A few weeks ago, I cared for a young woman who came in to get an IUD check and be screened for sexually transmitted infections. She sat on the exam table, squeezing the vinyl covering between her fingers and palms, crossing her legs at the ankles. Her lashes were long and fake, curled up like…
Author: Alison Hathaway
Alison Hathaway is a nurse practitioner. Her clinical work centers around sexual & reproductive health, family planning and abortion care. She earned her BA from Hampshire College and her MSN from Yale University. She lives in California.
Different Takes on Dobbs: Anti-Choice Rhetoric and the End of Mifepristone
My second year of undergrad, I enrolled in a writing course called Political Fictions. The class description said we would be asked to engage creatively with Joan Didion’s texts and compose “personal essays and fictions which respond[ed] to the political climate of our time.” One assignment involved choosing a newspaper article and spin-doctoring it to…
Under the Surface
I’ve only seen it a few times. I don’t mean when you pass someone at the grocery store, their head covered in a silk turban, pale skin, no eyebrows. I mean at close range—when it’s beyond repair. The first time was ten years ago, an older Taiwanese woman brought in by her concerned daughter. In…
Abortion in Surreal Times: Obstacles for the Youngest Patients in a Post-Roe World
“Our first patient is 11-years-old.” That’s the first thing I heard when I walked into clinic the last week of June. It was a few days after the Dobbs decision and the beginning of a new era in the U.S.: Roe v. Wade had been overturned—the constitutional right to abortion had been revoked. In California,…