Day One, a series of excerpts from Without Apology that describe the first attempt at telling the truth about abortion in Canada.
“Do you think I will go to hell for this?”
“Do you think I will go to hell for this?”
The young woman sitting across from me asks this question half in jest, but her eyes show me she is worried. We are in a counselling room at the Morgentaler Clinic in Toronto. She has come for an abortion, and it is my job to counsel her about the procedure, to calm her if she is nervous, and to make sure she is certain about her decision.
I have worked as a part-time counsellor at the clinic for seven years, after retiring from twenty years at Toronto Public Health, where I was a sexual health educator and counsellor. Each time I mount the steps of the clinic, I enter another world.
Shoppers, families, people young and old go about their business on the street outside, oblivious to the human drama playing out on the second floor of the office building on the corner. Each day when I have finished my work, I re-emerge into what I think of as the real world, but the women I’ve met that day stay in my mind: the fifteen-year-old who has come with her mother from Barrie, Ontario; the twenty-year-old student who, when the condom broke, took the morning-after pill but it didn’t work; the forty-three-year-old mother of three with an unemployed husband who, after using the rhythm method as she always has, knows she can’t welcome another child at this point in her life.
Women of all ages come. Women of every colour and every religion come. Sometimes they come more than once. They come alone or with partners, with mothers or aunts or sisters or friends. They are often astonished to see how many others like them are in the waiting room.
An excerpt from Ruth Miller’s chapter in Without Apology: Writings on Abortion in Canada, edited by Shannon Stettner.
