I felt like I needed to write a little something about abortion since it came up quite often in my OB/GYN month. Unfortunately, the majority of abortion issues that I saw where young girls (16-24) who had elective abortions just for the sake of not wanting a baby. 99% of my patients were on welfare, very uneducated, and trapped in a culture that was not only foreign, but disturbing on many levels. For them abortion was just the next thing you do when you have an unplanned pregnancy because you don't know how to use contraception. What also blew my mind was that these girls were just accustomed to having their bodies being subject to OB/GYN procedures...which are really...kind of terrible. Getting your cervix biopsied at age 20 because of abnormal Pap smears....getting neoplastic changes zapped off your genitals at age 17 in the operating room...these were just testaments that this was a different population than the group I grew up with. We were stressed about our AP exams, getting into college. We would have crushes, some of us had boyfriends. Did we think it was normal to get pregnant in high school? No. Were our mothers excited if we were 18 and pregnant? No. And no mom should be. And no kids should be having kids. I felt bad for these girls because they had a distorted idea that their lives were normal and that this is how all people are.
And then I realized gradually no wonder the lower-class doesn't really trust the medical system. Whether we admit it or not, doctors come from a different class than our patients on welfare. Several times a day, my classmates and I would just be bewildered by some of our patients. They made terrible life choices and it was obvious that they would continue to. We saw multi-generations in a clinic room who all made the same choices, that would trap them in a low quality of life. Blahhhhh...I don't know.
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