Life's Work

ldquo;His book provides the language [doctors have] been searching for.”

Auteur

Dr. Willie Parker sits on the board of institutions at the forefront of the fight for reproductive justice, including as the chair-elect of the board of Physicians for Reproductive Health. He is the recipient of Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, an honor also bestowed upon Hillary Clinton and Jane Fonda, and appeared on Ebony’s Power 100 list. He has been featured widely for his work, including in Slate, Jezebel, Cosmopolitan, NPR’s Morning Edition, Salon, and more. While a fascinating profile on Dr. Parker in Esquire sparked national interest in 2014, he is now the subject of Trapped (Trilogy Films), a documentary about the legal battle to keep abortion clinics in the South open.

Texte du rabat

"With a new foreword by the author and a reading group guide"--Cover.

Résumé
In this “vivid and companionable memoir of a remarkable life” (The New Yorker), an outspoken, Christian reproductive justice advocate and abortion provider reveals his personal and professional journeys in an effort to seize the moral high ground on the question of choice and reproductive justice.

Dr. Willie Parker grew up in the Deep South, lived in a Christian household, and converted to an even more fundamentalist form of Christianity as a young man. But upon reading an interpretation of the Good Samaritan in a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he realized that in order to be a true Christian, he must show compassion for all people at all times.

In 2009, he stopped practicing obstetrics to focus entirely on providing safe abortions for women who need help the most—often women in poverty and women of color—in the hotbed of the pro-choice debate: the South. He thereafter traded in his private practice and his penthouse apartment in Hawaii for the life of an itinerant abortion provider, becoming one of the few doctors to provide such services in Mississippi and Alabama.

In Life’s Work, Dr. Willie Parker tells a deeply personal and thought-provoking narrative that illuminates the complex societal, political, religious, and personal realities of abortion in the United States from the unique perspective of someone who performs them and defends the right to do so every day. In revealing his daily battle against mandatory waiting periods and bogus rules, Dr. Parker makes a powerful Christian case for championing reproductive rights. “At a moment when reproductive health and rights are under attack…Dr. Parker’s book is a beacon of hope and a call to action” (Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood).

Échantillon de lecture
Life’s Work

PROLOGUE

The Women

At 6:30 a.m. on procedure day, the abortion clinic waiting room at Reproductive Health Services in Montgomery, Alabama, is as hushed as a church. Inside, beyond the bulletproof doors, the women are waiting for me, occupying every vinyl-covered chair, occasionally perched on windowsills: twenty-five, thirty, as many as fifty women sometimes. When I pass through the room in my street clothes—the uniform of sweats, baseball cap, and prescription shades that allows me to hide in plain sight—most of them won’t even look up. But occasionally a woman will have heard of me, the “nice black doctor” at this clinic, and she’ll meet my eyes and smile. She may believe that I’m going to get her through this, whatever “this” means to her, and hope that by making contact, with a glance, she will show me that she is an individual, with a story, and reasons, and dreams of her own.

I am here, in this crowded abortion clinic in Alabama—or Mississippi, or Georgia, where I also work—to provide abortions for women because they say they need them. I am a Christian, raised in churches right here in the South—in Birmingham, an hour-plus drive from Montgomery. In the black churches of my childhood, an unplanned pregnancy was reason enough for a public shaming, or even expulsion from church ministry. A girl who became accidentally pregnant might be forced to stand up before the congregation on a Sunday morning and beg forgiveness for her sins, while the equally sexually curious boy who helped get her pregnant sat, with his brothers and sisters in Christ, in judgment of her. Unbeknownst to me, the women in the churches of my youth must have sometimes had abortions—of course they did, legally or illegally—but no one ever spoke of them. This was the Christianity I grew up in, and it has taken me decades of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual wrestling, with my conscience and with my world, to get to the place where I am now. I remain a follower of Jesus. And I believe that as an abortion provider I am doing God’s work. I am protecting women’s rights, their human right to decide their futures for themselves, and to live their lives as they see fit. Today, as I write this, access to safe and compassionate abortion care is under unprecedented threat, most often from people who call themselves Christians. What I do is unfathomable to my faithful opponents, yet preserving that access is my calling. As a Christian and as a doctor, I am committed to protecting women’s health.

This moral understanding came to me slowly, but it started to coalesce more than a dozen years ago when I had what I call my “come to Jesus moment” around the subject of abortion. From childhood I had long inferred that abortions were wrong, and for the first half of my career as an ob-gyn, I refused to perform them. But as I matured in both my faith and my profession, I found I was increasingly at odds with myself, an inner conflict that sat uncomfortably with me. I never questioned women’s individual choices, but until I found clarity and certainty around the abortion issue—what I call the head-heart connection—I recused myself, as a practitioner, from the fight.

Since achieving that clarity of mind and fullness of heart that liberated my understanding around this work, my passion for it has doubled. I have been working as an abortion provider for more than a dozen years with increasing energy and focus. I moved back to my hometown of Birmingham to care for women living in communities like the one in which I was raised. Some of my patients, poor and black, might easily be one of my three sisters or a cousin or an aunt—others might be anyone: you, your niece, your daughter, your mother, or your best friend; many are women with some means, in the middle and upwardly mobile classes. Some of my patients have formulated strong political opinions about abortion, but more have not and merely walk through my doors because they’re doing what they deem necessary for themselves. I do this work in the context of a ramped-up national crusade against it—one that promises, with a Republican president and Congress, to intensify. Calls from the antis to overturn Roe, to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and to defund Planned Parenthood are growing ever louder. Each one of these backward moves will not only restrict women’s access to safe, affordable abortion care, but will diminish women’s access to good health care in general, putting their lives and the lives of their children at risk. And poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of this political posturing by ideologues—as they always do.

Already, I have consciously put myself on the front lines. Since 2010, when right-wing extremists swept the nation’s statehouses and legislatures, more than three hundred state laws have been passed aimed at restricting access to abortion—despite the fact that it is legal. In twenty-seven states, women are now forced to wait…