The beginning of the end of my employment with an abortion clinic in Richmond, Virginia began with a conversation. “Kelly, make sure you take care of the magazines in the waiting room.” I knew exactly what my boss meant by “taking care” of the magazines. Initially, when they told me to search the pages for any content even remotely baby-related …
IN A RATHER ODD ATTEMPT TO ASSUAGE THE ACHE IN MY OWN HEART for having an abortion, I applied for and was given a job at the very same abortion clinic where I had my procedure. The best I can do to make sense of it is— I think I thought that if I helped women get abortions, it would …
PERHAPS YOU’VE HEARD THE FABLE: If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out; but if you put a frog in a pot of tepid water and gradually heat it, the frog will complacently let itself be boiled to death. That is the only way I can make sense of my time working …
“PLEASE STEP INSIDE, EVERYONE,” THE INDIAN GURU SAID with a thick accent as he led us to an empty conference room. “Lay on the ground. We’re going to keep the lights low.” I stepped in with the other people and lay down wondering what I had gotten myself into. “Now,” he continued, “when I say begin, I want you to …
UNLIKE SO MANY COLLEGE GRADUATES, I knew exactly what I was going to do with my degree. Although I love my daughter more than I can say, I lived through the hard reality of becoming a teenage mother some years earlier. At some point, I learned that Planned Parenthood offered birth control pills. Fully believing that women had the right …
WHEN MY MOTHER TOLD ME THAT SHE WANTED OUR FAMILY TO LEAVE Mexico City and cross over to the United States, the idea was unthinkable. As a young woman, I dreamed of being a doctor in Mexico City. Mexico was my home. My mother didn’t see it that way. On several occasions I had been the target of slash-and-go boys …
THERE WAS NO LIGHT IN THE WOMEN’S HEALTH CLINIC WHERE I WORKED—just one; over me. Every other room or hallway in the place was still and dark as night. After hours was a good time for me to get work done, I thought, the kind that builds up after a day of distractions, like chatty coworkers, or vendors coming in …
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR ME TO FIGURE OUT that the new job I had just taken at a Planned Parenthood in Missouri was not nearly as defined as I had hoped. In fact, as the new Director of Quality and Risk Management, a position that would seem to warrant some training, I was simply left alone to find my …
I ROLLED UP TO THE ADDRESS printed on my itinerary sheet, got out of my truck and walked to the building. Suddenly, I stopped. By the signage and writing on the glass doors, I realized I was about to walk into an abortion clinic. As a relatively new employee for a biomedical waste removal company, I hadn’t had an abortion …
“OH, KEYSHA, NO!” my mother said into the phone when I told her I had just taken a job at Planned Parenthood. “They kill babies!” But Mom really had nothing to worry about. The particular branch where I had just accepted a job didn’t even offer abortions. Their emphasis was on women’s health, and that made me more than a …
