I had to escort today at Planned Parenthood. I lost the schedule and was reminded about 12 hours before my shift that I was on today and had to be there at 6:30AM. The sun hadn’t even risen yet. I went to a debate party for MoveOn.org and didn’t get to bed until 3AM the night before.
I didn’t wanna go, but I had to. Good thing I showed cause there were only two of us there and it was busy today. I complained about how much I hated it most of the morning. I hate the protestors, I had the hours, I hate the awkward moment when we approach the women and they don’t know if we’re with the clinic or with the right-to-lifers.
We had two rape survivors today. One woman who just came out and told us she had been raped, and another who we assume was raped because the guy we thought was her boyfriend turned out to be a sherriff’s deputy sent to escort her in.
There was one woman from rural Missouri who had gotten up at 3AM and driven 3 hours to get there. She had gotten lost on the way and had no way of knowing how to get home. I’m terrible with directions and as you can guess, I don’t spend much tiime in rural Missouri, but she happened to be from a town that I had driven through so I was able to give her directions. We talked about what a boring drive it is, and we chatted for about fifteen minutes about the clinic and the protestors. She was one of the few patients who had come alone.
Sometimes we as escorts become default counselors to the patients or their boyfriends. Not often, just sometimes. Here’s this white woman from rural Missouri, who probably doesn’t know many black people. I’m sure we have very little in common, but I could just tell that just having someone to talk to meant the world to her. That’s when I don’t hate it.
The protestors can get kinda racial, and since I’m often the only guy and always the only black escort I’m their favorite target. It rolls right off my back. But today, around 10AM all these kids, all black, all male, all under 18, started getting dropped off by their parents for some educational program. (Nobody tells the escorts anything, so imagine standing infront of an abortion clinic and all of a sudden all these young boys show up!).
The protestors were getting really racial with these kids and that’s just so wrong. I’m a grown-ass-man, I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for this, but these are just kids. These kids are trying to get educated on how not to get girls knocked up and have to bring them back as patients, and these rednecks are harrasing them. If they saw these kids in any other context, they’d cross the street to get away from them, and their trying to tell these kids, from the inner city they abandoned, how to live their lives.
Makes me sick.
But props to the parents who brought their kids to an education program at Planned Parenthood. How cool is that?
It kills me, pardon the pun, how the anti-choice protesters will play any minority card they think will ‘win’, even if they don’t give a rat’s ass about said minority outside of the abortion debate. I’ve heard of white anti-choicers smugly telling eight-year-old black kids that aborting ‘babies’ was exactly like the systematic lynchings of the past. I’ve seen able-bodied anti-choicers say to disabled people “Well what if your mom had aborted you for not being ‘perfect’?”
Of course, these tend to be the ones who think that you shouldn’t mingle with those who aren’t Your Kind and that disability pension is communism…*sigh*
But props to the parents who brought their kids to an edcation program at Planned Parenthood. How cool is that?
That’s freaking awesome. I hope Planned Parenthood is still around in thirteen years (God help us if somehow it gets shut down) so I can take my daughter to classes there.
I really don’t understand anti-choicers. As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll ever understand how they think that what they do is okay. If you’re even one iota in touch with reality, you MUST know how important it is to keep abortion legal and safe.
I didn’t get to finish my sentence because my daughter came over to be nursed and I got distracted and forgot =
you MUST know how important it is to keep abortion legal and safe.
… even if you don’t agree with it.
Your post is fascinating, thanks. 🙂
Many anti-choice protestors are simply sick people.
i used to know a guy who would let eggs rott in his fridge and save them for the protesters every saturday morning.
Those bastards deserve it. I don’t know why at first I found their racial tendencies surprising. I mean…golly gee…with all that “morality” they preach…you’d think anti-racism would also be practiced.
and for the parents bringin their kids up there to be schooled…right on.
Wow. I commend you for being an escort. That takes some serious cojones as a black man to do. Yay you! And as much as I try and be peaceful and fair those crazy protestors just make me want to strangle them with my bare hands. May they all rot in hell.
That is exactly my wifes point of view, her religion forbids abortion (but promotes all other forms of responsible family planning) yet she is very pro-choice.
Re-criminalising abortion won’t change peoples morals it will just encourage them to risk their lives to obtain it.
My friend’s mother is pro-choice, and she’s an ex-nun. (she left “honorably”- realized that the call wasn’t working for her anymore) She hates that it’s around, but doesn’t feel it her place to judge another being- that’s for god and the people involved to decide.
Issues on contraception and abortion seem to highlight failings in organised religions (here lies the one true path to salvation).
Makes me believe more and more strongly that the relationship between man and god is not hierarchial but very personal. One mans god is not going to be the same as anyone elses.
Way to go Dave
I still want to volunteer to do that
That’s so awesome you do that, as a man. Nevermind being black, but a man period. More power to you.
Thank you for doing that, I wish you had been at my PP when I went.
A pro-life friend of mine admitted freely that she and her group don’t ever try to stop non-white women from entering clinics. That both disgusted and disturbed me. She’s one of the few people who threw a hissy fit when they found out I was childfree. In her opinion I’m not doing me “white” duty by reproducing. I didn’t even bother trying to explain my muddled racial history to her, I let her go on thinking I was a traitor to the whitey cause, even with she and another guy being VERY insistant on the fact that I’m one who was intended to be one of their frontliners since I have naturally blue eyes and naturally blond hair. GAG ME!
Redneck culture must be exterminated.
…and I’m not so much against exterminating the Rednecks either…
To me, people like you are very brave and cool to do what you do. Thanks. 🙂
Here is me not being surprised at racist anti-choicers. And if they’re assholes enough to be racist in the first place, I am not surprised that they are assholes enough to shout racist things at innocent children.
The antis at my clinic hand out white plastic fetuses to everyone. You’d think that they might by now have twigged to the fact that quite a substantial percentage of our clientele is minority.
Thanks.
BTW, didn’t that Pixies concert rock?
At my clinic they have black and white plastic fetuses. The pamphlets are reversable so they can fold it to have a white woman or a black woman on the cover. This is stuff I just found out yesterday.
What a progressive group of racists!
Kudos to you for your services! I really want to be an escort at our PP, but right now my schedule does not allow it.
I don’t know about your antis, but around these parts (upstate NY) they are all lily-white geriatric men. I don’t rough up their shuffleboard games or anything of that nature…
Word. I don’t know HOW far you have to have your head stuck up your ass not to see that. My mother used to be anti-choice til I sat down and had a long talk with her about WHY it’s important. She didn’t even know why the wire hanger was a pro-choice symbol. She understands a lot better now, and even though she REALLY doesn’t agree with abortion, she supports a woman’s right to choose.
I think it’s cool that you are an escort.
How dose one go about getting a job like that?
Agreed. We get prayer vigils and people who sing hymms, and those people I’m totally cool with. I just don’t get how these people could harass women and, in this case, children in the name of God.
Thank you. That’s really sweet of you to say.
Ouch. No comment.
Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Anything I can do to confuse, confound and piss-off racists, less I be killed, I’m down for.
You know, you’d have to be on your feet for the better part of 5 hours…
Sounds like a good time to me.
I was part of an undercover investigation that NARAL did of “crisis pregancy centers.”
They found out that, in addtion to trying to talk women out of getting abortions and sometimes even TELLLING THEM THEY WEREN’T PREGNANT when they were, some of these centers (which are just fronts for anti-choice groups) that tried so hard to prevent white women from even considering abortion, were refering black women to the nearest abortion provider.
How fucked up is that?
that may be…
but it’s the truth. 🙂
hell yes! a damn worthwhile sickday used 🙂
although I really really wished they had played Alec Eiffel. but …just seein them together was enough.
Yeah, it was a very Dolittle/Surfer Rosa show.
You know we have an african american escort too and he totally gets targeted. So it isn’t just you 🙂 And they get very racial with him too, and to the AA patients, saying that they are supporting genocide and all this stuff. It can be very difficult to ignore, and I know what you mean about love/hate with it. I like being outside, I like helping people, and I love my fellow escorts, but I get sick to death of the Antis and some of the stupid things they say, especially when they are like 18 years old, rich and home schooled, which many of ours are. Ugh.
should have clarified that I got here from the clinic escorts community
So you don’t think I’m some random nut. Hi 🙂
And I was going to add that the antis where I escort ours are (IMHO) noticeably less persistent with minority patients. It makes me so sick.
It’a a wonderful way we choose to spend our free time, ain’t it…
Down here there kinda scary, in a distinctly midwestern way. Kinda like “The Children of the Corn” all grown up.
Re: should have clarified that I got here from the clinic escorts community
It’s a strange situation.
You want them to leave everybody alone, but to watch them give so more attention to white people… It’s like, they’re anti, they’re racist, and they’re hypocrits.
Every time you think you can’t dislike them any more, they surprise you.
Just contact Planned Parenthood or go to thier website.
Hmmm.
You are a hero
^_^
anti
…this is the paradox of the assholes being anti-freedom are the ones who keep BREEDING and the more driven intelligent people aren’t. How messed up is it that the protesters are the ones who DO need to abort their seed before they screw up the next generation!
I always thought it was funny that the clinic protesters don’t have the fortitude to protest as long as the patients have to stay at the clinic. By the time of day many of the patients can leave, the protesters have already gotten tired and gone home to harrass their own children and watch the 700 Club.
I also find it amusing that Bush won’t fund female birth control options but is willing to force single moms to give up their right to self sustaining and put them in single mother group homes, aka code for a christian concentration camp for “undesirables”.
Did you know that under Bush’s healthcare plan, birth control isn’t covered at all, but Viagra is 100% paid for? Hmmmm….
Re: anti
Yeah, I just found out yesterday that the abortion rate has gone up during the Bush administration. So much for abstinence education.