Delivery of Care

Planting trees under which you may never sit

Dr. Willie Parker, an abortion provider in Mississippi and Alabama, shared his story on why he became an advocate for reproductive justice

Photo by Richard Asinof

The annual Stanley D. Simon lecture and forum at Brown's Warren Alpert Medical School featured Dr. Willie Parker.

Photo by Richard Asinof

Dr. Willie Parker, MD, MPH, MSc, physician, feminist and change agent, an advocate for reproductive justice.

Photo courtesy of Toby Simon

Dr. Peter Simon, Toby Simon, Dr. Willie Parker, and Patch Schwadron at the 22nd annual Stanley D. Slmon lecture and forum, held on Dec. 1 at the Warren Alpert Medical School.

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By Richard Asinof
Posted 12/5/16
The 22nd annual Stanley D. Simon lecture and forum at the Alpert Medical School was given by Dr. Willie Parker, an abortion provider for clinics in Alabama and Mississippi, who shared his own personal journey of why, as he asked and answered: “Going to Mississippi: if I don’t, who will?”
Will the new Trump presidency and the Republican majority in Congress seek to overturn Roe v. Wade? How will advocates in Rhode Island respond to the threat to women’s health coverage and the ability for women to make decisions about their own body? What is the responsibility of the medical schools to train OB-GYNs in abortion procedures?
The latest state legal maneuver to try and make abortion a prohibitive procedure comes from Texas, where the state approved new rules that will take effect on Dec. 19 that require health care facilities that perform abortions to make arrangements to have the remains either buried or cremated, regardless of how long the gestation period was. Under the rules, if a woman miscarries in a medical facility, the rules would also apply.
One abortion rights advocate, Heather Busby, called the new rules “a thinly veiled attempt to shame Texans who have abortions and make it harder for the doctors to provide them,” saying it was adding a non-medical ritual to a medical procedure.

PROVIDENCE – The speaker at the annual Stanley D. Simon Lecture and Forum at the medical school at Brown University on Dec. 1 was Dr. Willie Parker, who was billed as a physician, feminist, and a change agent.

Parker provides abortion care in Alabama and Mississippi, and serves as chair of the Physicians for Reproductive Health. Parker was featured in “Trapped,” a 2016 documentary film by Dawn Porter about the impact of restrictive state regulations in Mississippi and Alabama.

In Mississippi, Parker provides services at the only remaining state-licensed abortion facility in Jackson, Miss., run by the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in a once drab gray building that is now painted a bright, bubblegum pink.

“It’s now known as the pink house,” he said. “It is probably the only bubble gum pink abortion clinic in the country. I certainly know it’s the only one in the state of Mississippi.”

In his talk at the Alpert Medical School, entitled “Going to Mississippi: If I Don’t, Who Will,” Porter explained his own evolution as a doctor who decided to leave his comfortable academic position in Hawaii and become a Christian reproductive justice advocate and abortion provider.

His story, Life’s Work: From the Trenches, a Moral Argument for Choice, will be published on April 4, 2017.

The lecture drew a capacity crowd, mostly made up of medical students, who gave Parker a standing ovation at the conclusion of his talk.

Going to Mississippi
When first asked to go to Mississippi to provide abortion services at the Jackson clinic, his initial response, Parker explained, was no. His second answer was: Hell, no. Having grown up in the rural Bible Belt of Alabama, Parker said he felt “that in Mississippi, the trees were too tall and the nights were too dark.”

But, as Parker explained, “If I’m going to say no, at least I should go and see what I’m saying no to.”

So, Parker visited the facility and met with the staff, mostly African-American women.

“Many of [the staff] were veterans of the civil rights movement who had shifted their work from civil rights to reproductive rights for their patients, most of whom were black and poor,” he explained. “I knew in my gut that this was the place where I needed to make my contribution.”

inspiration from MLK’s last sermon
When it came to his involvement in reproductive justice, Parker said at the beginning of his talk, “When I look at the map of the United States, I could easily use the opening monologue from Star Trek to describe what my life’s been about.”

Parker then explained to those who may not have been born when the original Star Trek series was aired in the 1960s, that the show began with a statement about the mission of Star Fleet, of which the U.S.S. Enterprise was one of the star ships, with Captain Kirk and all the gang: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

To provide perspective, Parker said that many of the counties in the U.S. have no clinics or abortion providers. And, he added, “A look at the map will show that those vast swathes of territory look very similar to the Electoral College results from Nov. 8.”

The inspiration for the change in his life and the evolution in his medical practice came from the Rev. Martin Luther King’s last sermon, given on April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn.

“There’s a theory that when you wrestle with your conscience and you lose, you actually win,” Parker said, talking about how his life had changed. “For me, I lost that battle, wrestling with my conscience 13 years ago, when I was a faculty member in the OB-GYN department at the University of Hawaii.”

In Parker’s words, he had been living the dream life, with wall-to-wall windows that allowed him to look out at the Pacific Ocean, working with colleagues that he admired and adored; he could even walk to work.

“But when something’s in your gut, when you get the call, no matter how sweet you think your life is, you cannot overcome that thing that is in our gut, that you feel compelled to do,” Parker explained.

Parker, who had grown up in the Bible Belt of Alabama, schooled in Protestantism as a fundamental Christian, said that the assumption was that “If a woman became pregnant in my community, that she was going to have the baby, there was no other consideration given,” even if many of the women were single or in their teens.

Parker said that he never really thought about what it meant to provide abortions, even after he became an OB-GYN, even after he saw women patients on a regular basis who had unwanted and unplanned pregnancies.

“I spent about 12 years that way, practicing as an OB-GYN, referring those patients onto the next place to get abortion care,” he continued.

Increasingly, Parker continued, he became uncomfortable with his inability to provide abortion care because of his religious understanding.

The change came through a religious experience, Parker said, through a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King.

“It was the sermon where he talked about what it was that a good Samaritan did,” Parker explained. “Most of you know that sermon, the one that Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968, as the ‘I’ve been to the mountaintop’ sermon.”

In King’s last sermon, Parker continued, the question of concern was reversed: what will happen to the person if I don’t stop to help? The sermon, Parker said, became his pathway to a deeper compassion, more concerned with the well-being of his patients than what others might think of him, for going against the grain religiously.

“As a women’s health provider, that hit me square in my gut – not only was it appropriate for me to think about the well-being of my patients, it became a moral imperative,” Parker said.

The once and future battle over reproductive rights
Parker was the physician’s plaintiff in the lawsuit against the state of Mississippi that resulted in the court decision in July 2012 to keep the only abortion clinic in Mississippi open.

Even thought the state of Mississippi has lost twice in the federal courts, Parker expects that Mississippi will seek to bring the case before the U.S. Supreme Court next year.

“The lawsuit is now re-engaged, and in February, I’ll have to do a new deposition,” Parker told the audience. If the clinic is forced to close, Parker continued, “For me, my worst nightmare, my worse fear, is that there will be one more place in this country where women will lose access to their rights to reproductive health and privacy, simply based on their zip code.”

The real choices
Parker shared clips of protesters at clinics in Mississippi and Alabama and the kinds of things that were shouted at him, drawing attention to what he called the false theories that somehow he was practicing genocide against black people, which he debunked.

Parker also shared the stories of the patients who had come to the clinics seeking abortions, not out of luxury but out of necessity.

“I think about the mother, 25, with five children, whom I saw a couple of years ago, who had recently experienced the death of her two-year-old. When she came to me, she was nine weeks pregnant, and she said: ‘I don’t have the emotional or physical resources to care for another child.’”

Or, Parker continued, the 15-year-old young woman, who was being reared by her grandmother, who was 10 weeks pregnant – they were so poor that the grandmother had to sell her couch in order to pay for the abortion.

“I think about the 37-year old woman, a mother of three, who had been recently diagnosed with breast cancer while having her third child,” Parker said. When the woman went back for reconstructive surgery, she found out that there was a recurrent mass in her breast. “She came to me to end her pregnancy so she could get chemotherapy and be around to care for the three babies she already had.”

The options for these women are anything but a luxury when it comes to abortion, he said.

Planting trees under which you’ll never sit
In concluding his remarks, Parker referred to the saying: in order for a society to become great, people must be willing to plant trees under which they will never sit.

“What that means to me,” he explained, “is that you have to make a conscious decision to do something that doesn’t benefit you directly.”

As medical students, Parker continued, there are three fundamental questions faced: how do I make a living, how do I make a life, and how do I make a difference.

The proper relationship between those things, he continued, is to frame the answer this way: “You can make your life by making a living that makes a difference.”

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