In an exclusive excerpt from Becca Andrews’ new book ‘No Choice,’ a young woman navigates the health care system in Alabama, desperate to have an abortion, despite also wanting a …
In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the West Alabama Women’s Center sits among a cluster of nondescript businesses that circle a moat of steaming asphalt. The faded brown brick building is set back, tucked away from the main road, wedged between a crisis pregnancy center and an insurance office. The clinic first opened in 1993, and the building gives off a sort of weary air—.
Her insurance coverage from her old job through Blue Cross Blue Shield expired in May, and after that, she tried everything she could think of to get birth control. Even if the chances of getting pregnant seemed slim, she didn’t want to take the risk and lose yet another egg. If she could get pregnant, she wanted it to happen when she could carry to term, and start the family she’d been dreaming about.
For years, Tamika was forced to endure painful heavy periods that stretched on for weeks and left her dizzy and weak. In 2008, when she was newly graduated from college and had just become ineligible to remain on her parents’ insurance, the bleeding and the cramping became unbearable. Unsure of what else to do, she went to the Health Department, where she was told that finding the right kind of birth control would help her body find a regular menstrual cycle again.
Women of color like Tamika are often faced with institutional racism and generational trauma when they approach the medical profession with a problem, and that’s in addition to the general suspicion their gender earns them. Those ingredients concoct a potent poison that has resulted in death, for sure, but also in the loss of life in the sense that people whose bodies are biologically coded female have been unable to live their lives to their fullest potential.
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