Abortion doula Molly Gaebe is surprised to find herself in the same position as her patients.
Molly Gaebe is a comedian living in NYC where she writes for Lady Parts Justice League, a reproductive rights organization that uses comedy to expose anti-choice extremist douchebags. She can be seen performing every Saturday with her house team Women and Men at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. Molly is an abortion and birth doula with The Doula Project, and a member of the sketch team Buzz Off, Lucille (buzzofflucille.com). A psychic once told her to look at the moon every month and demand "love and money" from it, so she does that too. Find more info at www.mollygaebe.net.
This story originally aired on August 28, 2018 in an episode titled “Abortion: Stories from doctors and patients - Part 1.”
Story Transcript
I shut the door to the exam room and stand and look at Claire who’s in the room with me. I tell her where she can put her belongings. She put her purse in the chair, jacket behind the door, shoes in the corner there. I apologize for the temperature. It can get really hot. In the winter they really pump up the heat so I can open a window and let a nice breeze come in.
I hand her a clear plastic bag. It’s kind of like a giant Ziploc bag and there's three things in it. There's a medical gown and two light blue booties.
“These go over your socks like this.” And I mime putting them over my own feet. I do the same thing with a gown. “Arms to the front, opening in the back.”
I like to give a visual as well as verbal instructions because I know for me, whenever I’m at the doctor’s office, I’m never listening when they tell me what to do with the ties, the this or the that. My mind is always on the reason why I’m there at the doctor’s office in the first place. I’m thinking I hope I’m not sick. I hope the test results are negative. I hope my tampon doesn’t show up on the x-ray here.
So I pull the curtain to give her some privacy to change and when she's done I come in and I say, “Okay, now we just get to chat and hang out and wait until the doctor comes in.”
She looks at me, she looks at the ground, she looks at me again. I know what she's about to ask. It’s probably the most common question that’s asked in this room. She looks at me and she says, “Is this going to hurt?”
Claire is here for an abortion. She's early. Five weeks. And today, I’m going to be her abortion doula. That means I’m going to be with her during and after the procedure. That means I’m just here to encourage her, empower her, distract her, be a witness for her.
I’m not a doctor, clearly. I don't know how x-rays work. My function in this room today is just to be a hand to hold and, mostly actually in Claire’s case, just to have distracting conversation about which Hogwarts house we would be divided into.
So we’re in the room and we have the procedure and I tell her what I tell everybody. I said, “Hang in there. You're doing great.” Because that’s what a doula does. That’s it.
I think the term ‘doula’ is most often associated with the birthing process but it’s really at its base just a compassionate support person. I think about all the times in my life when I could have used a doula, like when I got a tattoo on what turned out to be the boniest part of the human body, or when I went on that first date with a guy who surprised me and brought me to his weekly four-hour slam poetry session. Again, because I just could have used a doula to be there and be like, “You got this, Molly. Hang in there. It’s almost over.”
So that’s what I did for Claire that day and she was great. Then we went into the recovery room and I was handing her a little glass of ginger ale and she sipped it. Then she looked at me and she asked me another question.
She said, “Molly, have you ever done this? Have you ever had an abortion?”
And I said, “No, I haven't.”
Two weeks later I was walking home from work, going down the stairs of the subway and my boobs had been hurting so bad, the kind of bad where you have to hold them like a precious toy dog as you walk down the stairs. You know what I mean?
And to get home I have to pass a pharmacy and I was thinking, “You know what? I got a couple of CVS ExtraBucks. Why don’t I go ahead and pick up a pregnancy test, just for fun. It’s Friday. What the hell.”
So I go home to my apartment and I go to the bathroom and I pee on the stick and I wait for that one line to appear. That one line that will tell me that I’m not pregnant. I really actually appreciate the drama and the magic of the pregnancy test. It’s like reverse disappearing ink. It’s very fun.
I’m waiting for the one line and the one line appears. Great! Show over. Curtain call. And then another line started to appear. I started to panic. I was looking at the pregnancy test like Marty McFly looks at that photograph of his siblings disappearing, but in my case another line was appearing. And I was like, “No, no, no. We've got to go back.”
But I couldn’t go back. I was pregnant and pregnant for me meant having an abortion. I just never wanted kids. It’s as simple as that. Actually, my mom gave me some really interesting advice growing up. She said, “Molly, never have kids!” I really took that to heart.
I also knew that it would be easy for me to get one in New York. I live in New York City, I have insurance, I know exactly where to go. I’m an abortion doula, for God’s sakes. I’m basically Abortion Barbie with brown hair, and less shoes, and no car, and more moustache.
Where was I? Two lines. I’m looking at the two lines. Two lines is bad for me. I’m nervous. My pulse is racing. My cheeks are hot and my ankles are sweating, because that’s a fun thing that my body does now. And I’m thinking even though I know every part of the procedure, I still don’t know how I’m going to act when I’m there for my own procedure.
Then I look at the two lines again and I think, “Oh, crap. I have a date tonight.” I’m like, “I’m not going on that thing.”
So I briefly entertained texting this guy to cancel, the text, “Can’t make it tonight. I’m pregnant.” And then seeing how long he freaks out before he realizes we've never had sex. But I don’t because I’m not a monster. Instead I just ghost him and pretend I never was alive.
If you're here, Ted, I’m sorry. It wasn’t you. It was me. Poor Ted.
So I made my appointment for two weeks later and so I had kind of that amount of time to prepare for my role reversal from abortion doula to abortion patient. I was nervous but I had other things to deal with first.
The first order of business was telling people. I had to tell people. I don’t keep anything to myself, especially this. So telling people that you are pregnant and going to get an abortion is a very nerve-wracking experience because once you speak that fact out loud, it’s out of your hands, in a way. It enters the realm of public opinion and, apparently, everybody has an opinion.
In my case it wasn’t even about the fact that I was going to get an abortion but it was how I told people, who I told, and in what order I told them. Did you guys know about this? There's an abortion notification pyramid. What it is, you have to tell your closest friends first and in a whisper lest a stranger overhear and the whole pyramid comes toppling down.
But I didn’t want to do that because doing that kind of felt like it was some shameful secret I was supposed to keep and it didn’t feel like that. Not to me. So, on purpose, I told everyone I saw in the order that I saw them. I think that next day it was my deli guy, my boss, my friend Jen, everybody who works at Lucky Burger and then my deli guy again. We’re very close now.
I also ended up telling the person who participated in making me pregnant. At the time I found out I was pregnant, I actually hadn’t spoken to him in two weeks because, finally, after years, I had gotten the courage to leave that toxic and abusive relationship. I believe that every pregnant person has the right to do with their body what they want and tell who they want and not tell who they want, so it kind of surprised me that I did tell him. I think part of me wanted comfort from him and the other part of me wanted him to suffer some of the anxiety of it with me.
There was no playbook for how to do this. This all felt messy and complicated. I didn’t know if what I was doing was right or wrong. I was just reacting to how I was feeling moment to moment. And pregnancy temporarily tied me back up with that part of my life that I wanted gone and I knew abortion was going to be the thing to free me from it forever.
So two weeks went by, very slowly, and then way too fast. Then the morning was here. I got up very early, earlier than I ever want to again. I’m a night person so I guess I've only gotten up that early for flights and abortions from now on.
I get to the clinic and I take a deep breath and I walk inside. Usually, if this was the clinic where I was doula-ing at, I would walk straight back, put on my scrubs, get together those plastic bags for the patients. But now I found myself stopping at check-in and checking in and then waiting in the waiting room. I was just mindlessly flipping through magazines for God knows how long until they called my name.
The walk back there felt so surreal, like I was still in the mind frame of I’m not the patient. I’m a person in the back waiting for the patient.
I was acting extremely gregarious, cracking jokes, making fun of myself. I wanted everybody there to think that this was old hat for me when, in fact, this was a brand new hat. This hat still had the label on it.
I finally get to the procedure room and I’m waiting for the doctor to get in. She walks in and I am thrilled. This is a doctor who I have worked with before at another clinic as a doula and she is the best. She's so kind, caring, compassionate, wonderful.
I spring up and I give her a big hug and I’m like, “Oh, my God. You're here. What are the chances? This is like crazy.” I needed an abortion, she provides abortions, the chances are high.
I was talking very fast. I remember that. Even as I was laying on the exam table, I was still talking like a mile a minute, trying to fill the space with myself, with my voice, and my faux nonchalance. I didn’t want to leave any extra room, any extra air, any space to go unfilled lest someone have the chance to ask me if I have any more questions because, honestly, the only question I had in that moment was, “Is this going to hurt?”
So me and the doctor were talking as the nurses were drawing up the medication and I think I had gotten away with this I’m-still-the-doula act when the doctor stops. She lets the room be silent. She touches my shoulder and she looks at me. She was onto me. I know this because the next thing she said was, “You're going to be fine.”
In that moment, in that small moment of stillness and connection, I got permission to drop the act. I let myself be cared for and supported. I fully surrendered to that moment of deep kindness and I let myself be doula-ed. I left it to the last second, right before the procedure. But in that final moment, I finally let myself be vulnerable. How human of me. Thank you.