Abortion in the ER

I work nights at a hospital that smells like floor wax and burnt coffee, the good kind of burnt, the kind that means somebody made a fresh pot at 2 a.m. because the last one had turned to punishment. I am the person who hangs the magnesium, who watches the strip, who calls the resident who is trying to grow a spine. I have held a basin for a miscarriage at a gestational age that the internet would turn into a rally. I have also refused to become a mascot for either rally.

Dobbs came down while I was on a stretch of shifts that blurred. I read the alerts in the break room with a yogurt. Some of the younger nurses cried like they'd been personally sentenced. I didn't cry. I thought: finally the court admitted it had been doing legislature. Then I went back to a patient who did not care about Justice Alito's citations, she cared about bleeding.

I am pro-life. I need to say it in the plain way, not the way consultants say it. I think the fetus is a someone, early, not only when it is cute on an ultrasound the parents already wanted. That belief makes me conservative in this decade's sorting hat, even though I vote mixed on water and on the crazy people in my own party who talk about IVF like they learned biology from a Facebook graphic.

The other side's real point, the one I will not cheapen, is that a ban written by people who have never been in a night-shift stairwell will be too crude for the bodies that show up. Ectopic is not a debate club. PPROM at 17 weeks in a woman who already has a kid at home is not a tweet. If your law makes a physician wait until the chart looks enough like death to satisfy a prosecutor in a county with an ambitious DA, you have not protected life. You have protected a press conference, and you have scared the exact clinicians who keep women alive. I have watched doctors hesitate. Hesitation has a pulse.

Arizona did this messy. The old law, the new law, the clinics that pulled up stakes, the patients who drove toward California like it was a weather evacuation. Some of those patients were ending pregnancies I wish they wouldn't. Some were in situations I would not wish on my worst roommate from nursing school. A serious movement has to hold both, not pick the photogenic one.

Roe was a bad opinion. You can think abortion should be legal and still admit Roe was a bad opinion. I went to a Christian college. We were handed that line like a mint after dinner. Then I went to work in a hospital and found out the mint doesn't stop a hemorrhage. Legal theory and a speculum are different instruments. Dobbs returned the fight to voters, which is the correct humiliation for a country that wanted the court to be a parent.

Did I like the victory laps. No. I did not like the men with the extra-large foam boards outside offices that also do mammograms. I do not like that some of my people talk about women as vessels when those same men cannot locate the nearest WIC office. If you vote to protect the unborn and then starve the born, you are not a witness, you are a brand.

Clinics closed. That is a fact, not a vibe. Prenatal appointments got farther. Rural patients already drove. Now they drive more. I will not celebrate a closed clinic like it's a converted soul if the building also did pap smears and cheap birth control, because preventing the pregnancies you don't want is part of reducing the abortions you don't want. If that sentence gets me uninvited from a prayer breakfast, the prayer breakfast was a club.

Medication abortion through the mail is the next war and everyone knows it. I think taking a drug to end a pregnancy is still ending a pregnancy. I also think a 22-year-old in Yuma is going to find the pills whether my Senate does a hearing or not, and a hearing that ignores that is just theater with better lighting. If we are serious, we are serious about why she wants the pills: money, a man, a diagnosis, shame, all of it. Shame is a lousy prenatal policy.

My charge nurse is pro-choice and she is the best nurse I have ever worked under. She does not mock my bumper sticker. I do not mock her pin. At 4 a.m. we are on the same side of a bed. The country could try that, but the country is not trying. The country is doing a costume party with Latin words.

I don't need the Supreme Court to like me. I needed it to stop pretending a trimester scheme was in the Constitution like a watermark. Now we have state fights, which are ugly and local and sometimes stupid. Ugly and local is how we do speed limits too. I can live with ugly. I cannot live with a lie that made a generation think the argument was over because five lawyers in 1973 got tired.

If you ask whether I would help a patient after a failed abortion, the answer is yes, immediately, and I would not take her political temperature while I hung fluids. If you ask whether I want Arizona to be a place that treats elective abortion as a routine errand, the answer is no. Those answers live in the same person. The internet is bad at persons.

Last month a woman thanked me for not lecturing her after she lost a wanted pregnancy at 11 weeks. I had not planned to lecture her. The fact that she expected it tells you what the temperature is. We did this. All of us. We turned a medical floor into a stadium.

I still think the smaller, born-already patients in the NICU are the same kind of someone as the ones we don't meet. That is my through-line. If your law forgets the woman in the bed, I will fight the law even while I keep the through-line. That is not a betrayal of Dobbs. That is how you keep Dobbs from becoming just another round of people yelling in Phoenix heat.