and kept seeing "Fe and Wine" in my head. Except maybe for when my brain automatically transliterated "salt" to "NaCl." Formerly an avowed humanities major, I'm now a walking periodic table.

So thanks, pro-choice movement, for having the unexpected side effect (ha--see what I did there?) of turning me on to science and medicine. Maybe if my high school chemistry teacher had explained molecular structures in terms of pharmacology instead of hexagons on a paper, I would be holding a B.S. degree right now. (If not an M.D.)

Thanksgetting

I don't do it for the thanks. If I did, there are plenty of days that I might have quit! I've had women shout at me, swear at me, tell me I wasn't a good feminist, I hadn't secured enough financial assistance for them, I didn't answer my phone often enough, I wasn't checking them in fast enough, doing enough, caring enough. When in fact I care really hard and I try really hard. Sometimes I'd hear a coworker have a similar interaction -- maybe just an abrupt goodbye after she phoned to delivered news of a donation toward a patient's abortion costs -- and hang up and mutter, "A little gratitude would be nice." Idunno, I say screw that. Women have a right to choose abortion; I don't have a right to clients' gratitude just for providing their care. It's a matter of social justice that women have access to abortion, and they don't owe me thanks for their rights. They weren't mine to give anyway.

Don't I appreciate a word of thanks from a patient who, by all rights, ought to have her mind on anything but my feelings? Of course--quite a bit. It's wonderful to hear, "You all have been so kind and so professional; thank you for making this so much less stressful and scary than I expected." It's wonderful to get letters that read "This means the world to me. God Bless and may heaven smile upon you guys. Thank you."

But it's the part that comes before it that keeps me doing this work: "Due to my pregnancy I was discriminated against at work, they cut my weekly hours from 40 to 15 and I could barely afford rent, let alone paying for an abortion or even having a baby."
"I'm involved in domestic violence and have had no one to turn to. You have saved my life from eternal abuse and my child from growing up with violent torture."
"This year I earned a sports scholarship to go to college, but when I found out I was pregnant I was afraid I wouldn't even get to graduate high school."
[Excerpted to protect privacy, but these are women's own words.]

Those women don't owe me thanks! We, as a society, owe them all that we can do to reverse workplace injustice, end domestic violence, increase educational opportunities, AND make reproductive freedom a reality. And I thank them: for not giving up, for seeking to make their own life, for being patient with the unfairly long process of seeking a provider, an appointment, the money, the ride, the babysitter, the day off to recuperate.

Thank you, so much, for the compassion and companionship that I hear you offer each other in the waiting rooms and the recovery room.

Thank you for the times I was training and you consented to have me in the room, even though my presence was of no particular use to you that day. Thanks for everything you continue to teach me and my coworkers as we strive to support you and connect you with what you need. In short, thank you for the privilege of being involved in your care -- I will try to earn it.

Trust

I'm not an optimist by nature, but by God, I force myself to be one. There's enough negativity in and around abortion care; no one needs me to be a grumpy, jaded provider. I dance at work and joke with clients and hype up my co-workers and proclaim my love for the clinic from the rooftops. And sometimes, it's the most exhausting part of the work I do.

I wear a "Trust Women" button like the one worn by Dr. Tiller. I believe it with all my heart and it's the reason I go to work every day, ignoring the protesters, ignoring my lower back pain and sciatica after 12+ hour days. I've sacrificed relationships and friends and sleep and food and health and leisure time and luxuries and vacations for this job. I do it because I trust and love every woman who enters my clinic, and I value the work I do. And I know that the clients appreciate all of us providers. But they don't always trust us.

Women constantly ask us if our clinic is clean, if real doctors perform the abortion, if they'll be infertile, if they'll get breast cancer. They call afterward and accuse us of "leaving something inside of me," they blame their stubbed toe on something we did, they call us money-hungry whores because we can't secure enough funding for them. And it hurts so much and it makes me so angry to constantly be the enemy, no matter what. Providers aren't perfect, but we're good and selfless people and we deserve trust and respect.

I'm sorry I can't be your regularly scheduled, sunny Desembarazarme, but I'm human and I struggle, and I trust you to be here for me.

Burn-out

Thank you to deliverance for joining us again as guest blogger today!

*******************************

I was talking with a co-worker yesterday about our work in abortion care. "We should all work part-time here, and then part-time somewhere else, like…an ice cream shop!"

What a great idea, I thought.

Burnout has gotten me down and it is harder than ever to self-motivate. A sanctuary-type environment where I used to continually stumble upon joyful moments, has become a normal office building with boring tasks.

It's not the absence of all joy or gratification, but those moments have become few *and* far between.

Part of it is repetition--the same stories ("I feel like I am killing."), the same obstacles (poverty), and less patient interaction in my current position.

It's also about money. Recently I called a few clinics to get an idea of how much others charge for abortions. There was a clinic a few states away charging over $600.00 for first trimester abortions. Considering how challenging it is for patients at our clinic to pay for procedures, I can't imagine how difficult it is to come up with twice as much money. Then again, women in that state probably don't have any other option.

According to the National Abortion Federation, women cannot access abortion in 88% of counties in the U.S., and that percentage rises to 97% for women in rural areas (http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/access_abortion.html). It doesn't take a genius to figure out why we need people who have a ton of passion and motivation to work in abortion care--this right is, and has been, on the brink of extinction.

I have met and waved goodbye to numerous abortioneers who have flung their entire selves into abortion care, but when it comes down to it (and I really do hate to say it), what we make isn't sustainable. If you want to have a family, go back to school, travel to get away from such stressful work, while also meeting rent, buying groceries, and paying off student loans (a Bachelor's degree is required for many positions at clinics)--good luck.

There is an effort on many of our parts to not only be happy, but to thrive with less--we don't need most of the shit we buy anyway--but fair pay is surely a feminist issue, one which many clinics want to avoid discussing. "Everyone needs a raise," is a reply I've gotten quite often, but I don't think that's so true when looking at wages for administrators and doctors.

Despite all of this, there are still some abortioneers who stick around. They have worked at clinics in the same position for 7 or 8 years, and although many clinics don't have much room for advancement, they hang on because our work can be that important and fulfilling. Some go to medical school to become providers. Others study midwifery, so they can deliver babies as well as provide abortions, in the few states where midwives are able to do such comprehensive care. A few play the game of working their way up to an administrative position.

When I realized I wouldn't be one of those people, I started to make plans to "move on," as people call it (even though I will take this work everywhere with me). I feel guilty for knowing I will one day leave, and resentful for what could've been.

For those of you who stay for the duration of your working life, thank you for being the backbones of our movement. Your amount of commitment and dedication is astounding to me.

Keeping my feet on the ground

("...and I don't go to sleep to dream")

Thinking about money again.

In my non-abortioneer job, we've been working hard to finish a proposal for a bunch of money that would enable organizations in low-resource settings to prevent death and disabilities due to unsafe abortion. (If you're curious about this, the immediate strategies are [a] averting unwanted pregnancies, [b] improving the quality of abortion care, and [c] training health providers in how to treat women presenting with complications from unsafe abortions.)

So yeah, big grant proposal means late hours in the office trying to figure out what the donors want to hear and how we can use their money for the things we specialize in, writing the perfect proposal that will win their hearts, and trying to negotiate the budget section and which partner organizations will get what-size chunk for how much work. Sometimes in the midst of all the math, I wonder how all that hypothetical money went so fast.

I also marvel at the higher rungs of the wider not-for-profit world -- from CARE to the American Cancer Society -- where salaries seem comparatively luxurious and the projects move comparatively slowly and the schedules seem like they're mostly meetings and luncheons or something. Sometimes it seems like the institutions all around me are wordlessly shuttling me in that direction, too.

It's what I was afraid of the first time I left my job in a clinic and thought I might try policy or advocacy -- that there'd be less interacting with the people I'm trying to be there for, more isolation at a desk hoping that my abstractions might do something useful like increase contraceptive access a little or reduce wait times for post-abortion care a little.

At the same time as your goals are getting more abstracted, you're also trying to "advance your career" so you can have more responsibility, help formulate goals, or make a unique contribution... And to be very honest, sometimes it's too easy to think of earning power as shorthand for getting somewhere, and that can make you accept others' values as your own, forget what you came here to accomplish, or in some other way lose perspective.

I'm not saying I'm sure my own perspective is perfect, only that on the other hand it's quite simple to keep on track when I am working with clients directly. It reminds me what matters right now, keeps me humble about all that I still need to learn, and gives me a healthy outsider's view of the weird process of trying to find a place for myself in the inevitable hierarchy.


In my imagination the thing I really fear looks like me sitting at a desk pushing paper -- stressing about donor-pleasing language, navigating five different colors of "track changes" in a document, going to an endless string of meetings to plan work that will always be postponed for more meetings -- not seeing any concrete results that make people's lives easier, and managing to make money off it. And that's another reason I love being an abortioneer and don't want to trade for an "easier," "better," or "more important" job: to me those other jobs seem like none of the above.

Now...how will I pay off my grad school loans? (The question that makes the world go round, right?)

Close your eyes and imagine something for me

welcome to your new home

What if you moved to another country and had no family there, and your first language was one that very few people in your new home had even heard of, and you spoke very little of theirs? You might be relieved and happy to find someone who shared your mother tongue and your host country's language, someone who could help you navigate this new place as well as be a friend who understood where you came from.

You might start dating this person, move in with him, end up relying on him in most aspects of your life. He might be a lot older than you, take advantage of your dependence, control your access to food or transportation or a phone, and refuse to use birth control. 

What if you got pregnant? What if you got pregnant and had always looked forward to having children and this person who had final say in your life was not a fan of the idea? And what if you couldn't get your own job or lease or even typical social services -- shelter, healthcare, food for an infant -- because your immigration status wasn't clear? What would you do? 

You might decide that, as much as you'd rather have a child, the only feasible course of action is to seek an abortion, just like he is telling you. You might have to rely on him to translate during the counseling session, and there's really no point trying to say how you really feel, because he already knows it, and he won't translate it to the counselor, and anyway what you'd rather do doesn't change what you must do. 

After the abortion you might try to spill your guts, in spurts, and using a combination of elementary vocabulary and charades, to the various staff in the recovery room. Unfortunately, if you talked to me, I might have a really hard time understanding the full extent of your situation, and try to comfort you with tissues and talk about the hope of having a child when you're in better circumstances -- not realizing that the road to better circumstances isn't visible from here. (It's a lot harder for me to write about this failure to listen well than to read J's story of a failure in his early days as an aid worker: why?) But I'd notice that you kept saying you didn't feel strong enough to get dressed and be discharged yet, even though your vital signs were normal three times in a row. 

If you talked to my more perceptive colleague, she might try to ask you if you had "somewhere else to go" -- but you don't know anyone or anyplace other than this man. She might call in a counselor and make a bunch of phone calls to informal assistance resources, trying in vain to find someone who spoke the right language. The three of you might make a plan to have you come back in a few days for "a check-up" and hope that this guy at least respects medical orders and will give you another ride to the clinic. 

All of this, to our regret, would happen after the abortion that you wished you didn't have to have, because while antis are lately fixated on stopping "coerced" abortions, they are apparently completely clueless about the forces and circumstances that actually make women have abortions they wish they didn't have to have. When language barriers don't prevent women and girls from telling us what's in their heart, when immigration laws don't leave the most vulnerable with nowhere to turn, when men don't take the opportunity to take advantage, when families don't make their daughters believe that can't possibly come home pregnant, (you fill in the blank): that's when women will only have the abortions they want. 

Using my job

In high school, I really, really wanted to go to the prom, and to me, pretty much the only thing worse than not going at all was going alone. There was this guy I knew, and to him, the only thing better than sliced bread was yours truly, and he made no secret of his crush. I, meanwhile, didn't make much of a secret that his crush wasn't reciprocated. But when prom time came around? You better believe I asked him to go with me. I totally used the poor boy. And if, for some reason, he's reading this, I'm sorry.

But I'm going to confess that I totally use my job. I know that I seem pretty rad and outgoing and great and all on the internet, but in real life (IRL), I'm still rad, but I'm shy. Sometimes, I try to push myself to go out with friends or to reach out and talk to someone at the gym, especially if they've given any sort of clue that they might be a bit of an activist. Without help, my "conversation starters" are along the lines of, "I have a cat!" But with help? "You said you're involved in working against domestic violence? I'd love to hear more about it. I work at Anonymous Clinic and we see a lot of patients who have gone through that." I throw in Anonymous Clinic's name and magically, I'm interesting and engaged and involved and coherent for once.

And I use the powers for good, too, like when my dear, life-long friend casually mentioned, "I picked him up from the airport and we didn't feel like stopping to buy condoms, and the sex was great--" I'm not an interrupter, but I damn well interrupted her and said, "When was this? Was it Saturday night? I can get you a discount on Plan B. We're going to the clinic right now."

But then, there was the infamous housewarming party. I had gone alone and I think the closest any of the other attendees had come to abortion was voting for Obama. I'm not sure how it happened, but I started talking about abortion. And the clinic. It just sort of came out like abortion Tourette's Syndrome, if we're being politically incorrect. Before I knew it, I was regaling this crowd with descriptions of the procedure and explaining why "partial birth abortion" is a myth. Who knows what kind of eye rolling there was after I left, but boy, howdy, was I the center of attention for a hot second.

The event that reminded me of this habit of mine was running into my neighbor last week. She's a lovely person, but she is a chatty person, and clearly, I'm not. I'd never really talked with her before, which didn't stop her, and I was trapped for a good 15 minutes, sweating and fidgeting and trying to act like a normal person and have a normal conversation. And then, she asked what I do for a living. I could have said I worked in healthcare, and left it at that. But my desperation was such and my palms were so sweaty that I volunteered, "I work at an abortion clinic. Yup." The reason for this was that I hoped a tiny bit, for once in my life, that she was an anti and that she would have disdain for me that she would just stop talking and let me go inside my apartment. Of course, she was unfazed, and of course, she followed it up with the dreaded, "I just don't think abortion should be used as birth control." And there I was dealing with the most uncomfortable amalgamation of a lecture fraught with social justice, social anxiety, and general anger. And I still wasn't inside my apartment where I wanted to be.

So, yes, dear reader, I use my job. But I will tell you this: I would absolutely ask my job to the prom, and not just because I would need a date. I would ask it because I totally have a mad crush on my job.

What is this "work-life balance" of which you speak?

Sometimes, you just gotta.

My lovely coblogger About A Girl recently wrote about self-care and the symptoms of getting too wrapped up in your work. I have to say, "Not going to pee" really made me say "Oh god, hell yes." Isn't that insane? Not going to pee? Jeopardizing your long-term organ health because you feel so pressed for time that you pretend you're a machine and not a person who needs to pee??

On several occasions I've gone entire workdays without getting up to have a drink of water or use the bathroom (and eating a snack from home at my desk). Iterated over the long-term, those are NOT good ideas! I did get a lot better about it over time, though -- partly because I realized the importance of self-care, and partly because I got more efficient/effective at the parts of my job that had been keeping me busybusybusy.

The interesting thing about that list is some of it is really physical and direct -- not going to pee, for example -- while others have more elaborate pathways or are more about emotional coping when faced with other people's traumas, or even about getting along in the midst of office politics. It's clear that everyone's different, and we don't all necessarily struggle with the same effects of putting too much into our work. In my case, it tends to be more of the physical stuff -- not eating right or not peeing regularly because I felt tied to my desk or the flow of clinic was just nonstop -- and much less of the mental/emotional stress. On the other hand, I can get LOTS of mental/emotional stress when an officeplace situation is bad, just like it might be at any other (non-abortiony, non-hectic, etc) job.

I'm super interested in learning more about sustainable work practices in our field. My focus has always been on giving clients what they need, and that will always be paramount to me, but I also want my colleagues to be able to stick around for many years. Non-profit and social-good work in general tends to drain people without giving back materially, with the justification that you're in it for the satisfaction of doing good anyway so you don't care about crass things like money or forty-hour work-weeks (ha!) or the flexibility to take a vacation. Acting like we're "in the trenches" is supposed to be normal. And the smaller and more marginalized the field, the more this applies (usually!). I've talked a lot about pee in this post, but of course I'm really talking about the whole shebang.

I was trying to remember the name of a woman I once saw speak (and a reader commented speaking about the same person and reminded me, so thanks, Courtney!) who should probably be part of a yearly retreat for anyone who works in crisis care or other fields where clients bring you their traumas or urgent, high-intensity needs. The speaker's name is Laura van Dernoot Lipsky and she has peered right into your soul and written down what she saw. Her book is called Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide To Caring For Self While Caring For Others.

In other news, another of our lovely readers (hi, Ali!) tipped us off to the ending of BUMP+, the weird-looking show that Revolutionary Vagina blogged about a while back. I haven't been watching -- life's busy, TV's hard to watch on a DSL connection, and this show looked weird -- but supposedly the fictional pregnancy outcomes were pretty much par for the course when it comes to abortion and "television" -- even, I guess, if the television is on the internet. Did anyone else see it? What do you think? Spoilers are more than welcome! 

Nurturing Self

Do any of the following sound familiar to you?

• Skipping breakfast to get to work on time (after oversleeping because so tired)
• Skipping lunch (too much to do, have to help that one client who needs extra help)
• Getting home, very hungry, and thus overeating after not having breakfast or lunch
• Spending a bit of extra time with that bottle of wine (or two or three…)
• Needing extra cigarettes to get through the stressful day
• Not going pee because you’re too busy seeing/talking to clients
• Not taking breaks
• Dreaming about work
• Talking about work a lot
• Difficulty relaxing in the evening
• Taking work home

If you answered yes to….well…any of these, then it might be helpful to take a look at your work/life balance. (Okay. I’m one to talk: I recently gave a patient my cell number and spent time on the phone with her outside regular work hours and I rarely take lunch.) It can be hard to strike a balance between life and work when your primary function is to take care of other people and often even put their needs before your own. This can be especially challenging when we work in a sometimes hostile environment (say, external hostility from protesters), and it can be super hard to explain our jobs to people in our lives. “How was your day?” is such a benign question, but I often ask myself, “Seriously? You really want to open THAT can of worms and know how my day REALLY was?”

Maybe you feel similarly from time to time. Here are some things that have helped me, and things I know that have helped others, too:

• Eat breakfast. Seriously. It really does help!
• Drink coffee!
• Take your breaks and your lunches, even if it seems impossible to do so. Take them.
• Have interests and hobbies outside work and indulge in them. Write, read, hike, run, go to the gym, play music, spend time with your friends, your children.
• Have something at home, after work, that is really important to you to focus on that is completely non-work related (I think this is easier for parents, as often their children can be the distraction).
• Spend personal time doing non-abortiony things! Really!
• Have friends from Abortionland so they can understand you.
• Have friends outside Abortionland so you don’t have to talk about Abortionland all the time.
• Shop.
• Go on holiday.
• Go to movies.
• Take a day off. And do something fun.
• Get rest.
• And sometimes, indulge in a few bottles of wine, or a few margaritas with your Abortionland friends.
• Cry.
• Take long baths.

Basically, just remember you, when you’re in the middle of remembering everyone else. Nurture yourself. Personally, I'd like to be right here. Any other suggestions?

Will The Revolution Be Funded...or Free?

e.t.a. CAUTION: I'm procrastinating on a paper, so this post is really long!

Did you check out Desembarazarme's Thursday post? You should. It rocks. I'll wait while you read it. Okay?

Okay.

Thank god for Desembarazarme, who reminds us how rewarding our jobs are, spiritually if not so much materially. Now here I come barging in, wanting to talk about compensation, but in the crass way.

I want to talk shop. This is aimed more at soliciting thoughts and advice from fellow abortioneers and other do-gooder types. There's these two things I struggle with, similar in a lot of ways and partly intertwined.


I. Money makes the world go round, and private charity steps in where our social safety nets have been unwoven. In most states, clinics and emergency funding programs can only get by financially if they register as official 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations. And those rely on tax-deductible contributions from individuals, funds from grant clearinghouses, or even donations from big foundations set up as tax shelters for privately-owned corporate wealth.

Yet in most endeavors, and certainly when dealing with the corporate-bred (not to mention governments), the biggest pay gets the biggest say. This may interfere with the non-profit's ability to offer certain services, give certain information, or take certain positions even in arenas not touched by the donor's generosity (for at-long-last-vitiated international examples, see: PEPFAR Anti-Prostitution Pledge, Mexico City Policy!). Thus are many clinics and funds drawn into what's known as the "non-profit industrial complex."

From experience, I'd say the longer and more directly your livelihood depends on the structure of the NPIC, the less mental energy you have to think about all its implications for our world. But from outside of it, it's a frustrating thing: you want to be grateful for the private goodwill that makes good work possible, but you hate that the numbers game means some organizations are at the mercy of one or two large donors and might either cave or close if push ever came to shove. It seems wrong, doesn't it? Plus, capitalist blood money! But then, all money is some bloody -- how to get anything done?

II. Money makes our lives more livable, obvi. People who do this thing called "happiness research" say that after the first $40,000, more salary doesn't translate into more happiness. Well, if I had any money to spare, I'd wager that the vast majority of abortioneers wouldn't know what that first $40,000 feels like. I don't. I've earned slightly-above-minimum wage, and then I moved somewhere 50% costlier but made only 40% more money and tried to save like crazy, then slowly raked in pay raises, then traded that for another relocation and the relative poverty of a full-time graduate program. Observations from this:

A) It's pretty hard to live on basic clinic wages and not stress. When I was a full-time clinic employee, I lived happily, but in the sense that I shared a house with four other people and not enough bathrooms, didn't buy clothes or other Stuff, thanked the stars for my no-deductible HMO, ate well, and almost hit the bottom of my account every pay period. Needing new glasses AND a new tire in the same month posed a serious threat.

B) Small raises somehow do make a big difference. Then again, so does lucking out big-time on your housing situation, which for a renter is never solid enough ground to put your fears to rest.

C) The farther away you are from direct client service, the more money you make: true in abortionland as well as most other fields. (Excluding doctors and CNAs, though even they make less than their non-abortionland counterparts.) There seems to be a ladder starting at the clinic and going through small, medium and large research and advocacy organizations. And sometimes it seems like there's an expectation -- maybe from your coworkers, mostly from others -- that you're going to climb that ladder professionally and financially, trading in face-time with women who need it for a series of raises and, sometimes, the supposed authority to speak on those women's behalf.

So Item II often brings me right back to Item I. Abortioneers clearly aren't in it for the money, which is scant, but it seems wrong and exploitative to take that for granted. At present, the most common career model I see is to get promoted out of direct-service abortioneering, yet that's not what many of us want. In addition to removing us from our clients, it brings us further into the non-profit industrial complex, which we then can't help but accept, internalize and reinforce. But the trade-off isn't just money, it's also often a salary instead of an hourly wage, more stable hours, more benefits, more responsibility, and/or simply less in-your-face stress. Sounds like a fair recompense for those burning out in lower-paying positions. And then there's the lifelong clinic staff, the other model, and it doesn't look like their raises are commensurate with their accumulating experiences.

I'm currently in school for a master's degree, even though I'm now unsure what I'll do with it. The program is instructive and fascinating, but it seems to pave the way for me to be some kind of technocrat: smart enough to tell others how to fix problems, and too expensive to be put to work doing something that supposedly "anyone can do" (if only!). It's also assumed that the money spent on this degree will generate dividends of future income. If given time, these assumptions permeate my thinking too. But god knows if I went back to full-time clinic work they couldn't "pay me my worth" for a master's! So are my studies forcing me, financially, out of direct service? Should I quit school right now to remain free of career-defining debt?

Some of the people who graduated from college or high school with me started their first jobs making several times what I made at my last pay raise. Several of them are well on their way to conventionally-approved adulthood: the storied trifecta of homeownership, marriage, children. I'm not sure that's a road I'd want to take anyway, because I like communal living and seeing new cities and not raising kids -- but it's weird to think that it's structurally almost impossible for me to "grow up" even if I choose to. And should I not even bother thinking about retirement?

I've had conversations with some of you, here and there, about old white men's money and the CEOs of women's groups, about this dilemma between the long-term risks of the NPIC and the immediate need to get our work done, and about where our lives will head as the years pass. Do you have any thoughts for me now? How will we do what we do authentically and freely, and perhaps be the movement's future, while enabling a decent-enough material life for each other and those who come after us?

While we brainstorm, I'll be reading this book, the source of my paraphrased title, by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, and hoping to make sense of it all.

Richness

Sometimes, I think about other lines of work I could go into. I think about it not because I'm irreparably damaged by the alleged horrors of my work (sorry, anti-choicers, I'm not), but because of the meager income I make at the clinic--I hover just above the poverty line, as do most of my colleagues. (sorry again, anti-choicers who think we're in it for the money and it's all about the Benjamins).

And other lines of work appeal to me a little bit, but none as much as abortion does. Abortion is so much more than a surgical procedure, more than choice, and more than feminism. It's about domestic violence and helping women come up with plans to leave their abusers after they end their unwanted pregnancies. It's about building up a child again after incest brought her to the clinic before she even entered her teenage years. It's about collecting irrefutable DNA evidence after a rape that WILL be prosecuted.

We see classism in healthcare and try to even the playing field in our particular brand of healthcare. We know why it's called reproductive justice rather than pro-choice because we've seen the disparities and barriers women of color face. We find funding and build trust with homeless women and we work to connect with the privileged, upper-class white woman who flippantly says, "I can't believe all these women are having abortions! I wish they wouldn't use it for birth control. My situation is different."

We've seen demographic data--it's not just heterosexual women having abortions, but queer women who also need a choice or who got pregnant through donor insemination, then were faced with fetal anomalies. For every macho man who's bored with having to spend his day at a clinic, we've seen men cry and express fear.

We know women who drive H2s have abortions, but so do women who have been exposed to environmental toxins that affect a pregnancy in terrible ways. We meet women who need D&Cs because of demanding work environments that caused them to miscarry.

We know how mental illness works. We come up with plans of care for women who deal with depression and anxiety, we evaluate and alter treatment, language, and protocol for women who are developmentally disabled. When we talk about post-abortion coping, we also talk about emotional, binge eating or exercise and restricting food, as well as body image and body autonomy.

As I wrote in my last post, we see undocumented immigrants who can't believe abortion is legal in this country they've adopted that hasn't fully adopted them. We also see women in the military who forgo this pregnancy so they can serve their country, proudly or bitterly.

We've met women who are staunchly childfree and women who need to be able to care for their large families by not adding to them. We see tired women who thought they were safely and squarely in menopause as well as teenagers who thought they couldn't get pregnant the first time they had sex.

And all of these diverse women are the reasons I don't mind buying thrifted clothes, driving an aged car, and living simply. Their experiences and their willingness to share them with me make me better, and that sure isn't near-poverty to me.

A brief assortment of scenes

[ETA: you know, I forgot we had a listy-post last week. So, sorry for listmania, maybe the rhythm just got into my head without my noticing!] 

Things I Only Have To Say At My Abortionland Job

1) An abortion? And you said you just had the unprotected sex last night? Well, you can't get an abortion, but do you know about emergency contraception?

2) I'm sorry, if you had unprotected sex four weeks ago, it's too late for the morning-after pill.

3) No, I don't think you're a bad person.

4) I'm sorry, I can't give you the name of our doctors over the phone, even though I really sympathize with you wanting to look them up on ratemydoc.com before you make an appointment. They're highly trained and qualified doctors, I promise, but they get harassed and threatened when their names are public.

5) Yes, there are a few protesters, but at our particular location they don't seem to get a lot of attention from traffic, so they don't stay very long -- but keep your windows up or they'll throw things into your car.

6) For two weeks afterwards, make sure you don't put anything in your vagina! No tampons, no penises, no vibrators, no DivaCups, and don't go swimming or take tub baths. Exceptions will be made for the NuvaRing and IUD insertion only. Did I mention no penises? No penises!

7) I really mean it, no penises. Did you know your softened cervix means not only are you more susceptible to infection in the next two weeks, you're also more susceptible to pregnancy.

8) On that note, no, you're obviously not likely to become infertile. I've had clients who didn't realize that they were more fertile afterward and ended up back here a few months later, so, no.

9) No, you're not likely to die either. Both the risk of death and the risk of infertility were high in the days when abortion was illegal and so there was no legit way to train doctors to do it safely -- so I think that's where a lot of people have that idea from. Back then, untrained people using any manner of equipment could definitely injure or infect women's uteruses, but in a legal clinic in the US, the risk of dying is less than 1 in a hundred-thousand.

10) Do you have anal, oral, vaginal sex?

11) You look uncomfortable. Do you want to talk to me without your boyfriend around?

12) That will be one thousand, two hundred and fifteen dollars. Um...can you take that cash to the money-order place?
OR
That will be one thousand, two hundred and fifteen dollars. (But I saw your sleeping bag unrolled in the back-seat of your car.) Um...actually, can you hold on a minute? (Maybe I can talk to my manager.)

13) We offer IV sedation, but you can be awake during the procedure if you prefer. What's it like? Well, have you ever given birth? You know the contractions beforehand?...Way less bad than that! But worse than your period cramps. For about a minute.

14) What's going to happen? OK, first you'll...well, have you had a gynecological exam before? No? Hm. Well then, here's what the speculum will do. Yeah, it will feel kind of weird when it opens, and maybe uncomfortable. I know.

15) You're welcome -- you're very welcome! God bless you too!

Transitions

I am leaving my current job, where I am immersed in Abortionland as we call it. I am pretty ecstatic about this change in my life. As we all share it is quite apparent that this work is draining, hardening and difficult.

I have been immersed in Abortionland for over 4 years. When I started working in the field I didn’t know I was passionate about abortion. Having just come out as gay I really didn’t think it had anything to do with me, but I knew I believed in a woman’s right to choose and I needed a part time gig, and so the saga begins. As I have become immersed in this work I have sifted through the many layers of choice, reproduction, and women’s empowerment and found my passion. This work is also empowering, fulfilling, and meaningful.

Abortion is a part of women’s survival, it’s a part of owning our bodies, lives, and decisions. Helping women obtain abortions is about giving accurate information and entrusting women to make good decisions with that information. When I talk to patients it is clear that lack of access to abortion is not where problems begin but rather one manifestation of larger societal problems. We live in a sex negative culture, from very early in our lives we learn that sex is shameful, dirty, and we should be secretive about it. We do not get clear and accurate information about our bodies or sex, and we lack language to talk about both. Lack of access to abortion and accurate information about abortion is one manifestation of a sex-negative culture.

Information about sex and health is essential to preventing unwanted pregnancies. Yet, when we can’t talk about sex and we are taught that abstinence is the answer then people don’t know how to take precautions against becoming pregnant. Also, it is a lot easier to ignore signs that one is pregnant if you don’t have a language to talk about your body. For me this work is about a larger picture, it’s much bigger than abortion. It’s about unlearning that sex is shameful, secretive and dirty. Sex is a part of life and people need information about how to take care of their selves and enjoy pleasure.

When I think about how I will remain true to my heart as an abortioneer, there is no question in my mind that this work will remain my passion with or without a job in a clinic or fund. I will bring my sisters to the clinic. I will use the counseling skills I have developed to help my sisters make major decisions. I will swipe my credit card or even request a credit line increase without thinking twice because I can, and I know I can help someone else pay for their abortion care. I will donate to a local fund. I will help a child, or anyone, learn how to talk about her body in a positive manner. I will help give people information about how to enjoy sex safely. I will remind a woman that she has the right to be in control of her own life.

After four years I feel really burned out and I’m thrilled make some major changes in my professional life. However, I am clear that my heart is still in this work and that won’t change.