Bread and Soup is a group of men and women in Southern California who are worried about the direction our country is taking. We meet to share our stories and identify actions we as ordinary citizens can take to protect our civil rights. If you like our stories, please tell your friends about us.
The top issue on our minds in the last several months has been health care, especially women’s reproductive health care, and the ways that the proposed health-care legislation will affect people’s lives. Here is a story from Paula, who grew up in a deeply conservative, highly religious family in the Midwest. Names have been changed to protect those of her family whose heads would explode if they knew how deeply feminist she really is.
Although Paula’s reproductive life has been long and complicated, two aspects of it stand out in her mind: Learning that every woman must make her own decisions about her own body, and the understanding that sometimes taking care of a woman’s health requires what some people consider an abortion.
In 1995 I stopped using contraception and quickly got pregnant. I went to the doctor, they did a test, and we counted back to the last menstrual cycle, those kinds of things.
I was far enough along that we should have been able to hear a heartbeat. They couldn’t find the heartbeat but they said sometimes the heartbeat is very quiet and they might not be able to hear it, or the baby might be positioned in such a way that their stethoscope can’t manage to get the sound. So I went home. I was disappointed but not deflated.

Two days later I started to spot and I thought, “Oh, this is not good.”
I went to the doctor and he said, “Well, I think you should go to bed.”

So I went home, and I was lying in bed with nothing to think about except what might be happening.
Then I started to have cramps that went on for about a day and a half. I went back to the doctor and they did an ultrasound and there was no heartbeat, no movement. They said, “You’re in the process of miscarrying. We have no evidence that the fetus is viable.”

So they sent me to a clinic where I had a D and C [dilation and curettage] to complete the miscarriage. That’s an abortion procedure but I didn’t recognize that because it was just health care. It was just what needed to happen for my well-being.
The fetus turned out to not even be recognizable. They couldn’t even tell the gender, it was so badly malformed. But there was no judgment about the D and C.
I was in too much distress to know anything about what was going on around me. I assume it was a clinic because I was sent there from the doctor’s office, and it was not a hospital. But there was nothing to identify what they did there, if it was just outpatient procedures, I don’t know. I was just being given the health care that I needed at the time with no judgment, with no controversy.

I didn’t even recognize that some people might consider what I was experiencing to be anything other than simply “health care.”
So one of the aspects of this health care plan that really worries me is that they want to strip all funding from Planned Parenthood. I don’t know if the clinic I went to was a Planned Parenthood clinic, I don’t remember. But I do know that for a lot of women, Planned Parenthood IS their health care.

2.5 million women and men in the US visit Planned Parent-hood health centers for services and information each year, and its website receives 60 million visits annually. No federal funds are ever used for abortions; it’s against the law.

But without the federal funding Planned Parenthood gets, there will be women who need care, and THERE WON’T BE ANY PLANNED PARENTHOOD AROUND TO PROVIDE IT.
When you are in the process of bringing life or not bringing life into the world, you are extremely emotionally and physically vulnerable. It’s an emotional roller coaster and it’s not just the hormones; it’s the willingness to sacrifice yourself, to be open to all the emotional, physical, financial cost involved in bringing a life into the world.
I don’t think people think about that: Women give up their body to bring someone else in. I never, ever heard anybody describe pregnancy in those terms before I thought about it in relationship to my own self. To have someone else interfere in that process — it’s like, do you not see what I’m experiencing here? Do you not feel my vulnerability? This is my little life and experience here, this is not yours. Please get back in your own yard. You’ll get your chance and if you don’t that’s not my fault, I’m sorry.
That period of time was so emotional for me, so difficult and overwhelming, and to think that someone else who didn’t know me would have had the right to make a judgment about who I was or what I was doing at that time, is just — I didn’t understand, before I experienced that, how hurtful and damaging it is for someone else to interfere.