No One’s a Virgin
JUST AFTER MY MOTHER tlearned she was pregnant with me, and a few months before she married my father, she was prescribed a drug, diethylstilbestrol (DES), intended to prevent miscarriage. The pregnancy was unplanned, and she had never before miscarried; my mother’s doctor simply gave her the pills and ordered her to take them.
DES caused my own reproductive organs to develop irregularly in utero, as was the case for many other thousands of “DES daughters”—women whose mothers were prescribed the drug in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Candy Tedeschi, a nurse and activist for people affected by DES exposure, examined me when I was a teenager and explained that the irregularities in my reproductive organs caused by DES would make conceiving a child difficult. She declared my cervix cockscomb-shaped, one of about five possible irregularities in the cervixes of DES daughters. The drug has since been banned for use on humans.
I had my first pelvic exam at thirteen so that I could be tested for clear cell adenocarcinoma, a cancer linked to DES exposure. As a virgin, I found being examined with a speculum so daunting that the doctor prescribed me Valium to take the day of the exam, and I was allowed to wear my new Walkman. I cried during the exam and felt humiliated, though I had done nothing to cause the circumstances in which I found myself. This early experience with my reproductive health may be part of the reason I find myself, at fifty, volunteering as an escort at a women’s clinic in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
THE WEST ALABAMA women’s center is a onestory brick building in a nondescript office park. Beside the clinic are a dentist’s office and a realestate agency; across the parking lot, parents drop off children at a day-care center. We stand in the shade of a magnolia tree, the three of us in rainbow-striped vests with clinic escort printed on the front and back in large black letters. Still, patients sometimes mistake us for protesters and give us a wide berth. Few medical procedures are more emotionally fraught than abortion, and the circus atmosphere patients encounter as they prepare to go through with a private but vilified decision is overwhelming. Imagine arriving for chemotherapy or dialysis and encountering a hostile group of strangers alternately shouting at and trying to cajole you, countered by friendly but oddly clad strangers who are offering assistance. It’s freaky.
Bonnie, one of the regular protesters, wears a visor and patrols the invisible boundary in the parking lot beyond which she’s
