Because thirty-six years ago, “choice” was just another word for nothing left to lose.

I couldn’t find the place at first. I drove around and around, checked my directions a dozen times, but it wasn’t there.

At the spot where the clinic was supposed to be was a building that looked exactly like the 1970s-era apartments I lived in when I was a kid - the kind of building that looks like a motel, with stairways on the outside leading to each floor.

Not knowing what else to do, I parked and walked over to the building. The doors all had numbers on them, but no signs. Windows were closed.

I checked the suite number I had been given, then followed the doors until I found the one marked 213. It was tucked far back from the street. I tried the door handle. Locked.

I must have the wrong directions, I thought. I was just about to leave when I saw a sign in the lower corner of the window, so small you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it: Women’s Health Clinic.

I pushed the door buzzer and a woman’s voice answered, “Yes?”

“I’m here for an eleven o’clock appointment,” I said, and gave her my name.

The door knob clicked and I pushed it open. The waiting room was tiny, empty, and eerily silent. No patients wandered in and out. No sounds of sick kids crying in exam rooms or medical personnel talking in the halls. Not even any musak playing.

The rather grim-looking woman behind the reception desk looked up as I entered. She handed me paperwork to fill out and return. Soon a nurse called my name and we went through a door into the bowels of the clinic.

In another tiny white room with two chairs and a rack of literature, the nurse and I discussed the purpose of my visit. She asked me a few questions, but it was clear early on that I was well-informed and had made up my mind, and she didn’t try to dissuade me. She actually seemed a little relieved and I could tell she was skipping entire sections of a well-rehearsed speech.

Finally she explained the procedure to me briefly, then told me the doctor would see me now.

We went to a tiny exam room, where she handed me a paper gown and left. As I undressed, I looked around. The room seemed over-stuffed with furniture and equipment, but that was probably because it was so small. There was nothing unusual about the room’s contents, I thought, until I noticed the contraption in the corner.

It looked like an alien, with a dull green reservoir and a long tube snaking out the side, and I admit I did not relish the thought of playing Ripley.

The doctor entered a few minutes later. He was short and stocky, with dark hair and mustache. He spoke very little to me and made no eye contact. His movements were brisk and he performed his exam at lightening speed (compared to others I’ve had, anyway). He confirmed the diagnosis, turned on his heel and left.

I got dressed and after a few minutes, the nurse came for me and we went back to the reception desk so I could make my next appointment. I told Grim Lady I wanted to have the medical procedure.

“You are just in time,” she said. “One more day and you’d have to have the surgical.”

I nodded, remembering the alien.

She clicked her pen and scribbled on her calendar. “August ninth.”

I smiled at the irony. My birthday.

Grim Lady gathered up some paperwork and handed it to me. I took it and turned to leave.

“Wait, one more thing,” she said, handing me a bulky manila envelope. I looked at her quizzically, but she dropped her gaze and busied herself with her work.

As soon as the door shut behind me, I opened the envelope. Inside was a VHS tape labeled “From Conception To Birth, A Fetus’s Journey.”

On the way to my car, I dropped the tape into a street corner trash can.

—

Two days later, on my birthday, I came back to the clinic and got a shot in my hip. I returned a week after that for the final step: two tablets placed as close to my cervix as the doctor could get them.

As I sat up on the exam table, the doctor took me by the shoulders and for the first time, he looked into my eyes. I saw compassion in his.

“OK?” he said.

I smiled and nodded. He let go of me and walked out.

—

Not so long ago, the health care clinic I went to and the procedure I paid for were illegal. In a town like Salt Lake City, with its uber-conservative origins, they are still at risk of annihilation in some way or another.

A sobering thought for me, a thirty-something Seattlite who took for granted her shiny liberal bubble until she left it.

What would it be like to be an unhappily pregnant kid living in a community so filled with misogyny that its “women’s” clinics must be hidden to keep from being bombed?

What would it be like to go to work each day knowing that you could be shot at with jihad-like zeal by people who pledge to love thy neighbor?

What would it be like to be a doctor whose patients often have such guilt and fear that you must distance yourself from them, allowing only a brief moment at the end to show you care?

Today I’m Blogging For Choice in the fervent hope that these questions will someday soon be made unthinkable, just as 35 years ago, “Pregnancy or jail and possibly death?” was for me.

Never forget how precarious Roe v. Wade really is. Use your vote to make sure a woman’s right to sovereignty over her own body remains the law.

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