Stories Ae Essential

Why Abortion Stories Matter

Dr. Christine Henneberg is a writer and a doctor specializing in women’s health and family planning. Her memoir is “Boundless: An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother.”

Start with a story.

It’s the standard advice for any doctor who sets out to write, speak or advocate on behalf of her patients. Stories change minds. They change how people think about issues that can otherwise feel impersonal. Stories matter.

This is why, in the year since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have been collecting stories from doctors detailing substandard medical care and harm to patients. It is why the obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Caitlin Bernard told the story of a patient of hers, a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio, who, unable to obtain a legal abortion in her home state, was forced to travel to Indiana to seek care. It is why, as an abortion provider in California, a state where abortion remains legal (for now), I collect and publish stories about my work — stories that, for whatever reason, stick with me.

Such as on a recent afternoon, when the last patient of the day chose to forgo IV anesthesia for her abortion because she was leaving straight from her appointment to pick up her kids from school. “I’m OK,” she said, her hands clutching the sides of the exam table. Half an hour later, I saw her in the subway on my way home, chin in her hand, staring out the window. I imagined her children waiting in the schoolyard, their eager hands thrusting into hers, their innocent questions and needs and demands.

Or the young woman who told me about her drag racer boyfriend and how, since becoming pregnant, she’d been too nauseated to ride in the car with him, instead watching from the sidelines, trying to imagine what her life would look like if they were to have the baby.

Like any doctor, I am careful to change names and identifying details to protect my patients’ privacy. This is, for the most part, easy to do, because so many of the stories I share are so common, so everyday. American women have nearly one million abortions each year. A vast majority of these are what the legal scholar and bioethicist Katie Watson calls ordinary abortions: A pregnant woman decides, for whatever reason, that she can’t or doesn’t want to give birth to a child right now. A doctor or nurse helps her safely end the pregnancy. These stories, no matter how fraught they might be with personal and moral tensions, don’t make exciting news. As Ms. Watson has written, “The imperatives of reporting preclude this headline: ‘Peaceful Day at Abortion Clinic: Ordinary People Got Quality Health Care.’”

“My life would not have been my own. I would be a prisoner subject to a body’s whims — and not my body’s whims, but the whims of a teenage boy.”

Nicole Walker, a writer and editor, in “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life.” Read the guest essay.

“It’s important that the government is in sync with the public opinion, but I don’t think they are.”

Dwyarrn, one of the participants in an Opinion focus group with 12 pro-life voters. Read the focus group’s discussion.

“Sometime soon, I am going to meet a patient who has no ability to leave the state, and I am going to have to tell her that her baby has a lethal condition, and she is going to have to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.”

David N. Hackney, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, in “I’m a High-Risk Obstetrician, and I’m Terrified for My Patients.” Read the guest essay.

“There are more of us than there are of them. That’s especially true if American men recognize that their way of life is also under attack. Men also have sex for pleasure. This is not just a women’s issue.”

“My fellow pro-lifers and I will also need to make the case to expectant mothers, and fathers too, that their unborn children are, like the rest of us, dependent and needy persons.”

Erika Bachiochi, a conservative legal scholar, in “What Makes a Fetus a Person?” Read the guest essay.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.”

Michele Goodwin, a professor of law at the University of California, in “No, Justice Alito, Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution.” Read the guest essay.

Yet ordinary abortion stories play an important role in the fight for abortion rights and reproductive justice. They remind us that abortion is normal. They humanize the one in four women in America who will have an abortion in her lifetime.

Unlike ordinary abortion stories, the details of extraordinary abortions cannot be easily disguised. The details are what make them extraordinary: The very young patient. The rape. The state where she could not obtain the abortion and the state where she ultimately did.

In medicine, doctors share extraordinary cases to educate ourselves and one another about the range of diagnoses we must consider, exam findings we may encounter or procedures we might be called on to perform. Extraordinary stories also serve a role in a democracy, to paint a vivid picture for constituents of the full range and implications of the legislation passed by elected officials, under which we and our children must live.

Extraordinary abortion stories remind us that pregnancy can be a matter of life and death. Pregnancy can — and does — result from rape, incest and intimate partner violence. Pregnancy can — and does — happen to children as young as 10. Governors and legislators and Supreme Court justices can — and do — make decisions that result in children being forced to give birth.

When Dr. Bernard was reprimanded by Indiana’s medical board for violating her young patient’s privacy (she discussed the case with a reporter without revealing a single traceable element of the patient’s identity), we saw proof of a new, disturbing reality of the post-Roe era: Abortion opponents don’t merely want to ban abortion. They want to silence the doctors who bear witness to the disastrous consequences of such cruel and unjust legislation.

Now more than ever, abortion providers must share the ordinary and extraordinary stories we witness — to humanize our work, to advocate for our patients, to move people. This is the impetus behind my writing and the work of other doctors. It is the impetus for the U.C.S.F. study documenting the substandard reproductive care post-Roe, whose preliminary findings, released in May, are chilling to read. This is why humans tell stories: so that our words are not only heard and read but also remembered.

In a post-Roe world, abortion providers see our patients’ rights to privacy and bodily autonomy violated every day. It is our ethical duty to expose that violation to the world.