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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 …

“AM I READING THIS CORRECTLY?” THE JUDGE SAID as he reviewed the charges against me. “Miss Munoz is being accused of stealing a sonogram machine?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. I hadn’t yet heard the charges against me, ones that had me turning myself in to police, getting a mug shot and being put in a jail …

I REMEMBER THE FEELING AS I WALKED OUT OF MY JOB INTERVIEW at a women’s health clinic in Texas; that I was about to join a group of women committed to women’s health. There was an all-for-one feeling running through me and I loved it. Sure, my interviewer mentioned that the clinic did abortions. But she assured me they happened …

Looking back now, it is difficult to understand. But when the Planned Parenthood clinic that I worked for advanced me from receptionist to the person whose duties it was to strain for the baby pieces and rinse them off, I was matter-of-fact about it—it didn’t bother me in the least. Planned Parenthood, with their high respect of my skills, good …

I KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG the very first moment of my first day. I had a wonderful job as a nurse in Jackson, Louisiana, when I received a call from a friend who worked at an abortion clinic in Baton Rouge. She told me they needed a registered nurse—and that I would be perfect for it. I liked the idea …