Project Manager in New Orleans discusses the economic and social reasons for her not wanting to have children at this time, the poor quality of healthcare available in Louisiana, as well as her frustration with the medical system for not taking more of a stance in defense of reproductive rights.
““My whole point is, well, if I’m dead at the end of the day, then your whole [medical] system that you believe in is a bunch of bullshit.”
ANNOTATIONS
Annotations coming soon
TRANSCRIPT
Interview conducted by Dan Swern
Conducted Remotely
June 27, 2023
Transcription Allison Baldwin
Project Aid Access
0:00
Today is June 27th. It’s 1:02 pm Eastern time. My name is Dan Swern and I am conducting this oral history over Zoom. I am joined today by
[Redacted]
[Redacted], thank you so much for taking the time and for participating in this project. We really appreciate it. Whenever you’re ready just please feel free to start from the beginning.
Okay. So, my name is [Redacted] and I currently live in New Orleans, Louisiana, and New Orleans is a little bit of a friendlier town to abortion and maternal health and that kind of thing than the rest of the state. Otherwise, this is kind of the Deep South. Contrast is that I actually grew up in [Redacted], so I have been able to see the stark differences through various points of my life. One state that has a lot of maternal healthcare, or just a lot of women’s healthcare in general, and then Louisiana who, especially in the past year or so, has dwindled to sadly nothing, so I will just start with growing up, that kind of thing.
I grew up in [Redacted], which is the immediate west suburb of [Redacted]. Um, I still say that it is [Redacted] because you would walk [Redacted] the street and technically it is [Redacted] proper, and as long as the [transportation] is in your district, I would call that [Redacted] as opposed to somewhere like [Redacted], which is not [Redacted]. Or like [Redacted]. That is many hours away at this point. So, growing up was a fairly normal childhood. Albeit, I have an autistic brother, so that probably sways some of my decisions on– especially on whether I want to raise children or not, and the need, and knowing that children are not this happy-go-lucky present of joy, that there’s a lot of real work that goes into having kids. And you particularly see that growing up with someone who has autism. You see your parents sort of struggle a little bit with that and you’re not so bamboozled with the rose glasses of like, “I want a baby! It’s going to be so easy.” It’s not easy and it’s definitely not easy anymore.
So, that being said, the immediate people surrounding me were my mom and dad, my brother. My grandmother lived with us. She was kind of our nanny until 2001/2002 when she died, so that was kind of back in the time when your grandmother lived with you, which is– was very different than it is now. You know, lots of older grandparents just live in nursing homes and, you know, it’s a completely separate household kind of thing. So, relatively normal. I would say that another big person that was in our lives was [Redacted] who was my brother’s aid, so there were a lot of women who were maternal figures in our life, and there was a decent amount of support there, which I can’t say the same for a lot of the people who I’m noticing now that have children who are my age, you know, they’re really trying to find, or pay a lot of help, to come help them. It’s just a very different contrast in my mind. Times were different then. You had grandparents that lived with you. And that’s not really the case anymore.
Okay, so, my mom is an interior designer. My dad works in advertising. We lived in [Redacted] pretty much all my life until I went off to college at [Redacted] and I hated it. It was in [Redacted]. I had to get the fuck out of there. So fast. It was, you just kind of saw yourself being boxed into this very suburban [Redacted] life and, you know, it’s not like a big theater school and, you know, for any industry. It’s kind of like a liberal arts, it’s really focused on ballet actually. You know, it’s up there with Julliard, but if you are in business or anything like that, it’s not like there are a lot of top finance firms recruiting from Butler. It is definitely considered a lower tier in that way, and I think, unfortunately, a lot of the schools in the Midwest are just kind of like that unless you went to the University of Michigan and that’s like a zillion people.
5:30
So, I quickly figured out that I didn’t like it there. Particularly because I went to an incredibly diverse school system growing up. You know, you could walk to school. It was probably a much higher tax rate than other areas that were immediately surrounding us. But you paid for the schools, and you could have twelve kids with two grand in taxes that were just dedicated to going to schools, and those were incredibly good public school systems. Again, there’s only me and my brother but public school systems– public school systems– but just public school, or the cost of school, has very much deterred me from having children myself. You see the very stark difference in, really anywhere now, but in New Orleans we have the very failed charter system, and unfortunately the guy who brought about its demise is, I think, running now for Mayor in Chicago, which is, like, terrible. Which scares the hell out of me. But that being said, the charter school system is here and then there’s lots of private schools. And then for a kid to go to preschool, again I don’t even think they would be able to finger paint yet, is like three thousand dollars a year. And that’s a pretty stark contrast to what I grew up with, which was a very diverse group of students. You had, like, any kind of economic background. You had any kind of, like, religious, race background, that kind of thing. It was probably still a very white school district, but it is a lot more diverse than other places I’ve seen, and particularly when I went to school in [Redacted]. It was incredibly hard to see anyone who was different from me. Everyone was bleach blonde, and white, and from [Redacted], small town [Redacted]; and they didn’t have much experience with, you know, anything that was outside of their, like, immediate culture, and unfortunately that’s kind of how things are in, you know, the Midwest and states like [Redacted].
So, very quickly figured out that I wanted to get out of [Redacted] and had visited a friend of mine in New Orleans during the first semester of college, so, somehow freshman year I somehow managed to scrap together money to buy a plane ticket to New Orleans, and then I was pretty much like, “Oh shit, I need to transfer here.” So, you know, and Tulane is still, you know, Tulane is still a very white school in general. There’s a lot of privileged people that go there, especially if they’re from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. But it was way more than what I was experiencing in [Redacted], and by that point I was just bored out of my mind in [Redacted]. It was a bunch of people that I considered bigots at that point. So, it probably took about a year to gather all of my information and then start the transfer process sophomore year. And by junior year I was in New Orleans, which was great. They actually offered me a ton of money to be there. Butler was broke, apparently, and I am still paying off student loans for them. They did not have that big of an endowment at all. But there was very much a push from Tulane to get people to come back after Katrina, and, you know, Katrina obviously devastated the area, but it also devastated a lot of the colleges because no one wanted to send their kids to college there. So, they actually offered me a ton of money and that helped me financially, very much. I’m still paying off student loans from them, but it is significantly less than whatever I paid for Butler and I kind of just erased Butler from my mind until this interview so, that being said, New Orleans is way better. There is just so much more of a culture here.
10:05
But it does have drawbacks. You know, [Redacted], for as much as everyone shits on it, it’s infinitely cleaner, better run infrastructure, better run government, in so many ways and Louisiana, New Orleans in particular, is really striving to make a change, but the rest of the state is really stuck in this concept of, or constant struggle of, freedom versus “I don’t want to pay anything in taxes at all and therefore everything becomes stagnant and broken,” and it’s just like this never-ending cycle of kicking the can down the road, which brings me back to more of the education-cycle of things.
Which is that being now, and during college I was working toward a Master’s in [Redacted], I got a Master’s in [Redacted] from Tulane. I worked at three [Redacted] jobs at this point in my career. Is it because I’m 33? You know, the ever-present cost of seeing the price tag on children’s education is very looming. And it’s not just like children’s education. It’s aftercare. Carpool doesn’t really exist here anymore. You know, you can’t be like, I remember back in [Redacted] people would carpool with each other and you would throw a bunch of kids in the car, and now, well, you can’t really do that unless– unless you’re like an authorized person to pick them up, and I just– I feel, and I see all of my friends who have kids who are kind of just in this survival mode because they want to– they want their own kids. I understand that.
I understand this maternal need or paternal need to have children, and it’s just not speaking to me, maybe because of my profession, and I kind of just, you know, being in survival mode all the time is kind of just not my schtick right now. And especially with Dobbs falling, as a female you’re already in survival mode all the time. You know, you have to go through this back channel of things all the time and you can’t even really search things on the Internet. You have to talk to other women that you trust about, like, their procedures, you know, what went wrong with? Or what went right? With them giving birth, or them having an abortion, or just like their symptoms because the healthcare system is just– It’s last in the country, first of all.
There’s especially since Dobbs, I think I said this in the other interview, there is next to no healthcare, no department of health, and the budget, even like three weeks ago, the budget got slashed by, for the department of health, again four weeks ago, by one hundred million dollars, which they calculate will actually impact the department of health by seven hundred million dollars and, you know, if you have a complication or a miscarriage, which one out of every four people do, or, you know, one out of every four pregnancies really, not even one out of every four people. So, with one out of every four pregnancies, you’re probably going to have a miscarriage of some sort. I really don’t want to be on a chopping block death table and worry if I’m going to bleed out or not. Or be so close to the brink of bleeding out that then, then they can save me. And so, with everything that’s going on, with how hostile the state is towards women, you’ve noticed it’s really hard to retain women as employees in Louisiana. It’s making the people who, like myself, who are in my friend group, wait a lot later for kids even though there is pressure from grandparents now to have kids. And there’s just a million reasons at this point to either delay until some legalities get worked out or just, you know, this becomes an amendment that we can have abortions safely. So, I was going to say, I think I monologued a bit there, a long time, so if you have a question, help me out.
15:00
Okay, let’s see, what was the next one. Oh, okay, so that’s kind of where I am a little bit currently. I can always go back to, um, okay, let’s see, so I’ve been, we’ll just start with background history of me and my husband. So, my husband is from New Orleans, so he doesn’t know much better and, like I said, I’m from [Redacted], so fortunately I do. So, we met, when was it? We met over Thanksgiving in New Orleans about nine years ago at this point. We’ve been married for the past eight months. So we got married last October. And the delay was very much because of– kind of because of COVID, but also because I really didn’t want him to wear a mask in photos and things like that. I just didn’t want there to be, like, restrictions on having a wedding, because I’m not so desperate to get married that I need to compromise my vision, personally. Which sounds ridiculous, but whatever, it’s fine. We already own a house together and so we don’t necessarily have to have this crazy wedding just to rush past the aisle to be wearing masks the entire time and to have our guests wear masks. And I did– I did require everyone to be vaccinated though, so that was a big. “No you’re not coming, if” at all. You’re not coming at all if you’re not vaccinated. I have no idea if anyone abode by that or not, but I was pretty vocal about it. I’m sure a few people did, and I’m sure a few people ignored the shit out of me about that, so that’s fine.
Anywho so, we met when I was working at [Redacted]. After my master’s in [Redacted], or was it, after my master’s[Redacted], and so I was working at [Redacted], it had been a year or two, something like that, and we hit it off pretty immediately, and then didn’t see each other for like three months, reconnected while watching a playoff Saints game, I think it was against the Seahawks, um, and kind of our friend group pushed us together in that way, and like pretty much immediately hooked up within that night, like after going to a bunch of bars. Bars stay open here until 4:00 am. Or actually, like, there’s 24 hour bars here, so they don’t even really need to close at this point, so, anywho, a very awkward breakfast later, we are still together, and I knew he was leaving for med school within four months or so, and the conversation I had with him after seeing him for like a month or two was very much like, “Look, we’re either never talking to each other again, or we’re being long distance. Make a decision.” And so, we made the decision of being long distance just because, God forbid I move to Florida, because I really did not want to. It is nice to visit there occasionally, but right now it is a bit of a hell hole, so I am glad that I no longer live there. That being said, [Redacted] is one of the more friendly places to move to, thankfully, um, and so he went there for a year, and he was already in training, um, I followed up and just kind of hung out for a couple months or so while finding a job, um, you know, we lived in this very small apartment with the two cats that I dragged from New Orleans with me, which he was none too pleased about, but like now we’re fine and they’re still alive so, it’s been– they’ve moved a couple times at this point, with me, and so we’ve spent about– he probably spent about five years in [Redacted] and I spent like three and a half, four years in [Redacted], um, that was when I got really involved with Planned Parenthood. I ended up on the board for Planned Parenthood. I think it’s like the [Redacted] chapter. I can’t remember. It’s basically this chapter that’s [Redacted], all kind of within that region.
20:00
And so, one of the biggest things that we did was kind of campaign and raise funds for [Redacted]. I really enjoyed it. I felt that it was kind of imperative to—and they were much older—I was the youngest person on the board, so they were much, much older. Mostly Jewish women that were on the board of just raising funds for [Redacted], and it was just wild to me that I was one of the youngest people there. And I felt that it was incredibly important, because you kind of see the writing on the wall living in Florida. It’s a much more conservative state than people seem to think it is. You know, it is never going to be this purple state that people think, you know, I don’t care how blue Miami makes it seem. It’s a gigantic state. It’s never going to be, I don’t think it will ever win a Democratic governor election or another senator at this point. Particularly now that the population has shifted so much just to ultra-conservatism. It’s not even ultra-conservatism. It’s like a cult. Probably, you know what it is, well it’s definitely a cult, but it’s like a culture war cult if you will. And so through my work through Planned Parenthood, I would, I was a clinic escort, also on the board fundraising for [Redacted]. I didn’t really like my job, you know, it was a bunch of– it was a Good Ole Boys club and then this one woman who worked with us who, it was painful to see her do so many backflips, mental backflips, like, always defending men, which is probably what invigorated me more to be part of Planned Parenthood, you know? Because I was just faced with constant opposition to basic women’s freedoms. And so eventually when [Redacted] was—my husband’s name is [Redacted], if I didn’t mention that—eventually when [Redacted] was done with residency, which I think was 2019, we moved back to Louisiana, and, you know, the choices were also like Mississippi, Texas, and I was very against going there, but New Orleans doesn’t really operate in the same ways as the rest of the state, thank God, because otherwise I would have gotten the hell out of here. Immediately. But the other options, particularly with his specialty, you gotta go to more rural or underserved communities. A lot of his patients are heavily diabetic. Maybe one hundred percent of the time they’re smokers. They need new stints, arteries, all these things, repairing blood vessels. Since he’s vascular surgery that’s the core of what he does, so found a job here, actually I found it because I was like I’m not fucking going to Mississippi. Again, I was pretty determined not to go to rural Missouri. Because they, in the last year of residency, they take you around, and as the doctor’s wife, as to be, or the spouse or whatever it is that you are, they cater to you very much that you, you know, they take you around the neighborhood and show you, “Oh this is where you could live, in this nine million dollar house,” and like, you know, I work in [Redacted], and I looked at this nine million dollar house and I was like, I will never be able to sell this to anyone. Ever. I don’t care how nice it was, which it wasn’t. It not worth nine million dollars. In the middle of Pattysburg, Mississippi. I don’t know who would by this from me ever again. Like, let’s get the hell out of here. And eventually I found him his job at [Redacted], because I got pretty fed up with his interview process.
And I actually found it during a Saints game. And I was looking through the job boards and it was like, I mean, it was very therapeutic in a way because, like, well technically we lost the Saints game, but that happens unfortunately. And it was a playoff game, which was even worse. But there was something good that came out of it because we were able to come to New Orleans and I found this job posting. It was incredibly late during the season.
25:00
Usually, you have your position secured in September, October, November and, as I just mentioned, this is playoffs football season, so that’s either February or January. You know, it’s very late for them to either interview or consider someone at that point. Fortunately, though, the card worked in our favor. I quit my job at [unclear], that was the firm I was at in [Redacted]. I was exceedingly happy to leave that firm, especially since our immediate bosses were just– just behind on the times. Then there was one good coworker that I worked with, her name was [Redacted]. She was actually, shockingly enough, she was incredibly progressive, um, but she was from the church of, I think it was Latter Day Saints. The one that they don’t, which one was it? The one that they don’t celebrate their birthday. I don’t remember if that’s the same one, but whatever it was. But she was incredibly progressive for that, and you would not think so otherwise. And I left some good people at the firm but I just, I could not wait to get out of [Florida] because it was an infuriating state, and at that point DeSantis was already– I joke around and say in power, in governor, because he was a governor at that point, but he really was in power, and he hadn’t swayed things to the kind of craziness that it is now. So, came back to New Orleans, took a few months just to be calm and not be in this survival mode, because I was supporting [Redacted] throughout all of residency. It was really my income that we were relying upon. And then he had, like, twenty-hour days. I maybe talked to him fifteen minutes a day.
And he’s got, like, super ADD, so he can barely pick up a cell phone for any reason other than it’s like work. I don’t know if an 80 year old told him he should never pick up his cell phone and learn how to communicate in that way, but he’s incredibly old school in that way where he just hasn’t learned that technology switch over and he’s my age. I don’t know why, but in any case, during residency I’m supporting someone and, you know, and especially my income, taking care of the house, making, you know, basically having to take care of a child while they're going after their dream. Even though he’s my husband, it’s still kind of one of those same things where it’s like, I’ve kind of been a parent for a little bit, so don’t need to do that anymore. So, we came back to New Orleans, took a few months off, then started working with a few recruiter friends of mine. Found an amazing job that’s at [Redacted] in New Orleans and, like the firm that I was in at [Redacted] versus the firm now, it’s just night and day. I mean, I say that the place I work at now is the best place that I’ve ever worked. And [unclear] was the worst place that I had ever worked, particularly because of the immediate managers being fucking bozos all the time. They were just idiots. And Republican too, which is just, uh, just gross, in every way.
So, what was it, not even six months into working, I got my job, I want to say, either October or November 2019. We had one normal Mardi Gras, and then during the rumblings of Mardi Gras lots of people started getting sick around us. And we were, New York and New Orleans were really those places that were ground zero, and we have a lot of people that come down from New York, whether they went to Tulane or any of the colleges here, or LSU, or any of that, we have a lot of people that are New Jersey, New York, Connecticut people, that come down here. They come down here for– just to have fun or Mardi Gras or whatever, but those two places New York and New Orleans pretty much had ground zero effect that happened for the pandemic, and, you know, everyone knows what happened with the pandemic. We got hit exceedingly hard. Lots of people died in our community unfortunately. It was, it hit hardest in the black community, for various reasons unfortunately.
30:00
Especially, if, you know, there was a lot of jobs that you have to be– still require you to be onsite, and we lost a lot of those people too. It was just a very weird time for New Orleans, but at the same time it’s like great weather, and it doesn’t look like the apocalypse outside, and it’s not snowing, and it’s very hard to reckon you can’t talk to anyone, but it’s still beautiful out. It’s like 60/70 degrees and all this other shit, and also back to having kids, you see everyone who had kids struggling to figure out what to do with them and school. And is this ever going to happen again? Like, am I ever going to have to deal with this? I was incredibly lucky in the sense where we have space in our home. It’s like a 2000-square foot apartment where–
This is not like New York where it’s less than 500 square feet and you’re stuck inside. We have parks everywhere, and we have places to kind of roam around, and I can’t imagine, personally, I can’t imagine being anywhere else, but it made COVID, unfortunately with all the deaths that went on, a little bit easier to kind of grapple just because you have an abundance of an outdoor area, and it’s nice out, and all these things that are not afforded to you, especially if there are states that are still snowing or just like sleeting or terrible weather. I can’t really imagine being in [Redacted] during that point in time because, like, the shittiest weather is really in March. So, I think all of COVID was an even further awakening, at least for me, that I really don’t want kids or way down the line when I feel like I can afford them at least. Again, it’s like for preschool, it’s 3,000 dollars for them to finger paint and, I am not an education person so I am sure there’s a lot of benefit in finger painting, but that 3,000 dollar paint better be shipped in from Rome or wherever for them to further their education, whatever it is, and then during the pandemic you see, you’re still paying so much for them to just be on Zoom calls, and then for the kids to be just kind of zonked out, and still don’t have the social skills and the kind of thing during that time. So, that’s my current gripe with the pandemic. That’s like a whole other reason why I don’t want kids.
But also, particularly with Louisiana, and I’m sure it’s a lot better with different states, again, there’s no, like, real health department here and you get this sense that hospitals are hiding under the guise of secrecy because they’re not reporting to the department of health. And we just had a, what was it? Senate session, um, where not a single bill was passed to, you know, protect women in any kind of way. I mean, it took a long time for even the pink tax to, like, be done, like, what faith do I have in a bunch of Louisiana politicians that will not even listen to me? I mean, they’re just listening to their Bible and their inner circle of men and, you know, maybe, especially like the older politicians, they’re not going to know anyone that is affected by an abortion or giving birth or miscarriage or honestly anything. It would take one of their granddaughters dying from a miscarriage for them to give a shit about any of it and that’s kind of the unfortunate reality of, not necessarily New Orleans, but all of Louisiana. I mean there’s just, there’s no help here. And I say that fully knowing that there are tons of gynecologists devastated that they have their hands tied, but it’s kind of one of those things where my husband is a doctor and he doesn’t really, they don’t really stand up to the laws and the politicians here. They do in a very soft manner, but the people that are often the ones that I see rallying behind, you know, making things better for women are just average people like me or you, or anyone who has been affected by a miscarriage, or someone desperately needing an abortion.
35:00
For various reasons, whether it’s domestic violence or they just don’t want a baby. There’s, like, a wide range of reasons, of things as to why people don’t really want children anymore. Including gun violence. Everything is terrifying there. I mean, you could just send your kid off to school and you don’t know if they’re coming home or not, and it doesn’t really matter if you sent them to the most expensive school in the district or not. Like at all. It’s actually a wonder that there are not more private schools that have had gun violence. I think there’s this stigma that it’s only public schools. Well, you know, if you roll the dice enough times, it’s going to happen at a really esteemed private school at some point. Or they’re going to take great measures to cover it up. I mean, it is like one of those only a matter of time things where it’s just not–
As much as there’s a maternal clock ticking, you kind of have to step back and say, do I really need another child in this world given that, you know, [gestures broadly] everything going on and everything is very uncertain and there’s no support and shit there’s not even– you’re not even allowed to carpool anymore at some of these schools, which I mentioned earlier, and the cost of everything is astronomical. Like, my husband and I both make good money, but can I afford more than one kid? Probably not. Which is just insane with the cost of living and everything has gone up and it– I have no idea how anyone who is lower income is even possibly able to make ends meet because the poverty level is here: I think the poverty income level is, I don’t know what the combined is, but if you’re single it’s like 29,000 dollars a year, which, that gets you nothing. In America at this point. I mean, I don’t understand why more people aren’t moving to Europe at this point because at least it gets you social services and things like that, so.
I’ve hit another wall.
Um, [Redacted], can you– I don’t think you said it earlier, but can you speak why you joined Planned Parenthood or why this is even an issue of interest?
Um, I actually, so there’s a couple reasons. A friend of mine, who I don’t see that much anymore, her in-law was on the board of Planned Parenthood, and I was like extremely bored in Florida. You know, I am not seeing my now-husband for any amount of time. I didn’t know anyone in [Redacted]. The only people I knew in [Redacted] were also doctors. Or like nurses, things like that, and they have incredibly hard schedules. So, at first, it was one of those things were, “Yeah, I’d like to help out,” that kind of thing, and then, you know, I contemplated it, it clicked in my head that, you know, the first place that I had gotten birth control at–because I was too afraid to go through my parents and what they would think–was actually at Planned Parenthood [Redacted]. And so it kind of dawned on me more like, okay, I don’t come from any kind of an extreme background or, you know, any– it’s just very average American almost, you know, where parents don’t necessarily have, like, a ton of money but they’re not like super scraping by every single second.
I mean there were tons of holidays where the thought of spending money on Christmas presents was, like, dire, but that’s also, that’s chalked up to fluff at a certain point. And so, you know, the first birth control that I had ever gotten was at Planned Parenthood. I didn’t want the scrutiny of my parents. I didn’t know what they would say. There’s a lot of stigma around it. And I really just– I wanted it kind of like for acne purposes, but let’s be honest, no I didn’t. That’s just not, you just don’t want to get pregnant. That’s a reasonable thing to want, especially in college and not have to bring that burden with you when you, yourself, are not a fully formed adult or have completely your own thoughts at any point.
40:00
So, a friend of mine in [Redacted] she had said, you know, she had teetered on being on the board, and she’s kind of flaky anyway, so eventually I joined the board and it was me and a bunch of sixty or seventy-year-old women, and they were all very well established in their retirement and their careers and things like that, like exceedingly wealthy women who were doing this because they had paid attention and seen, you know, all these changes and laws happening for the past decade and, you know, Dobbs had not been a decision yet, but you knew it was going to be even in 2014, you knew what was going to happen eventually, because you saw all of these politicians and, like, religious-centered political groups, they just kind of chip away at communities and states where they can and make it more and more unreasonable or unsafe to get an abortion.
And I thought that that was bullshit, so there was an inner fire in me to join Planned Parenthood and help in that way, if possible, and since I was the youngest, there was a lot of people who then I got to engage with and speak to, a lot of great authors, um, doctor, well, gynecologists too, Dr. Willie Parker was one of the people who spoke, and he is, was one of the, well, you– not is anymore since Dobbs, unfortunately. He was the last abortion doctor in Mississippi, and I had a lovely conversation with him. But, you know, he even knew it, he knew that it was a matter of time, that, you know, he was the last abortion doctor, but the time was coming for him to be, you know, none in the state. None allowed. I think he expanded to a few other states, but as a traveling doctor, so I don’t know. I haven’t kept in touch with him, but he was really inspiring to talk to.
I forget her full name, but the woman who wrote the autobiography for Ruth Bader Ginsburg was another speaker. I ended up talking to the CEO of Planned Parenthood a lot, um, not that she would remember my individual name or anything like that, I mean, there’s like a sea of people at this point, um, that she has to talk to. But it was just incredibly amazing that, especially in Florida, there was this very connected group of older women that were very pro-abortion and, you know, maternal healthcare, women’s healthcare, that kind of thing, because especially coming from Louisiana, I mean, we’re just, you know there are people of different races who are treated as second-class citizens, but the biggest population of second-class citizens in Louisiana is women and no one really gives a shit if we pass away or come within an inch of our life from giving birth. It’s just one of those things where they’re just so into their Catholic, fucking Catholics, or just their religious troupes where science doesn’t matter, you know, and it’s just– it’s incredibly disheartening and I’m glad that I’m not in Florida anymore. I think I’ve said that a million times, but it’s incredibly disheartening to live in states where nobody gives a shit.
And you know that the gynecologists care, but they’re too afraid to do anything about it, because they’re going to get sued, and it’s one of those things that’s hard to reckon with where you are always told to trust a doctor and now, particularly with everything, you know, you just don’t trust them. At all. So, I think I saw the writing on the wall when I was in Florida way earlier than a lot of people. I mean, I remember when Trump got elected, I was, like, sobbing for days. And it wasn’t just because of Trump. It was because I now will live in a reality where giving birth safely will not be an option within my future. And by the time, you know, I’m not willing to be an experimental lab rat for any reason because someone in a fucking Bible belt states just wants to have me pop out a million babies.
45:00
And then have me potentially die in the process of it or be traumatized from it. I mean, there’s enough women at this point who– they don’t want to give birth again because it’s terrifying. And it’s just, it’s like a sad reality that, like, and again, I commend all the people who got me into Planned Parenthood that were much older, it’s a sad reality that we now live in such a politicized time where at one point all these older women really cared about me safely giving birth or not, and now it’s a complete 180 where, you know, where my immediate friend group, or friend age group, let’s call it that, we’re all terrified about what could happen with us. And obviously younger because they’re going to grow up and potentially have kids, that kind of thing, on their own and then now, people who, women who are older, done having kids, things like that, they’re all, “What? Why would you ever have to worry about dying? Why would you? Why? Giving birth is such a wonderful thing!”
No, it’s not. It’s horrific. It’s such a horrific crock of shit that somehow everyone has been sold on that it’s, like, beautiful and– I understand there’s a lot of hormones released so you’re happy and your baby, if your baby is fine, it’s this beautiful moment. But it is also horrific laying on a table with half your organs out of you, and giving birth, and then being told that your options are very slim if anything goes wrong, and then you already have to be a superhuman and give birth, but then still be a superhuman double time, and then just not have a complication. I mean, there’s a million people that have complications with childbirth and the states that– particularly Louisiana and definitely Florida at this point, there’s just like a total disregard for women and treating us completely differently. I don’t know why, I don’t know what reason there would be to have children at this point other than just some, you know, maternal need. But there’s a lot of rationale screaming out at me saying there’s no reason for you to have kids at this point. Gun violence, healthcare costs, your own life, parenting becoming infinitely harder, education becoming more and more unaffordable and also decentralized. In any kind of way. I mean, it just seems like a different version of the wild wild West and why would I? Like, what is going to override me to think that I can beat the odds? Of millions, trillions, billions of people who already had to do all of this before me. Like, I don’t know, there is a little person saying to me, like, don’t fucking do it. It’s just, it’s too overwhelming, and until there’s some clarity on laws, and not necessarily clarity on, like, “you can’t even have a safe miscarriage or not,” like, that’s not clarity. There’s also the fear of going to jail too, if you have a nonviable fetus. I don’t know why, I just don’t know why people would even bother having kids at this point.
There’s too many hurdles. And it’s sad to think that I joined Planned Parenthood, I was just volunteering my time because there was just so much more hope then. To have kids in a society that would be, like, functioning and older people would give a shit about you. And the news wouldn’t be constantly yelling at women to get married. All the time. And it’s just, I can’t ignore that little voice, and again, it probably stems from being in survival mode for too long where it’s like, no, I don’t really want to put myself through it. I don’t- and, you know, if I did become pregnant, even if I am married, I probably would have an abortion at this point. It would just, it would give me a lot of pause where, even though I am financially okay and, you know, older and there’s a bit more of a support system, and I have a house, which is also horrendous for millennials to even afford a house at this point.
50:13
Like, I would have to give serious pause to having a child or an abortion because there’s too many risks that have been politicized and taken over by religious zealots that I just cannot fucking deal with anymore, so, so that’s another pause.
[Redacted], why did you reach out to Aid Access?
I reached out to Aid Access– a friend of mine had actually done it. I didn’t know that until after I had reached out to Aid Access, um, so Dobbs happened, and everything in hospitals was very up in the air, and lots of friends of mine who were gynecologists, again, I think I had mentioned this in the previous information, in the previous interview, but if there was a nonviable pregnancy you would call, you were supposed to call the Louisiana department of Health. And after Dobbs they just put an answering machine recording, just a recording that says, “You must call the attorney general.” Well, you’re not going to call the attorney general because then you might get investigated, and that is insane to me. There was a friend of mine, two or three friends of mine actually who almost died from having very late-term miscarriages. Like, after twenty-five weeks kind of thing. The fetuses were not viable and, you know, I know that reaching out to Aid Access for the abortion pill, that’s only up until a certain amount of weeks, but at least it gives me some safety and some coverage to be able to live a somewhat normal life instead of going to another state, which all of their shit is up in the air too, and then having to go through this probably very painful process of getting an appointment in a state that, especially, like, if you got an appointment in the state of Illinois, you could be there for, you don’t even know, you could be in Illinois for, like, days before you even got an appointment for an abortion, or let’s say it was just a miscarriage, you–
One of my friends, she had a normal miscarriage, and unfortunately the miscarriage was very late on in her pregnancy, and she was forced to give birth to it and, you know, that’s just horrifying. In my mind. You can’t just remove it surgically anymore. You have to induce labor and that person has to a) almost die, b) be left with, like, zero options, other than to just go through the process of giving birth, to a dead child, and that is, you know, it was never going to live outside the womb anyways, so when I contacted Aid Access, I think it was back in the fall, maybe, I had not gotten the two pills that, I can never pronounce them correctly, I will just butcher them [unclear]. See I can’t do it, whatever, so I got them in probably December or January and it’s just a safety net for me because I am just seeing so many people, who are my age, that are finally like, “Yeah, we are– we bought the house, and we got married, and we finally have some money to raise a child,” and that kind of thing, just to be crushed with a wave of miscarriages that happen, whether it’s, you know, the stress of the environment, it’s been the pandemic, or the Dobbs decision, or any of these things. I don’t know if I had ever realized how many people had miscarriages so much later on, but it just seemed that every single person that I knew had a miscarriage, for whatever reason, and, like, so many more of them have, and I guess it’s just because you have to talk out about it a lot more now and be like, yeah, we lost the baby. I think it used to be this really taboo thing where, and again, taboo thing where– and taboo to the extent where you didn’t even tell anyone you were having a child until three months. Well, we’re in Louisiana. It’s pretty easy to tell when people aren’t drinking.
55:08
So, you can’t really hide it that much, unless you were like a hermit. We don’t have, like, a snow season. Where it's shitty and you can hibernate inside and tell people that you’re sick all the time or, you know, whatever it is. I got Aid Access really as just a safety net and knowing that, again, I’ve been a clinic escort. I was a clinic escort in New Orleans, also in [Redacted]. And it’s the only one in New Orleans. And that one just immediately shut off any type of abortions happening for anyone. I mean, we have several– several universities in New Orleans. And I can imagine that there are probably college students, at the very least, that need an abortion for whatever reason and, not just college students but, you know, the vast amount of New Orleans is low income. You know, if you don’t have insurance, or you have bad insurance, that kind of thing, you might not be covered for birth control, and birth control–
I think I said this last time, but I did the math for how much I had spent over my lifetime in birth control—it was like 25,000 dollars. And that is with the cost of three IUDs in now– and that is, you know the cost of an IUD is significantly lower than it was twenty years ago, but my birth control used to be probably one hundred dollars a month with insurance. And you don’t, it’s obviously gone down a lot more now, thank god, but if you don’t have insurance, if you don’t have access to healthcare, which so many people in New Orleans don’t, there’s just– there’s so little options. And then the baby is born and there’s no support system. There’s no daycare, there’s no, you know, paid for daycare or subsidized. There’s no, I don’t actually know if you get this or not, but during the pandemic you got like a child tax credit. I don’t even know if that’s like a thing anymore. But if that’s gone then like, shit, how are you supposed to take care of this child? So, Aid Access was a very welcome way. I posted all over Instagram saying, like, “If you need the abortion pills, there is a way to get it. I have it. I will drive you to another state if you don’t want to get it through the mail.” I mean, it’s been tested for years at this point. It is safe. And that’s most of the reason was just a safety net.
I mean, there’s just been so much, there’s been too much– being a woman in every society is difficult. Now, I am a white woman so it’s less difficult than if I were Black or Latino or anything from another country, anything like that, but Aid Access was just another safety net, fortunately in this whole time of, really since Trump got elected, just an assault on women constantly. And I know things were eroding a little bit with the religious and conservative movement under the previous administration, but it was so blatantly in your face once Trump got elected, and people who were abusers were way more empowered because they have a guy who literally looks like them and talks like them is now President, and Aid Access was just another way that– I probably won’t tell anyone if I take it, whenever I end up taking it, you know, the abortion pill, if I have to take it, but it’s just another safety net to have in case, you know, we have another wave of, you know, I don’t know, a pandemic happening or just like, you know, living through another hellscape that is very Margaret Atwood Handmaid’s Tale kind of thing. I mean, we’re already kind of, we’re already in it.
1:00:00
And I just don’t want things to get worse, which sounds like I’m bargaining at that point, um, but if you’re in survival mode for so long you cannot leave options open.
[pause] Wait. What time is it? Oh, it’s like 1:00. Okay.
[Redacted], thank you. I was wondering if you could go back a bit. You briefly were talking about growing up in [Redacted]. Would you be willing to share a little bit more about your parents, what they did for work, and just a little bit more of a picture of what it was like growing up in [Redacted]?
Gotcha. So, um, I loved growing up in [Redacted]. I think I had just a far more diverse experience than so many other people that I meet. And that’s not to say that the majority of the school wasn’t white, like, it was, very much so, but you saw– you just saw– you were exposed to a lot of different things in life that maybe you wouldn’t have been in a very suburban, you know, picket fence, that kind of thing. So, grew up in [Redacted]. My parents moved, I think they moved from [Redacted] in 1989, which was the year I was born. My dad got a job at the [Redacted]. My mom was– she’s interior design now, but I think she was doing some kind of master’s in, like, painting at the Art Institute. I’m not entirely sure. It’s morphed since then. They’re creative people, they astound me in that way. They morph in their line of work, like, all the time. So, in any case, they had come from– they were– both of them were raised in Florida. My mother, her father died very young. I do not know what of. It’s kind of been a little bit of a mystery only because it seems like he kind of just died of alcoholism, but it’s never really talked about, and so she was raised by a single mother, which is unfathomably difficult, you know in the ‘60s,’70s. My grandmother was very much a force to be reckoned with. She probably smoked, like, several packs of cigarettes a day. She had a gin martini by 9:00 am. She was a very loving grandmother, but very clearly weathered by having to raise kids in a very patriarchal, not very just society, you know, she could only get a job as either a librarian or a secretary, those were the only jobs back then, and she had actually grown up in [Redacted], which, funny enough, both of my parents, their respective parents, they had all grown up in [Redacted]. Not together, very separate areas of either [Redacted], and I guess when Disney came about everyone just migrated to Florida. Because everyone thought there would be a shit load of jobs there, which I guess there were. I mean, like, Disney built a gigantic theme park, so they weren’t wrong in that sense, so everyone had moved to Orlando. Somehow they had met after college. I think they were working together. [Redacted] I actually have no idea if that publication is even around anymore. But no matter, so both had parents that came from [Redacted], uh, moved to areas of Florida. My dad’s side, uh, so my mom’s side was her and her sister and then her mother, which was my grandmother, and then her father had died somewhere between the time when she was like 6 and 9, something like that. I think that my mom’s sister had taken it the hardest, um, because she’s probably like 9 at that point, so she has way more fond memories of her father. I don’t think my mother had like a, you know, there’s not a whole ton of memories before you’re like 5.
1:05:00
There’s probably a few, but there’s not like an immense amount so that’s my mom’s side. My dad’s side is very[Redacted] people, um, my dad has– had three other brothers, now he only has two. Unfortunately Uncle Ken passed away, um, like in December actually, and so he, it was four boys and two very Catholic parents, and they were florists in [Redacted], and they had moved down to Florida to open a floral shop and, you know, that kind of thing. And they were florists their whole lives. Eventually somehow my parents met, I have absolutely no idea how, but they got married in Florida and then they moved up to [Redacted], um, like probably right before they had me. I was always told that they found our house, like, within two months of me being born, so I’m sure they were setting things up still, or, like, painting, or things like that. I’m sure it was absolute chaos, which I am not sure that I could ever do. That would just be absolutely insane to me, like fuck it, whatever, but so they had me. Three years later they had my brother who is—we didn’t know it, obviously, at birth—but autistic. He is, shit, how old is he now? I’m 33, so he’s got to be 30 at this point. So, he’s like three years younger than me.
I don’t have a ton of memories of before me and my brother. Like, I don’t have a ton of memories of me being the first-born kid. I’m sure there’s like a few, like I remember playing with goldfish or whatever it is. Which is fine, that’s a normal, happy memory, pretty colors in like a fish tank, you know, that kind of thing. I do remember very distinctively growing up that both of my parents worked. They had too. I’m sure even back then, well, it’s like leveled out, I think a lot more now, but [Redacted] was probably a more expensive place to live. It was more akin to being in New York City, especially back then so both of them, both of them worked. My dad worked at [Redacted], um, I don’t remember exactly where my mom worked but she was an interior designer in [Redacted], and so we were probably, for the first like ten years of my life, probably raised by my grandmother. And she was great. She was very mean. She was great. She really loved us in every kind of way, but, um, I have a very funny memory, and this kind of shows how different the ‘90s were and just from now because this would never happen.
And so, my grandmother had dyed, red hair and she would pick me up in this yellow convertible that wasn’t a Jag but it looked like a Jag. It was, like, very boxy like one, with a scarf, like, very glamorous, dripping cigs in the carpool line, and I have this very distinct memory of her giving me a twenty-dollar bill and me as a kid going to the gas station and getting a carton of cigarettes. That would, like, never happen today. She would be, like, in jail. But it was a very different time. It’s actually really funny. I know exactly which gas station it is to this day. It’s right by this grocery store. It was a Gulf 76 and, again, we were in the convertible, so like I’m going up to the, I don’t even know, the cash register guy was probably just bewildered. There’s this five-year-old asking for a carton of cigs and that would last maybe a week. Like, smoking back then was a very different time. But other than that, because that makes her seem awful, you know, she raised us, and back then, you know, they didn’t really have 401Ks back then, or they didn’t have the concept of 401Ks. Your grandparents, like, lived with you unless you were, like, fabulously wealthy.
1:10:00
Like, I didn’t know many other people, actually there was a lot of people on my block that had grandparents live with them, and that was kind of like the in-home care. But we were on the block that was like—you could probably look this up on like Google Maps—but like we lived on [Redacted], which is one block away from the dividing line of [Redacted], and then the rest of the area, like, in [Redacted] was [unintelligible] so it was not great of a community. Like, there was one side, it was wonderful, and I loved [Redacted] and it was incredibly diverse because it had this spillover from [unclear] that kind of thing, and maybe I’m just like a total psychopath because there was like a hint of danger in there, but it also, it opens your eyes a lot wider, too, you know, to other people’s way of living within economic disparity or, you know, there’s really rich people in our town too, but we lived on this dividing cusp of, like, all your friends were hanging out in the street and their grandparents were watching because you had all these people that were, like, living with them as, you know, grandparents and watching the kids, and that kind of thing, and then you had this other side of [Redacted] which was like fancy mansions that was even farther from the dividing line of [Redacted], where it’s like big houses and, like, grandma didn’t live with them or whatever it was, so I think in some ways it was very well balanced even though, if you asked my parents, they’d probably felt bad that they lived in that area because there was such a spillover of crime, I mean, I’ve never not had a bike stolen, right? There isn’t one point in time that, like, my– what was it? I think my dad was a baby, no, not my dad was a baby, I was a baby and someone came in behind my dad into the garage and held a gun to his head and said, “give me your car,” and fully knowing that I am a baby inside the house with my grandmother and everything, and he was like, yeah, fuck it, “take the car,” it’s like a shitty Honda anyways, right? So, it was just, it was, I don’t know if it was very average American, but it was very diverse in a way that you understood other people had it much harder than you growing up and you appreciated things a lot more than probably, I mean, we didn’t even have cable. Like, do you know how many reruns of Maury I’ve watched, like, so much Jerry Springer.
Like, we did not have cable. People who– I remember people who had ice cube machines, like, in the panel of their refrigerator, like, those people were rich to me, so I think it was a perfectly normal fine childhood, but I also recognize that there was a lot more diversity there, thankfully, so I’m not so blinded by the plight of other people. Like in the past couple of elections they were like, “I didn’t understand that people were living like this.” [haughty, affected voice] Like no, I had seen that from an earlier age where friends of mine were incredibly poor, or living off of food stamps, and then there’s the other side where it’s like, you know, their parents gave out the king size candy bars for Halloween or whatever it was. So, let’s see.
My grandmother passed away in, I would say either 2002 or 2001. I can’t remember, but it was after 9/11, and I think that’s when things got a little bit harder. Because, mmm, it’s a weird perspective, I don’t think my grandmother and my dad got along that well, so I’m sure my dad was like thrilled when she passed away, which is like sad to say but like I’m sure he was like, “Shit, that’s a burden off of my, off of me, personally.” But think that my mom, from what I recall, I think my mom was so fed up with working, and her mother had just passed away, that she wanted to take a couple– a couple years or so to be a stay-at-home mom, and at that point when you are kind of raised, well, you are raised by your grandmother at a certain point, but you’re also raised by your community and the community of people who live on your block, like the concept, I think New Yorkers and Brooklyn people really understand this, but like your community of people were the people that lived on your block.
1:15:16
Two or three blocks over was not necessarily like your people. Those were not the people that you saw every day, so you know, you were able to go outside, play, you know, the street games, all the things, you know, you had parks nearby. And astonishingly enough New Orleans does not have that many parks nearby where you can just send a kid off and go and play, and there’s a jungle gym, and you don’t have to worry about, “Oh shit, when are they home?” You just like, you know, it’s the time before cell phones, and then you got cell phones, and, like, then you could only play Snake on your cell phone. So, it was a very interesting technology time where you had TV but you still had to call your parents' houses and let them know where you are and whose house you were at, so it was this incredibly interesting, and I think at that point when my grandmother died it was a little bit more of a similar time. When she passed away it was right after 9/11, so everything kind of became infinitely harder. You worried about your kid’s safety a lot more, whether they were in school or whether they were where they would say they were gonna be. And my mom wanted to take time off, which at that point, you know, a lot of kids– after 9/11 happened you were not so mystified by the world that you don’t really know what’s going on. There’s not a lot of naïveté. That happens when that occurs because there’s the months, and like the day of 9/11 I remember going into my grandmother’s room, and she was sick but she was, like, with it at that point. She was pretty sedentary in her bed but could move around in, like, her small room. And she was like, “Come here now,” and I remember seeing the second, you know, plane hit the building and then you were just supposed to go to school because school started at 9:00 am. And you’re just like what the fuck is going on? And especially the fear of, like, “Okay, this just happened in New York,” [what if it happens here]?
So, there were just fighter jets everywhere for weeks at that point kind of surveilling everything, and I think during this time of when my mom decided she wanted to be at home, I’m already grown up at that point. Not fully grown up, but it’s a very big different shift, and I think things got a little– a lot harder because with the reality of my brother being, what 2001 was, like, yeah I wouldn’t have even been 10 yet, I was like 9 or something. I don’t even know, I was in sixth grade or something, I remember that. Whatever the math is for me being at that age, right. So, I think for her, this big reality of, you know, my son is now 6 and still, like, talking, no, not even talking, completely mute, and we have to figure out schooling and things like that, and do we have to be in a different school district? Does he need to go into a different school? Do we need to pay for that? Just like all these things of a perfect storm where, I mean, I know that a lot of eldest child and also eldest female siblings joke that you then become a parent very fast once there’s younger siblings there, and then you have to be the most responsible one, but there’s then a completely different element happens once, well, a) 9/11, but b) when you see that your brother is only going to be working at, like, McDonalds for the rest of his life. So, there’s an immediate shift that you’re always going to be, not strapped to someone, but you kind of are. You have an immediate sense of responsibility that is much heavier than a normal nine-year-old would normally deal with
1:20:00
And there was lots of other people who I met who feel exactly the same way where they’re the eldest child, and the second child has autism, or maybe it’s flip-flopped, and so I think once that 2001/2002 happened it became a lot harder when in high school. I don’t know anyone that gets along with their daughter in high school. It’s probably such a rough time for the parents, and then so much more is going on at least for my brother, a whole spectrum of things, and then by the time your kids are in high school you’re talking to a completely different human at that point. And I used to kind of joke that the stages of kids– because I used to nanny a lot so I’ve taken care of a lot of kids, done a lot of carpool lines, all these other things, especially during college, that was how I supported myself. I had two other jobs and I was nannying, like, you know, I totally went out all the time, don’t get me wrong, but I was still– still taking care of other people’s kids. I think that, like, once you’re in high school, and you’re figuring all of that out, and you’re seeing so many people spend time taking care of, especially, like, my brother or, you know, that kind of thing, and all the other people that, because of [Redacted], you know, I met a lot of other siblings that were like me, there was just an immense more burden than, probably like the guys don’t really grapple with that, but the females do because you’re already kind of born with someone, like you choose to have a child, well, sometimes you don’t choose to have a child.
You choose a lot of the time to have a child and sometimes not, and you have the ability to choose whether you want to keep it or not, frankly, up until like a year ago at this point. But you are born with someone who is permanently attached to you, and that is a hard thing to reckon with that you can’t ever really fuck up. Like a lot of the other people that I know, shockingly, a lot of us are in finance. A lot of us are in very stable, money making jobs because we know that somewhere down the road, even if we had kids or not, um, you know, they have to be supported in some kind of way. So, that’s a very– that’s a kind of odd thing to kind of grapple with very early on, so I think that eventually I wanted to get the fuck out of the house by the time I was I was out of high school. I was like, get me out of here, I wouldn’t say that it was a toxic situation, but it was just like my parents have too many other things going on, don’t pay attention to me, just let me do my own shit. But then they’re trying to parent at the same time, and it’s a whole clusterfuck of a mess, and no one necessarily knows how to speak whatever language, because you have two kids that are very different in age but also very, very different in mentality at that point. So, it’s like you’re bobbing in between two completely different spectrums.
And I went to college, and this is a source of contention with me and my mom, she freaked out about money all the time, all the time. I mean it was not a normal amount of freaking out about money. And it probably comes from a generational thing about money, where her mom was a single parent, so that trickles down in that kind of way. And so by the time it was college, I was basically told, “Oh, we can’t afford college, things like that.” And I just wanted to get the fuck out of dodge. I was like get me out of here, I’ll go to [Redacted]. Like, I don’t know anything different at this point. I think I had a few other friends that went to [Redacted] or [Redacted] over there and I was like great, I’m going, I’m getting out. Awful decision, obviously. I already said that at this point. I should have taken more time to figure out where I actually wanted to go or it could have been a good thing because I did get a lot more money the second time around applying. I might not have gotten as much money had I gone the first time around. I don’t really know. Time will obviously tell with that.
1:25:00
But my mom was so focused around money. She signed me up for all these student loans, like I had a student loan for, like, 500 dollars, which is stupid, and I incurred, like, 7,000 dollars in interest, which was like horseshit at this point. So, I don’t think she knew what I was doing, she wanted me to stay in-state and not just like in-state, like, in [Redacted], and I very much knew that I needed to get, not that my childhood was bad, but you just need freedom at that point. And I was like, “I’m not living in [Redacted], I’m not doing a commuter school.” Things like that, like, no disrespect to people who do commuter schools, but you just kind of know sometimes that you need to get out of your immediate environment, but there’s also too many people I saw that graduated and they never left home, like the hometown area if they went to those commuter schools, and so like, one of the commuter schools was like [Redacted] and I was like, I’m not fucking going there, absolutely not. Like, I would literally never leave out of my parent’s house at that point in time, and honestly a lot of them haven’t. A lot of the people that were my age they maybe just now have gotten their own apartment and they haven’t really expanded beyond what they immediately knew in their comfort world and things like that, and it was wildly expensive too, it was like forty-grand a year for a commuter school, like it’s not even that good of a school, this was not like a theater school from like the Ivy Leagues or whatever it was.
There was [Redacted] and that is basically kind of considered an Ivy League, but like I am not smart enough for that. Those kids are, like, way too smart. Like, those kids are way too smart at that point. So, since then, and obviously I came to Tulane, so I’ve been established in New Orleans for a while.
My parents decided to, well, I don’t know if decided to or kind of forced to move, they– my dad was working for [Redacted] for like twenty-five years. I don’t know which kind of bankruptcy they had, but it’s the one where it reorgs. I think it’s like Chapter 11. It’s Chapter 11 or Chapter 7, I can’t remember, and so [Redacted] had to reorg, so mass layoffs happened but there was non-competes that all of them had, and they all got severance and things like that, but you couldn’t work. I don’t think you could work within four states surrounding [Redacted], so he had to go to– shit I forgot what it’s called. There’s like a [another job opportunity], and everyone loves it, and I have no idea what it’s called at this point, but whatever, neither here nor there. I’ll probably remember it honestly in like two hours from now or something. So, he went to go work there, and I was in I think my senior year of college when they had told me, hey, we need to move for dad’s work, you know, that kind of thing. He can’t work in [Redacted], like there were certain other major markets too, like, he couldn’t work in [Redacted]. He couldn’t work in [Redacted], although I don’t really consider [Redacted] a major market, but I guess some people do. He couldn’t work in [Redacted], that was another major market that he couldn’t work in. So, he pretty much either had to go to California or New York or, like, Massachusetts, right, so they called me senior year and said we are going to move to New York and at that point I was like, “Eh, New York’s terrible.” Whatever. I went to school with so many New Jersey and New York and Long Island kids. I was like, “Why would we move to Long Island?” To hell with that. And then I ended up loving it, so ate my words tremendously because my senior year, going into my senior year actually, so they basically told me my junior year, because I retract that, they had told me my junior year when I had just gotten to Tulane, “Hey we gotta move,” and then by senior year, going into senior year that summer, I had just had basically, you know, the most transformative year of my life, didn’t know a single person at Tulane except, like, one person, and I didn’t really talk to them. It was just one friend who I had visited to go see Mardi gras, whatever.
1:30:06
So, most transformative year. Probably developed a lot more anxiety as one does when there’s like a free amount of alcohol everywhere in the state of Louisiana and you could enter the bars when you’re eighteen. So, you could very easily get a drink and you don’t really need a fake ID for any of it. So, went up, kind of did like a, I did like a whole road trip through like twenty states because I just didn’t want to talk to anyone after a year of having to make a whole new batch of friends, and being so far away from home, and knowing that I wanted to take this giant leap forward of, like, just getting out of the Midwest and my parents and things like that. Like, it was a very scary year and also the first year that, like, you didn’t live in dorms. So you lived in dorms if you were a freshman and then a sophomore and then junior year, so it’s like having to pay an energy bill for the first time, having to pay rent, needing to have a job to not blowing all of your alcohol money, being able to pay rent, balancing your student loans so you don’t blow all that in alcohol too. All these other things and you’re just given an immense amount of responsibility in one year. And I think I had a panic attack and said, fuck it, I’m going on a road trip, and so eventually went to like twenty states, stayed with a ton of people that I had grown close with over the year at Tulane, ended up in Long Island where my dad had rented. It was like a– I don’t know if you’re familiar with houses in Long Island but they’re these houses that basically have like a mother-in-law suite that are on the basement kind of floor, and so for like a couple of months or so I would go to New York City during the weekend, and then during the week I would cook at home, developed very good cooking skills actually, but would go, like, surfing and would learn how to catch my own, like, mussels and shrimp and clams and things like that, things that you don’t think New York has to offer or they would be disgusting and watch a whole bunch of TV, probably watch a whole bunch of Maury.
And that was the summer, I can’t even remember what summer it was, it was probably the summer of [Redacted], something like that, and I eventually had to come back to school, obviously, but did that for like three months, and then did a whole road trip back seeing the kind of same, not the exact same people, but went to a various amount of other states, and I was completely by myself, um, you know, paid for my own gas money, had no idea how, I think I just had some kind of savings or something that was stock piled up.
Because my parents didn’t give me money often. I think I got– I think I got, like in college, I think it was fifty bucks every two weeks. So, I was probably pretty envious of the Connecticut kids who had a credit card. Like, must be nice at that point.
Oooh, someone sent me a message. I’m kind of ignoring work right now. I put myself on do not disturb but that doesn’t matter to people. Anyway, so from there, from leaving Long Island, which, you know, I would shit on the whole time, but then I ended up loving this place. I was like this is incredible, the pizza here is phenomenal, like, every single grocery store you’re yelling at people over the counter. [Redacted], so made my way back down, finished out school. It was probably the biggest year of growth, one of the biggest years of growth that I’ve had.
1:35:00
And then went back to school. I think I had to do an extra semester because I had transferred for Tulane. And then I was pretty sick of school. I still really hate school, so I’m sure school was really shitty for me when I was much younger, which I’m sure my parents knew, but I’m not sure they were able to process at the time. But then I think I started studying for my [Redacted], and I took like a month to go visit a friend in Paris, and she had a very hoity-toity aunt and uncle and they had a really cool apartment there. it was, like, way bigger than my house even is, like, I bought a house and they were living large in France. Don’t know how I had that connection. At all. But stayed with them for like a month then started grad school. And so that is a very long-winded explanation of my childhood and my parents and things like that.
[Redacted], thank you so much for being so generous with your story and sharing that much detail. It was really lovely. I was just curious if there’s anything that you want to talk about that we didn’t talk about yet, that you wanted to make sure gets communicated. Why you decided to do this story or anything else that might be important to you.
Um, I don’t know other than, I think it’s incredibly important to me being able to share it because I am in a very unique position where I live in a Southern state which has next to no rights for women’s maternal health at all. I am incredibly fortunate enough to be married to a doctor. But I don’t drink the Kool-Aid. And I don’t necessarily think that all doctors are there to help you in every single way possible because also the law is preventing them from helping them in every single way possible. And I kind of see through, I don’t see through rose-colored glasses like a lot of people, you know, spouses who are in the medical community do. Like, there’s a lot of people, I have friends, they’re nurses, they’re anesthesiologists, they’re surgeons, or they’re teachers, right? They teach residents, they teach med school, that kind of thing, and I think that, I don’t know if this is just me being jaded, but, you know, I don’t see a lot of doctors standing up for patient rights. I see a lot of them conforming to the hospital. And I understand there’s a certain amount of conforming that you have to do because you want to have your medical license and things like that, um, and you obviously want to keep practicing something that you spent your whole life achieving and striving for, but I also feel like– I feel very disappointed that doctors have not been vocal enough and that there’s an insane amount of fake clinics that have popped up. And there are no doctors there. There’s barely a registered nurse there. In many states it is very illegal for nurses to read off a sonogram or whatever it is, you know, a doctor has to be there, and it’s just I don’t see– I don’t see enough of them going against their employer, and I see a lot of conformity. And it’s hard to talk to other doctors that are in the system, again, they’ve fought their whole life to be there. And so whether it is– I’m not trying to say that they’re indoctrinated but they kind of are, you go through medical school and are taught that patient is the first care and blah blah blah, yada yada yada, that kind of thing, but there’s this business aspect to every hospital and none of them understand the business aspect to the hospital.
Like, every single person that I talk to they’re like, “Oh well, that’s just what they’re gonna decide,” and it’s so passive, and it’s infuriating in my opinion, and you see, again, you see fake doctors, fake science, fake clinics all these other things where there should just be no religion that is actually involved in this whole process. And I’m stuck between this space of I’m married to someone that is within this system and, unfortunately, they don’t see it with a kind of clarity or disparage that I do.
1:40:06
And that was kind of the most important reason and I understand that for our firm– I got permission to be published in any kind of way for this because we are registered [Redacted]. We have to get approval before we make any kind of donation to literally anything, or talk to a publication, or any of that kind of stuff.
And so I thought it was incredibly important to, even if it’s anonymous, just be on the record and say, you know, doctors don’t really have their shit together in that sense, and they are not taught, unfortunately, that there’s the administration behind it, and they’re kind of those, like, book nerds in a way, sadly, that they’re not standing up for anything, and I understand that there’s medical associations that are like, “We strongly suggest that you don’t do this.” Well, I don’t see a lot of them getting angry. I don’t know why more of them aren’t angry and a lot of them are very solemn and they’re like, “Oh, it is the way it is, my hands are tied.”
And there are ones that are angry, don’t get me wrong. There are ones that are protesting that kind of thing, but it is very few. It is very, very few. And at core basis they have all had the same medical education and experiences, and I understand that politics can go from a various range of people but it is infuriating that everyone has a set curriculum and then there are people, even within that system, that are hindering women from getting the best care. And whether that is because of their religious beliefs or because they are on the business side of things and they’re just seeing dollar signs everywhere, it has been incredibly frustrating, and trying to explain to my husband why I don’t think it is safe to have kids in America is this constant battle of, like, he believes so strongly in the medical system because he was, he has now been taught all of it and he sees my point, and then my whole point is, well, if I’m dead at the end of the day, then your whole system that you believe in is a bunch of bullshit.
So, at some point you have to, like, understand the ins and outs of the reality of a whole bunch of politicians making a whole bunch of stupid-ass laws, and I don’t think– I don’t think that they are there yet. I think that gynecologists are all there, but I don’t think that other realms of healthcare are there. My husband is not a gynecologist. So, he does not have to deal with those specific things, but eventually those healthcare issues, maybe there’s a miscarriage or something, you know, something, he will eventually get a case where he will have to repair [Redacted] from a botched abortion. Like, that will happen at some point in time, and I don’t think it has happened at such an immediate floodgate effect yet, I think it has obviously impacted gynecologists and nurses that are within OBGYN, and I think that they understand it, but I don’t think the rest of the medical community is as outraged as they should be. Because when one thing happens a domino effect happens, and I don’t think it has fully come to terms yet, and I don’t, unfortunately, I don’t think enough women have died for anyone to really give a shit. So there.
[Redacted], thank you. Actually, there’s just one more question I have. I was looking through my notes. When we last spoke you were very generous about talking about your history and your relationship to contraception as well as your gynecologist and I was wondering if you might be able to share a bit of that.
Yes, let me move my mouse around to pretend that I’m still here, on my work. So, let’s see, okay, let’s see, okay, um, I got my first round of birth control at Planned Parenthood [Redacted], I think I mentioned that already, then was on the pill for a while, and then I think in [Redacted], um, yeah, in [Redacted] was when I got my first IUD.
1:45:00
Now, I have the one in the arm and I had gotten a replacement of the one in the arm, I think it was the first time that I talked to you, I had just gotten the replacement. And those are wonderful. Highly recommend those. They are pain free. They are amazing. I scream them from the rooftops. But, you know, you have birth control for a long time, you can have scares and there’s hormone issues. Millions of hormone issues. I mean, the amount of, I don’t know if you remember this type of birth control pill but it became very popular when I was in college, and a lot of people actually at [Redacted] had it. It was called Yaz. And like people were having blot clots like crazy on it and also nearly dying from that so that’s lovely and great, I guess, so never wanted to be on one of those. Eventually got to [Redacted] and I was incredibly nervous about getting an IUD, which goes up inside of you, um, and so I didn’t want– it wasn’t new but there was still– there was kinks to be worked out. That was probably sometime in 2014/2015, whatever it was, and I got one. I kind of have to remember this a little bit, I’m pretty sure I got one because of Trump. I’m not even kidding. I saw the writing on the wall so fast. I was like sobbing for days when Trump won and it had nothing to do with the fact that he’s a fucking creature from the Black Lagoon. Because he is, and he deserves to be in jail for life at this point, and he’s an abuser in many ways, but it was just you already knew what was going to happen. You could see it from miles away. That birth control would become extremely more limited, abortion would become more and more limited, because with individual counties and states feeling more and more emboldened to restrict things.
I remember having so many arguments with men thinking they’ll do the right thing and it’s always men saying that shit. I remember I barely talked to my husband for a year because he’s so fucking naïve about all of this. And I was like screw it, I’m getting an IUD, and so I got one. It was called Skyla and it was horrible. It was like the worst experience that I had ever had. So, they put it in, and it’s a three-year one specifically and it’s actually, I’m a pretty short person, so it’s kind of meant for teenagers and short people, and like if you’re very, very young, and like it’s a smaller IUD. Just in general for people who are way shorter. I mean I am only like 5’3” so there’s, like, lots of people who can benefit from that, right? And so I got it and it was like a horrific experience where the gynecologist, you know, she wasn’t an OBGYN. I think she was just OB because she didn’t deliver babies or whatever it was. I don’t know the difference, but she didn’t deliver babies and I was on the table, she implants it, she hits the uterine wall, which sends my whole body into this like shockwave. I, like, lose vision.
All of this was the weirdest thing, and I don’t know if it’s called hypotension or hypertension. But I essentially went into either of those. I thought I was fine. I didn’t know anything was going to happen. I guess I was just me being naïve about it. Other people had told me how it hurt, but they didn’t give that graphic of details. And so she ends up hitting the uterine wall, which is shockwaves down your entire body in the most excruciating pain I think I have ever been in. I could very much say that it could be very similar to labor. It was just, again hyper- or hypotension and my limbs just started shrinking up like this, and my hands, weirdly enough, did this. I remember trying to unfurl them because and everything, for whatever reason, I don’t know if it’s your blood sugar spikes or you’re in shock or something, I remember not being able to see my hands and trying to open them up with each other and I’m screaming in the room, “Help. I need water,” no one comes, like, at all and I’m like, “Water” And I somehow, like, finangled, like, opened the door, yell, “Water,” and they’re, like, fucking confused and they’re like, “I’ve never had anyone react this way.”
1:50:27
That is a lie. There are so many people that I know that have had a very, I wouldn’t say the exact same experience but, like, a similar experience where all of a sudden their blood pressure or their blood sugar or whatever– something spikes and it’s like I had to drive myself home afterwards. I thought I was gonna crash my car. Like, my vision was going in and out, again, completely blacked out at one point in time. Couldn’t see anything, screaming that I couldn’t see anything. The gynecologist eventually comes in and she’s like, “What? What’s the deal? What’s happening here?” And I’m like, “I can’t fucking see anything. I don’t even know where the hell you are.” Like I know the orientation of the room so I know where her voice is coming from, but I’m like, “Water!” I had to sit on the table for like thirty more minutes. And it was just like, it was horrific, you know like they say you get horrible cramps afterwards. This was like being knifed in the stomach after two or three months of feeling like I was in severe amounts of pain and every time that I would, like, for Skyla IUDs you don’t really get your period, right, and so every month there were severe cramps where it was like, “Okay, now I know what those are,” and so I don’t even know if it was the same level of pain or if it petered off or not. I have no idea. And I remember like the next year coming in and trying it out for like a year and then terrified to like tell the doctor, like, all of these things that had happen and she was literally like completely honest at, finally, like, “everyone has problems with it, that’s a common reaction,” that kind of thing. It was like, so you had told me a fucking year ago that you had never had anyone– that you had never seen anyone as bad as me and then come to find out a whole fucking year later that everyone has horrific experiences like this. Like again, why am I going through this? Like why is this just so difficult to not get pregnant?
That’s all I’ve striving for here. I can’t afford a kid. I can’t afford to fuck up in that way. Like, I’m the one that’s supporting the household right now while my fiancé, not even my fiancé, my boyfriend at the time is working his ass off, one hundred hours a week in a hospital. Like, you’re telling me now that everyone else has a horrific experience and you couldn’t just be honest for, like, one minute the first time around. So, at that point, it’s already in me so then I have to deal with it for the next, like, two years and it got better. Or maybe I just got better at dealing with it.
I found a gynecologist in New Orleans. She is lovely. She gave birth to a, like, a few of my friends’ kids, something like that, but they were LSU people, like, they got married right after college and shit like that, and I definitely did not. No thank you. No one from Tulane does that. I would love to say that we are smarter, but like I don’t actually know. I think it’s just a completely different view. And so she had delivered some of my friends babies who had gone to LSU, and she seemed good, and I was like great because anything is better than this fucking quack that was in [Redacted] and I’m never going back there again.
And she was like, she suggested, I was like “Look, I have Skyla and it’s awful. I hate it. I don’t want to put in anything else.” She told me about Nexplanon and it was the one in your arm, and so I remember the last ounces of pain that that fucking IUD Skyla gave me, um, and they had put the other IUD in my arm at that point, um, so that was like fine, oh actually no it was not, it was the other way around.
So, they took one out of me, again, I don’t know how to describe this feeling, but what I describe, hitting the uterine wall it’s like someone has powerfully flicked you on the inside of your stomach lining, but on the outside of it. It is like the worst fucking feeling. Now imagine the reverse of it where they are taking it out and it’s pinching because it’s stuck to the inside of your walls and it has to be ripped out. And that is a wild feeling that I never want to feel ever again as well.
1:55:24
And I was freaking the fuck out. I did not black out again, thank god, or pass out, but that was probably the second worst feeling that I ever had. I’m sure that if I had broken any bones or anything like that it would be up there, but that’s the second worst feeling I’ve ever had next to it being inserted in, and then having shockwaves move through you. But I still had to calm down and it’s like, yeah, it’s literally like two sides pinching at the insides of you and you can’t hold it and you can’t grip your muscles because then it will retract back into you and it’s very bizarre. I don’t know how to describe it other than that, but it is horrendous.
She, like, takes it out of me and it’s blood everywhere, which probably is normal for a gynecologist. Like, I’m thinking it’s bloody everywhere, but I don’t work in medicine, right? But she takes it out and she shows me and it looks like the little T or whatever, but it’s got these extra wings that deploy with it and the reason I was having so many issues was because when it was put in, it was put in incorrectly, and these wings never deployed. So these wings that look like, I don’t know, they look like these round little things with these divets in it, they almost look like a LEGO flower or something like that. It’s, like, really weird, right, and so these little wings that are still like tucked in, you know, like here’s the T and they’re still folded in like this, and they’ve got like chunks of flesh in them. Ugh. It’s, like, horrible. Like the things that women have to go through to just not have a kid is insane, and I never put Skyla back in, and there’s like a small insertion I think I actually, oh yeah, there’s like a little scar right here. I have two scars because I have gotten two at this point and that, they at least numb you up for, you have no idea that it’s happening whatsoever. It’s a smooth insertion and removal process. I mean I didn’t feel shit, but it took me when I got the other IUD put in– it took me weeks, months to feel better on top of then getting it taken out. I had to spend like a good twenty to thirty minutes recovering from it being taken out of me. And just knowing, because by then you already have the fear that something is going back into you. And so your mind is already tricking you and psyched you up in a way, and it was just one of the most horrific experiences, and Skyla being put in like no one believed me that was in the medical community. They’re just so desensitized, like, the husband had no, not husband at the time, boyfriend at the time, he was acting like a real fuckboy I will say. Like he really did not understand the kind of pain I was in until the third day.
And there was months more to come of being in severe pain and he, you know, he does like crazy, big surgeries all time, so I think for him it was like this is so whatever, this is so trivial, that kind of thing. But it affected every aspect of my physical well-being. Like not being about to like– like not being able to sleep in a certain position. Not being able to sit in certain positions because things were moving, or you could feel it, or just an enormous amount of things you’re getting used to it. And like for me personally, like, I don’t even use tampons. I’ve never used tampons. I’m very much a part of the free bleed society in that way. Like, I’m a small person, I don’t really like a bunch of weird shit shoved up in me, like, where I don’t know what preservative or whatever is being encased in it. I never liked that feeling and then having to be restricted, and then how I moved, slept, sat anywhere, sat in an office desk on top of just feeling like general shit as a result of it because it’s just traumatic. So, anyways, I wish I could ream out the creators or the makers of to their face and be like that was a horrible fucking product you guys are dipshits.
[Redacted], thank you. I really appreciate your time and, again, your generosity in sharing all of this. I am going to go ahead and stop the recording.
2:00:58 (end of file)