Shortly after you arrive, one of our female health educators will bring you to a private room. You will discuss and learn about pregnancy options, the abortion procedure and various birth control methods. You may remain fully dressed for this part of your appointment. The health educator will take your blood pressure, pulse and weight. If you brought a support person with you, he or she may stay with you during the health education.
Since UCSF Medical Center is a teaching hospital, we may ask your permission to have a doctor-in-training listen in on the health education session, which takes around 20 to 40 minutes. After your conversation with the health educator, you will meet the doctor.
Our doctors are obstetrician-gynecologists with specialized training and interest in abortion provision and family planning. The doctor will review your medical history, perform an ultrasound exam to determine your pregnancy's gestation, and give you medications. If you are less than 12 weeks pregnant, you will receive oral pain medications, including Vicodin, Valium and ibuprofen, at this time. If you are 12 to 14 weeks pregnant, you also will receive a medication called misoprostol, which softens your cervix to make dilation easier.
This portion of the visit takes about 20 minutes. If you are less than 12 weeks pregnant, the oral medications need 45 to 60 minutes to be most effective. You will be awake, but well relaxed. You may stay in your room or wait in the reception area. We have magazines and portable stereos; you may want to bring something to read or a CD to occupy your wait time, which will be 45 to 60 minutes. If you are 12 to 14 weeks pregnant, the misoprostol needs two to three hours to work.
We will page you when it is time for you to return to the clinic. When you return, we will give you oral medications, including Vicodin, Valium and ibuprofen, and ask you to wait an additional 30 to 60 minutes for those to fully relax you. Continue reading.
Your support person can be right next to you for the whole procedure. Use a speculum to view inside your vagina 2. Clean your vagina and cervix with gauze soaked in soap 3. Victoria Barrett, then 39, came up against this restriction when she found herself faced with the decision to abort a much-wanted pregnancy in At 14 weeks she learned that the fetus carried a chromosomal abnormality called trisomy 13 , which causes severe intellectual and physical birth defects.
Most infants born with trisomy 13 die within the first few weeks. Her ob-gyn was kind and compassionate but was unable to provide the abortion herself because of her affiliation with a large Catholic hospital in their area. Instead the ob-gyn referred her to a male doctor in the area who could perform the abortion in a public hospital in Indianapolis, not far from where she lived. Barrett has no regrets about the procedure, completed at 15 weeks, but it's one she still wishes her own doctor could have performed.
Glancing at one of the pages, she accidentally discovered the sex of the fetus—information she had not wanted to know. So what can women in need of an abortion do to get care? For two weeks after her second ob-gyn visit, Clements wavered between aborting the pregnancy and carrying it to term. In the end, she decided termination was best. And thanks to the delay in treatment, her abortion was riskier too: For each additional week an abortion is delayed after the first two months, the risk of complications increases by 38 percent.
The experience left Clements distrustful. When she and her husband decided to carry a pregnancy to term in , she made sure to find a provider who offered the whole spectrum of reproductive care—prenatal, delivery, and abortion. Sarah Watts is a writer in Chicago covering health and science. Follow her at swattswrites. They had come for a Planned Parenthood fundraiser party; among them were her father and two sisters. Then I stopped to take a breath, and everyone applauded, including my family.
After the event, to her surprise, her Republican father donated to Planned Parenthood. Until that night, McHugh had told no one but her husband and a few close friends about her part-time work as an abortion provider at one of nine abortion clinics in Indiana. She had never told her conservative-leaning parents or three sisters, despite them being an unusually tight family.
Nor had she told her two young children, neighbors, or colleagues at the university where she works as a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology. Despite living in the proverbial closet, McHugh had been receiving hate mail from anti-choicers since April , when she published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing against new legislative restrictions on abortion in Indiana.
She identified herself in the op-ed as an obstetrician-gynecologist, but did not mention that she herself moonlights as a provider. Her Twitter and Facebook inboxes flooded with messages saying she should get raped or murdered. That changed this past winter, when she was the target of another wave of vitriol on social media. This time, the hate mail came not from strangers, but from people she knew. Instead of pushing her into deeper silence, this harassment provoked her to come out of the closet.
McHugh is one of five formerly closeted abortion providers who spoke to the Guardian about their recent decisions to come out about their work. Criminalization did not put a stop to abortion, of course — estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the s and s range from , to 1. Each was charged with up to years in prison. The charges were dropped after Roe v Wade passed the following year.
Many fear getting shunned by their communities, fired from their day jobs, or targeted by anti-choice protesters.
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