Peg Johnston, who worked at Southern Tier Women’s Services, an abortion clinic, in Binghamton, NY:
“I don’t know if I just started getting bored with Operation Rescue,but I definitely started to get interested in what women were saying instead.”
She’d sit in on a counseling session with a woman who’d say,
“I feel like I’m killing my baby.”
9 weeks
At first, she said, she assumed that the patients were simply repeating what they’d heard outside, having internalized right-wing disinformation that Johnston needed to “correct.” Then she says:
“once I began listening more intently to her,I learned that she wasn’t saying what the picketer was saying–although she used the same words.Frequently [abortion patients] were already mothers and they knew a time when,at that same stage of pregnancy, they had welcomed the lifeand felt like it was their baby.They weren’t mouthing an anti-choice message–they were acknowledging that this was serious stuff.How can I want one kid and not the other?”
“Listening to women about abortion” Fairfield County Weekly May 26, 2005
