A young woman gets in the car and knowingly, after days of family debate, drives her sister to the abortuary. The sister enters the abortuary to keep her appointment; the young woman tries to go into the abortuary with her, but is not permitted to remain because she carries a small child with her. The young woman then returns to the car, to wait there until the abortion is over.
At this point it sounds like a dead-end sort of scenario. It’s all over. And sometimes when I pile up all the “facts” in my mind, then I begin to act like it’s all over. Fortunately, though, I am not the only sidewalk counselor at American Family Planning. Because by the end of the morning, after being urged by another Guadalupe Partner, this young woman had roused herself out of her stupor, took the child home, came back, went into the clinic, and after about a 45 minute struggle, came out with her sister. (Actually, after her sister had already left, she remained a little longer trying to persuade another woman in the waiting room to come out.)
And then there was the Spanish couple. I did something right on this one. After their car pulled into the parking lot, when the sidewalk counselor asked if she should meet the couple at their car or near the door I said at the car. These are the kinds of little details that matter when sidewalk counseling. If you walk around on the sidewalk to meet them at the car, if they are not willing to engage with you, all they have to do is walk deeper into the parking lot. If you remain by the door, you will have at least ten seconds and a better opportunity of getting an envelope into their hands. I advised the sidewalk counselor to go to the car, and she was indeed able to engage them, in a somewhat separated place, for about seven minutes. The man, then, became impatient, and began ordering his wife to get iinto the building. He went ahead and actually entered the abortuary–but when his wife didn’t immediately follow, he came back out and again began to call her in. I then started talking to him. His English wasn’t good–neither was my Spanish–but it really didn’t matter. The objective simply was to distract him away from his wife. This little duel went on for about 10-15 minutes. He lost, she won, the baby lived.
That was all on Friday. On Saturday the dark clouds quickly rolled in. Unprepared, we stood in the rain, doing our best, trying to hand out dripping envelopes. One of our new sidewalk counselors, Monica, did a very good job in persuading one of the drivers to go into the abortuary and bring out the girl he had brought. Unfortunately, this one came out empty-handed.
