Title: A Memoir of Providing Abortions Before, During, and After Roe - Get Political

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A key issue in this year's presidential election is abortion access. For our latest edition of the book series Get Political, we turn to two people who have dedicated their lives to abortion care even before it was legal. Curtis Boyd grew up on a farm in Texas, spent time as a minister, and when he became a doctor, he performed safe abortion care even when it was illegal. It was at one of his clinics in Dallas that he met his wife, Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, a registered nurse who went on to get her PhD. Glenna became a dedicated abortion counselor, pioneering new techniques to help keep patients calm during the procedure and to guide them through a potentially difficult decision. Together, the Boyds have spent decades providing abortion care in the face of death threats and arson attacks. Now, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, their expertise and advocacy has become all the more significant. Curtis and Glenna have written a joint memoir. It's titled We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe. Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd join me now to discuss. Curtis, what ideas did you have about abortion before you started providing abortion care?

Dr. Curtis Boyd: Actually, I had experienced a major event, which I talk about in the book, but it's Barbara. In high school, I was in Mrs. Broom's algebra class, and it just happened that this girl was sitting in front of me. She's vivacious, friendly, very pretty. I'm new, so I'm wanting to meet people, and we didn't mind meeting a girl either. After a few days in the class, a week, I think I met a new friend somewhere. I was talking with him. I said, huh? I really like her. I think I'm going to ask her for a date. He said, what? No, you can't ask her for a date. She got knocked up. She's got a kid at home.

Well, of course that was it, because boys have-- If you're going to maintain your good reputation, boys have reputations, too. At least I was considered a good boy. I had to maintain that reputation. Of course, I'd never ask her for a date. She could only come to class for classes, could not be on campus otherwise. On the school she came, class left. No extracurricular activities. She had a bad reputation. I happened to find out the boy who got her pregnant, he had a sterling reputation, big band on campus. All of this just struck me as wrong.

I thought, this is not fair. Something needs to be done about this. I think that's where it started. Only later did I realize what that impact when it came up, that I had an opportunity to do something about it. It was sort of, oh, Curtis, you said something needs to be done about this. I was just talking to myself, are you going to do anything about it or not? That was the question I had to confront myself with, sort of an ethical question.

Alison Stewart: What about for you, Glenna?

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: What did I think about abortion?

Alison Stewart: Yes, any preconceived notions about it? Did you have thoughts about it?

Glenna: Very different from today. The first time I heard the word abortion, I was 15 years old, and it was on the front page of The Modesto Bee, with a photograph of the children's TV star who was married to a physician and had taken thalidomide and was deplaning from a trip to Sweden where she had an abortion. I saw this word, and my mother and I always played word games, and I knew that she knew every word in the dictionary.

I asked her what an abortion was, and she said, well, it's a medical procedure that a doctor can do when there's a pregnancy that's not meant to be. Those were her words, and that's what stuck with me. Then my mother being my mother, I got a fairly detailed description of thalidomide and its effects on the developing fetus. I thought from that, abortion was a personal, social, a moral good for everyone involved.

Alison Stewart: Curtis, you could be practicing any kind of medicine. Why did you keep doing this work, providing safe abortions?

Curtis: That's a good question. I've thought about that. Basically, I thought this was something that needed to be done, there was no one to do it. I thought, I'm willing to learn. I saw the importance of it. We don't take a position, you see, in this, have abortion, don't have an abortion. You come to us and we don't make the assumption you're going to have an abortion when you come. You come thinking about that, but sometimes they come uncertain. Women change their mind both directions. They come in, plan to have an abortion. They don't. They say, I would never have an abortion, but they come in, they have one.

We've learned to take each woman, just hear her story, her story, and then help her to come to a resolution. I don't want any woman to have an abortion that doesn't want one. I don't want any woman to be denied abortion when she wants one. I became a feminist, and it's about women's issues, women's rights. I came to strongly believe that a woman can never consider herself to have equality if she cannot control or has autonomy over her own body. If you can't have autonomy over your own body, you're never going to achieve equal rights. It became a much bigger issue. For us, this work was about women's equality.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe. My guests are Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd. Glenna, how would you describe your work as a counselor to these women?

Glenna: Interesting, always. Sometimes surprising, and incredibly rewarding. I had no idea what I was getting into. I should add, for both Curtis and me, neither of us intended to make this our career. When I started counseling, I thought I'd do this for six months and get things going beautifully, and I'd move on to the next important thing in my life. What kept me there was the fact that an unintended or untimely unworkable pregnancy is a big deal in a woman's life then, and it is to this day.

I experienced women as almost cracked open by that experience, and needing as well as willing to talk about their lives and what this pregnancy means and what ending the pregnancy means in greater depth than I ever expected, and being able to actually solve a problem in a couple of hours' time, a big problem for a woman, as opposed to entering into months, perhaps years of therapy. It was nearly instant gratification.

Alison Stewart: How did it feel to be outside of the mainstream? You started when it was illegal, then it started to gain momentum. Then the momentum fell away. What was it like to be on that roller coaster?

Glenna: Yes. It was like being on a roller coaster. By then, I was already in love with the work and knew in a much more real, immediate, deep way than I had when I went into it, how important it was and is to pregnant people and to say what's obvious to anybody who knows me, I have a big stubborn streak. The rise of that opposition, it was simply happening, and I was living through it.

It was really looking back over my life and our lives in the writing of the book, that I allowed myself to feel the disappointment that I felt at that time, particularly for poor women, because Medicaid funding was cut off at a federal level, and funding to hospitals that provided abortion was cut off. That struck me as so wrong, and I was not about to give up.

Alison Stewart: Curtis, when you were performing abortions illegally, were you ever concerned about being caught?

Curtis: Oh, yes.

Glenna: Perpetually.

Curtis: Perpetual. That was a perpetual thing, and it's one that I learned to suppress, because to do my work, I wanted to be present. I wanted to be doing good medical work, have good relations with the patients I was seeing. They needed to be relaxed. I could not be fearful. I didn't want them to be fearful, but it was always like I lived in constant fear in the background.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe. My guests are Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd. I want to switch gears, and I want to ask about your relationship, because a lot of your memoir is about you and about how you're feeling. You tell a great story about kicking Curtis out of your clinic when you first met him.

[laughter]

Glenna: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Would you share that story with us?

Glenna: It was my first week on the job. This job that I thought [crosstalk].

Curtis: Very conscientious, she was.

Glenna: Well, this job that I thought was temporary. I had counseled a patient, and I brought her into the surgery area, and there was a strange man there, inappropriately dressed for a surgery area. The patient I was with got scared. What she said was, who is that strange man? Why is he here? I did what any good counselor, good young feminist would do. I walked over to this guy, and I said, excuse me, but you'll need to step out of-- This is a surgery area. You'll need to step out. The back porch is right here, and you can wait there.

I assumed he was there to talk as a friend with the doctor who was doing procedures that day. Curtis said, perhaps you don't know who I am. In my always charming way, I said, I don't really care who you are. That's irrelevant. Please step out, and he did.

Alison Stewart: What did you think in that moment, Curtis?

Curtis: I'm thinking, I like this woman. She's sparky. She's beautiful, she's sparky. Obviously, she's intelligent. I mean, and she was not easily intimidated. I was. I thought, hmm, I thought, I want to get to know her. There might be something there. I acquiesced very politely, and excused myself. I thought, that's all right. We'll meet later. She'll find out who I am.

Glenna: He thought, I'll put her in her place later.

Alison Stewart: Well, it took a little while for you to come around.

Curtis: No, I was in love with her and knew what I wanted long before she came around.

Alison Stewart: Curtis, do anti-abortion advocates, do they make sense to you? Do you understand what their concerns are?

Curtis: Yes, I do. I don't agree, but I don't have any great difficulty with that. I grew up among people who had strict moral beliefs. They believed in right and wrong, and Heaven and hell.

Glenna: As they defined it.

Curtis: As they defined it. A democracy depends on compromise. It cannot function without compromise.

Glenna: It also depends on respect for the opinions of others and respect for differences of opinions without demonizing anyone.

Curtis: When you come there, you think, okay, you can have different opinions. In a pluralistic society like this, we're going to have different opinions. It'll hard to get everyone to agree on anything. These are opinions. I believe this. You believe that, because I believe this doesn't make me right and make me a good person. Because you believe this, that doesn't make you wrong and a bad person. Either one of us maybe both be right. We're both right and it's our opinion, and we have reasons for that. If we wish to discuss it, we can discuss our differences if we want to. We can say, I just-- I don't care to.

At least we don't want-- We don't hate each other. We don't want to kill each other. This is a democracy. We have to accept these differences of opinion. We don't have to agree with them, but we need to be tolerant of them and we have to come to some consensus. You can't function without coming to some consensus. You don't go to war over it. You have to change people's hearts and minds, which comes back when we wrote this book.

We don't need nothing less than to change people's hearts and minds about how to think about and talk about complicated issues and divisive issues, that you can do them in a respectful way. You can differ. That's fine. A woman can be opposed to abortion. Doesn't bother me at all. She thinks it's a sin and I'm going to go to hell for doing them, and the woman having the abortion is going to go to hell. That's her belief. I can respect that as long as she doesn't want to force her belief on someone has a different belief.

Glenna: We might even learn from each other if we would stop and listen.

Alison Stewart: Glenna, I'm curious. This is something I've always been curious about, and I think you're a person I can ask. People in the reproductive community, some people will say, like, you can have as many abortions as you choose. Like, it's no big deal. Why is there such a big-- why does it need all this counseling? Why do we just get an abortion?

Glenna: My deep sense of that is that actually for some people, that really is their reality. After all of these years of meeting with patients who are choosing to end a pregnancy, for most of those people, it is an important and a moral decision. The opportunity to talk with someone who doesn't have an agenda for them, who isn't involved in their daily life, to whom they don't have to answer when they walk away, but who knows a lot and will listen, is frankly, liberating. Actually, as I was developing protocols for abortion counseling, my mother was at that time diagnosed with breast cancer. This was clearly many years ago.

She had an old-fashioned radical mastectomy. One of the things I was stunned by as she and my father went through that whole medical experience was in all of it, no one among their caregivers ever offered either of them an opportunity to talk about how they felt, what this meant, and what impact it was going to have on their daily life. My thought at the time was, counseling needs to be available as a part and parcel of most medical care.

Curtis: I'll say something those of you listening to us may well be surprised by. I value the fetus in the pregnancy. I put importance on it. I always show respect in the way I handle it, the way I dispose of the tissue. I do blessing ceremonies if the woman wants them. Why? Because the woman wants this. It's important to her. She wants to acknowledge that, yes, I cared about this pregnancy [unintelligible 00:18:17] , it was not meant to be. This pregnancy could not be in my life. It's not that I didn't care about my pregnancy. It just could not be.

They want to show their respect. Some women want that, need it. Some don't want, don't need it. That's an individual thing, too. Abortion is a little different, some other things, because it does involve a potential human life. I think in that way it should not be taken lightly or disrespected.

Alison Stewart: Glenna, we've been having this conversation as the presidential election is underway. Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Dobbs decision. I'm not sure what my question is, but I guess I'm asking that, you know, what are you thinking about abortion during this presidential election?

Glenna: One of the most hopeful things right now, given that the Dobbs decision was, frankly, devastating. It was personally devastating to us. It was devastating to our staff and to women in the state of Texas where we were working at the time. One of the things that has happened since that decision, with a presidential election on the horizon, is that not only are people who are involved in politics coming out to talk about abortion, their abortion, what it's meant to them, people are also coming out to advocate for the necessity of legal abortion in a way that wasn't happening when it could be taken for granted.

I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime, but I think the level of discussion, which has become far more personal, which is one of the things that, the changes that we had worked for and part of why we wrote the book, why we talk so much about ourselves, which is not my way, but we need to humanize this. This is not a series of hateful, often shouted names or political talking points. This is a pregnant person's life, future and the quality of life for any child that will be born into this world, into that situation. There's much more real conversation going on at that level than we have seen through the years of legalization.

Curtis: See, every abortion involves one woman's story. Once you separate it out, then you have to take that seriously. What's amazing, I didn't expect just [unintelligible 00:21:23] an outpouring. The polls in general across the country running about 70% in favor of reproductive rights, or the people saying that think they would have an abortion or not, they think should be legal. Abortion should be legal because other women might want to have 1. 70%, that's big. We will prevail on this issue. You can be sure.

Of course, you have 70% support. You're going to prevail. This is a democracy so far, if we can maintain our democracy. You're going to prevail with 70% support, you're going to prevail. And that's what we talk about in the book. Don't lose hope. Don't lose hope. We've gotten this far. Everything was not lost. At first I thought, oh, everything is lost. Our whole life's work is gone. No, it was not at all. We've regained our optimism. We've regained our optimism, but you have to work to make that real. You can be optimistic, but optimism doesn't mean anything if you don't do the work necessary to realize it.

Alison Stewart: Glenna and Curtis, thank you so much for being with us.

Glenna: Oh, thank you.

Curtis: Oh, thank you. You're welcome. It's our pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Coming up on tomorrow's show, we'll talk about a couple of really powerful documentaries. Patrice, about disabled folks who want to marry and what stands in their way, and Blink, about a family with three children who are losing their sight. We'll hear excerpts from this week's Get Lit with All Of It book club event with Erik Larson. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.