Military Families

I don't know if other clinics are noticing this as well, but we've seen lots more servicemen and women over the past year. I don't want to use this post to make any overly-simplistic arguments like Iraq War = more deployments and hardships for military families = more abortions, but I do want to mention some of the challenges that military families face when choosing abortion.

Maricela had been a teen mom and struggled for years to achieve some degree of self-sufficiency for she and her son. She worked a minimum wage job at a big box store. She met a boyfriend there and he challenged her to explore more options for her life. "There's not much out there for a single Latina mom with no education," she said, "and so I enlisted." She waited for basic training and a few weeks after getting her assignment, found out she was pregnant. "I'm sure that I can't have a baby now," she explained, "I have to get some training so that afterwards I can take care of my son. This is our only hope." Her mother had agreed to care for her son while she was gone. The challenge now was the pregnancy test at her preliminary medical exam. (Many pregnancy tests will give a false positive reading in the weeks after an abortion, because they test for hormones that are still in the body.) "If I come up as pregnant, I don't get to go. It's this or the Walmart." I offered to have her records faxed to any clinician she wanted, but she was reluctant. "I don't really want them to know that I just had an abortion, but I guess if it comes to that I'll have to. I guess we can just hope for a negative test, eh?"

Lana's story was much more serious. She had a string of abusive boyfriends and finally found the guy she said was "the one." Just one little problem--he was due to be sent to Afghanistan just three months after they started dating. Lana was in school to be a vet tech and had huge student loan bills. When her roommate moved out, her rent doubled and bills piled up. She worked at her regular job, but this wasn't making a dent. A friend worked as an exotic dancer and suggested that she give it a try. "I looked for something else, really there was nothing. I was going to be evicted." She didn't tell her boyfriend. "I was so ashamed. He's in a war zone, why would I bother him with my problems. Everyone kept telling me--don't worry him, he doesn't need to know about this. All his family kept saying was don't you break his heart, you better be faithful." Lana was raped by a man at the club, but didn't report the incident. "I felt like, who was going to believe me--I was a stripper." Now pregnant from the rape, there was nothing she would have liked more than to tell her boyfriend, not just about the pregnancy, but about the dancing, the money issues, her mounting debt, all the stress she was under. "Everyone kept saying, he needs you to be strong, don't you worry him. I don't know what he'd think of me. I was such a nice girl and now I'm a stripper. How could I tell him?" I reinforced that no one should ever be raped and being in the sex industry doesn't change that, but she had a hard time hearing me. "I'm supposed to be the loyal girlfriend at home pining away, not having an abortion from some guy who forced me." I encouraged her to get some counseling and gave her a referral to a sexual assault agency in her area, but with all that shame around the rape, I'm doubtful she followed up.

Cheyenne was positive that she didn't want to be pregnant while her husband was deployed, but military insurance will ONLY cover abortion services when the life of the mother is at risk. (Yep, check it out. No coverage if you're raped, if you have a significant fetal abnormality. No coverage for counseling, even.) "Hasn't our family sacrificed enough already? I have a thyroid disorder, depression and PTSD. My husband is in Iraq. I had to move in with my mother and I've hardly bought groceries this month because I've been trying to save up for a f***ing abortion," she said. "How much more 'at risk' does my life have to be?" That, I told her, was a damn good question.

-Nell