Journée des femmes II : interlude.
Oui, j’ai un calendrier… et en fait un deuxième billet en préparation. Mais ce week-end, j’ai (eu ?) un sérieux coup de déprime & angoisse. Ce qui veut dire que j’ai beaucoup dormi et pas réussi à faire grand-chose.
En attendant le vrai billet numéro deux, qui portera par conséquent le numéro trois, je vous présente quelqu’un: la docteure Miriam McCreary, gynécologue à la retraite, qui travaille un jour par semaine dans la clinique du planning familial de Sioux Falls, au Dakota-du-Sud, seul établissement médical qui pratique des IVG dans cet État et en voie d’être criminalisé le 1er juillet, quand le nouveau loi interdisant l’avortement (y compris dans les cas d’inceste, viol et danger pour la santé de la femme) est censé entrer en vigueur :
Finding providers for remote areas is one of our biggest challenges. So I feel like I have something to contribute here because I’m retired from my full-time ob/gyn practice. Two days a week, I’m out of town going to Sioux Falls or Fargo. I’ve traveled about 28 or 30,000 miles per year, and this means taking a whole day out of my retired life, which I am enjoying most of the time, but there are other things a retiree likes to do. I have ten grandchildren. I like to spend time with them. We like to travel.
When I travel out of town, it takes the whole day. Weather gets bad, you end up in Green Bay, Wisconsin instead of the Twin Cities. And sometimes I’ve had to stay overnight at Fargo and catch the early flight back the next day. So it means a lot of sitting around in airports. But I don’t mind doing it because the reason I’m going is because I want these clinics to have a doctor to provide the services. It’s very important to me to be able to keep providing these services to places where they don’t have other doctors. Sometimes I say to myself, “What if I decided not to provide abortions anymore?” If I leave, there will be a gap. [...]
I think what worries me the most is that there might be a crazy person out there who wants to get rid of me because I’m an abortion doctor, but we’ve been very fortunate in Minnesota. We haven’t had as many incidents of crazy people, as I call them, like the Lambs of Christ. These people were very active about 14 years ago and they were picketing in front of our house, carrying signs that said, “Dr. McCreary is a murderer.” And I wrote a letter to Dr. Barnet Slepian, the doctor in Buffalo, New York, who was later murdered; and he sent me a nice copy of the local ordinance that they had passed in Buffalo prohibiting picketing in front of a private residence. So we were able to get an ordinance passed in the city of Mendota Heights prohibiting picketing in front of a private residence.
So after that picketing ordinance was passed, then they didn’t come around so much, but it was traumatic emotionally. They threw oil and nails in my driveway and threw red paint at our white front door and put pictures up and this was very disturbing emotionally because I live in a neighborhood with families and children and I didn’t want them to have to see these things. They put “killer” on the sidewalk in red paint. So these are the emotional things that are bothersome. But I think as an abortion doctor, you have to be willing to realize that these things are going to happen. And I worry sometimes that maybe they will go after me like they did after Dr. Slepian, but so far I’ve been lucky.