My Life with Roe

Last Friday evening, after I finished working, I checked the news on my cell phone and learned that SCOTUS had overturned Roe v Wade. I clicked on a story that showed a map of the United States of America, individual states in various colors representing what the new abortion laws were there. I clicked on Wisconsin and read that abortion was now illegal in my home state.

I have been agonizing on how to process and address this personal impact since. I’ve never had an abortion, but from February 1994 to the end of September 1996, I assisted in them. Likely hundreds of them. From week 8 to the end of week 21. I’ve attempted to write about it in meaningful and thought-provoking ways. This morning, I finally said to myself, “Fuck it, Kristine. You’re a storyteller. Just tell your story.”

In early February 1994 I interviewed for a position at an OBGYN’s office in Milwaukee that offered elective abortions as part of his solo practice. The position was to provide the mandated information to women seeking an abortion, complete simple lab tests typing the pregnant women’s blood type, start IV lines for those patients who chose to be consciously sedated during the medical procedure, assist the doc during the procedure, care for women in the recovery room post-op, and provide aftercare information before they were discharged.

The only thing that qualified me for this position is that I had graduated in May 1993 with a BA in Women’s Studies. When I moved home from Boston, I applied at every abortion provider I could find in the Appleton Yellow-Pages. Mostly they were clinics that provided abortions on certain days of the week with a rotation of doctors performing the abortions. About a week after interviewing, I was offered a job at the Wisconsin Women’s Health Care Center, the solo practice of an MD whose name I won’t print for fear of not remembering everything that happened during my tenure there and being accused of liable. Another reason I won’t print his name is that after being hired in February 1994, by Labor Day Weekend of the same year, we started an affair. I was miserable in my first marriage as he was in his second. I remember that Saturday when he asked me to come into his office before the staff arrived for the day as if it was yesterday.

I sat across from him at his desk. He said another co-worker had told him the night before that I “had a crush on him.” I immediately started backtracking anything I had said while very drunk the night before with two co-workers. He interrupted me and said, “But I feel the same way about you.”

Our separate marriages began the separation and eventual divorce processes in early September. Mine was much simpler because we had only been married since December 4, 1993, and the divorce was finalized in the fall of 1995. His was a complicated nightmare that is his private business, but eventually he too was divorced.

I can’t remember the exact chronology of the following events, but I’m giving it my best shot here.

He had been estranged from his entire family because of his second wife’s demands. He had taken her last name when they married. By Christmas 1994 I had talked to him enough about how much his parents and his younger brother and his family would want to hear from him. It had been years since they last spoke. His family lived in Montana, although they were originally from Colorado. His father and brother ran a family-owned electrician company, and his mother and daughter-in-law ran their cherry orchard. During the next cherry season his mother FedEx’d fresh cherries to my parents and my Grandma Krause who made cherry pies, cherry tortes, and we all ate the cherries by the handful. My grandmother said she had never baked with such good quality cherries and my mother will rave about them if you ask her about them to this day.

He and his family decided he should fly to see them alone at their reconciliatory visit. I was in total agreement. It was bound to be awkward enough without some young woman, 13 years his junior there standing in the way. While he was gone, the very active and very vocal anti-choice movement in Milwaukee listed him in the top three of their “hit list” which encouraged any anti-choice advocate to “do whatever it took” to prevent him from killing one more unborn child. While he was in Montana the U.S. Department of Justice contacted him with instructions on how he was going to return to Milwaukee. There were going to be to two U.S. Marshals on his flights from Kalispell, MT to Milwaukee. They would not make their identity known to anyone. When he touched down in Milwaukee, he was the last to deplane and another two U.S Marshalls were going to meet him at the terminal, drive him to a special location to pick up his luggage which would be pulled from the general luggage that went down to the arrival’s carousel, and follow the two of us back to the house we shared on a private lake in Waukesha County. For at least the next two weeks we would have two heavily armed U.S Marshalls with us 24/7.

When he finally walked down the jetway into the airport terminal I ran to him and was immediately tackled by both Marshalls. They knew his girlfriend was waiting for him and providing transportation back to our house, but apparently, they didn’t have an exact description of me and as they were charged to protect him, they took me down like a helpless lamb in a field of wolves. Upon confirmation I was who he and I said I was, I rode with them in an enormous black SUV with windows so darkly tinted I couldn’t see anything. We picked up his luggage and he drove his black Jeep Cherokee back to the house in Waukesha County, closely followed by the Marshalls who were going to spend the night armed and awake in our living room. At roughly 2am I was thirsty and had to walk past them sitting in my living room, watching TV, while I walked to the kitchen, grabbed a soda, then walk past them as I re-entered our bedroom.

He had to explain their presence in the office to the rest of the staff the next morning. One of them sat in the waiting room from 6:30am until the last patient of the day left, usually around 4:30pm. The other sat in the “lab” which was where the staff hung out between patients, where instruments were washed and sterilized in the autoclave, where the list of patients and their status during the day was written on a white board, where the doc completed his charting, and where the doc checked for the completed removal of products of conception to ensure that there weren’t portions of the pregnancy left behind which could cause serious infection and other complications. Both Marshalls were always inconspicuously heavily armed. We couldn’t go out to dinner. We couldn’t go to the homes of his friends. We had sex with them listening on the other side of a closed bedroom door twenty feet away.

Christmas 1995 we put up a tree in one of two floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of the two-door entry of our house. Before we left to spend the holiday at my parents’ house, we opened presents under the tree. By 7am there was a group of protestors on the opposite side of the street across from our house, hoisting anti-choice signs and chanting distorted versions of tradition Christmas carols all the while.

They protested in front of other employees’ residences as well, but at Christmas and Easter they appeared to be focused on our house. One time while our groceries at the local grocery store were being bagged, someone from the anti-choice movement recognized us and began yelling at the young man bagging our groceries, spouting that he was going to hell for assisting “a baby killer” by putting eggs and frozen pizza in brown paper bags.

By far the scariest reminder of how at risk our lives were was his decision to wear a bullet proof vest to and from the office every day. Since I started working there, I knew that the doc wore one, but once we became involved, he really wanted me to wear one as well. I refused. In my idyllic 23–24-year-old mind, I didn’t think I was invincible, but it was more about my sheer stubbornness that fought against every instinct to wear one. Around the time when the U.S. Marshalls were protecting us, I answered the main office phone and a man on the other end of the line said, “You are baby killers who soon will be killed” or something along that theme. The FBI came to the office and I remember sitting down in a private office with the agent who, when he showed me his badge and photo ID that I barely scanned when he held it in front of me said, “Ma’am, I really need you to look at my ID and badge and understand that I’m an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” it was yet another way Roe v Wade infiltrated my life.

When I started working for this MD, I would shout back at the protestors who were shouting at me, the rest of the staff, and at the patients from the sidewalk in front of the office parking lot. It became very personal and very scary once the doc and I became romantically involved. Armed U.S. Marshalls ordered to serve where I worked? Ordered to observe and protect me? Trying to drown out the Christmas Day protestors at my home by turning up the volume of Jazz to the World? Wearing a bullet proof vest to work?

Yeah, I have a part of my life that was impacted by Roe v Wade in ways most Americans, who support a woman’s right to choose, could never even imagine. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up in that situation. Then I remember I fell in love with a doctor who felt even stronger than I did that every woman has the right to a safe, legal abortion.