Devil's Mercy

In which the merchants of death overplay their hand.

I’m trying to picture the pitch meeting where someone suggested it was a good idea for NPR to air the audio of a surgical abortion last week. Was it the journalist’s idea? Her editors’? Was it a joint decision? I would imagine something like this had to go through many stages of approval before it was finally greenlit. In all that deliberating, I can’t imagine that nobody raised a tentative hand to say, “Guys, I don’t know. Are we really sure about this?” And now I have to imagine somewhere, someone is saying, “Guys. We should have listened to that guy.”

The report around the audio is worth reading in full. It just so happens that it’s set in my home state, Michigan, in anticipation of a proposal that would encode abortion in our state constitution. That would be Proposal 3, for any interested Michiganders reading—incidentally, a proposal that would open a whole Pandora’s box of horrors if you look closely, including “sterilization and infertility care” for minors. Spelling it out, this would mean clinics could legally distribute puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to a child without parental knowledge or consent.

But back to NPR. The journalist who produced the story and the accompanying audio is actually a rather talented writer. She vividly conveys the atmosphere and clientele of the clinic she visits. She interviews an OBGYN named Lance, who has been known to dye her hair purple as a technique for relaxing her younger patients. It just made them feel better, “seeing that their abortion doctor was a woman with cool purple hair.” The clinic’s founder, Renee Chelian, is old enough to remember the pre-Roe world where she had her own illegal abortion:

She has spent most of her adult life pouring that energy into creating the kind of clinics she wishes existed when she was 16: spaces that are spotless but not soulless, where the halls and waiting rooms are sunny and soothing music plays in the procedure rooms. Large windows look out on pine trees that sway in the breeze. There are inspirational signs on the walls: “Good women get abortions,” one reads. “Wise, beautiful women have been where you are now,” reads another.

When patients leave, their prescriptions are handed to them in a brown paper lunch sack, their names and a small heart drawn on the front in pink marker.

Again, I wonder if anyone ever pauses to think about how this sort of thing comes off to someone outside an NPR bubble. Even granting that the majority of Americans hover somewhere in the mushy middle when it comes to abortion rights, does it not occur to anyone that there is something intuitively sinister about the atmosphere evoked here—like air freshener aggressively sprayed around to cover up a Scent which shall not be named?