Women Waiting to Exhale

By Jennifer Baumgardner, AlterNet. Posted June 1, 2005.

Aspen Baker was born in a trailer on the beach in San Diego on the third anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Her parents were "surfers, but surfing Christians," says Baker, now 29, who was home-schooled. Her mother was a former Catholic, and Baker was raised in a non-denominational Christian church. Baker was pro-choice, sort of, but she also believed that she could never have an abortion herself.

Then, just after she graduated from Berkeley, she learned she was pregnant. "Initially, I believed I was going to be a mother and have the baby," she says. She was living with roommates and working as a bartender ("Imagine the eight-months-pregnant bartender," she laughs), and she sensed that the relationship she was in was short term; she would be a single mom.

Two co-workers at the bar told her that they had had abortions and felt it was the right choice. Although Baker gradually realized that she didn't want to have the baby, the decision to have an abortion was hard. "When I finally went, it was in a hospital, and I had a nice doctor that explained the procedure to me, and plenty of counseling beforehand," she says. "I was so grateful for the positive medical experience, despite my ambivalence."

She assumed that at some point, though, someone at the clinic was going to tell her how to get follow-up counseling. But no one did. "I didn't bring it up myself because if it's not something that they do, then I figured that my feelings were abnormal and would go away," she says.

They didn't. In fact, her confusion and sadness only increased. "I thought I'd never have an abortion -- and now I had," Baker says. "I questioned my moral beliefs as a human rights activist. I didn't believe in the death penalty. I felt bad about the boyfriend, who had gotten back with his ex."

When she told her parents, who were divorced, her mother refused to talk about abortion and "when I told my dad, he cried all night and told me that this was something I would have to 'reveal' to my husband someday." She felt very alone, Baker recalls: "I cried all of the time, but I didn't want to burden my friends."

Her father called her the next day to say he wanted to support her in any way he could; he just hadn't known what to do in the moment. So Baker began looking for resources. All she could find were thinly disguised antiabortion messages. As a feminist, she says, "I didn't see anything that reflected my experience." Seeking resolution, she interned at CARAL -- the California arm of NARAL, one of the country's oldest abortion rights organizations. But when she would raise the lack of emotional resources for women, she confronted blank faces. It was, she says, as if admitting that she was struggling with her feelings meant that she wasn't really pro-choice.

Eventually Baker discovered several like-minded women in the Bay Area, and they founded Exhale, a non-judgmental post-abortion talk-line, in 2000. The group tried to eliminate anything that might stop a woman from calling, including words like "feminist" or even "pro-choice" in their materials (although Exhale is both).

"We didn't know if we'd ever get a call," recalls Baker. "But we got our first call the second night. It was from a father who wanted to know how to support his daughter." Five years later, Exhale gets about 60 calls a month -- and around 10 percent are from men, often wanting to know what they can do to help a daughter or partner going through an abortion.

In June, Exhale's talk-line is going national.

Exhale's approach to abortion centers on supporting women's experiences, rather than legal rights or lobbying. Haven, a hosting network in New York City, has a similar focus. Haven hosts provide a place to stay for women who travel long distances to have later-term abortions (and thus two- and three-day procedures) in the city. Hosts are vetted, and the vetting is to weed out pro-choice proselytizers as well as the pro-life ones.

Exhale and Haven are changing the way supporters discuss and approach abortion. This strand of the conversation that focuses on supporting women's complicated experiences instead of politicizing them, is gaining prominence -- and meeting resistance.

To wit, when Senator Clinton addressed 1,000 abortion rights supporters on the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade this past January, she both asserted her belief in Roe and said that abortion can be "tragic" for some women. Her words sent shock-waves through the major pro-choice organizations and spurred the New York Times to accuse the Senator of "recalibrating" her pro-choice position in preparation for a 2008 bid for the White House. In other words, she and politicians like Senator Kerry were backpedaling.

This seeming shift in focus in the national conversation, from "Keep your laws off my body" to "let's talk about feelings and sadness, and even (gasp) whether fetal life has value" actually has a long history.

One way of telling the story begins in 1980, with a 30-year-old counselor named Charlotte Taft. Ms. Taft was two years into her tenure directing the Routh Street abortion clinic in Dallas, Texas when, feeling enthusiastic, she decided to draw up a questionnaire for patients coming in for their two-week checkups.

Jennifer Baumgardner is the creator of the "I Had An Abortion" project and on the advisory board for Exhale and Our Truths/Nuestros Verdades. She writes for various magazines, including Glamour and the Nation, and is co-author of "MANIFESTA: Young Women, Feminism and the Future." A version of this piece originally appeared in the Fairfield Weekly.

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