• Only one store in the entire state would sell guns. (See: Mississippi, Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming for states with only one abortion provider.)
• You’d have to fill out an enormous personal background check including intrusive personal information that has nothing to do with your ability to own or use a gun. Then you’d have to wait at least 72 hours and come back to the store. (Remember, it’s the only one in the state. You better hope you don’t live on the other side of Wyoming.)
• Upon your return, you’d have to sit through intensive mandatory counseling. Your counselor, regardless of his personal beliefs, would have to tell you that gun ownership is actually a bad idea, and that it would negatively effect your mental health to own a gun. (This, despite there being no scientific evidence to support the claim.)
• Next, you’d sit through a gruesome movie showing the actual aftermath of domestic gun crimes. You’d see people with half a head. You’d see dead children in their beds. You’d see the bloody aftermath of a school shooting. You’d be shown statistic after statistic warning you that you’d be contributing to this morally degenerate sanctioning of murder.
• If you lived in Virginia, you’d have to come back (again) for an invasive and uncomfortable fMRI (which costs around $300 out of your pocket) to ensure your honesty in answering all the background check information and your intentions to use your gun responsibly. (This was as close as I could get to the invasive transvaginal procedure included in the recently passed Virginia bill.)
• Oh… and if you were married, your spouse might have to sign off on your gun ownership.

My friend is the awesomest. Not only because she does not GAF about the stigma and talks openly about her abortions, and because she called the cops on the protester who assaulted her on her way into the clinic, but also because she brought Flying Spaghetti Monster pamphlets to trade with the protesters who were handing out anti-choice propaganda. Understatement of the year, they didn’t like that at all. Those people are obnoxious as all get-out, and it is amazing how they cannot take even an extremely watered down dose of their own medicine.

At the clinic I used to escort at, the only way I could deal with them was by not interacting with them at all: ipod headphones in, or chatting with another escort; talking only to the patients and their companions and just narrating what the protesters were going to do (“…She’s trying to give you a pamphlet, but you don’t have to take it… She’s going to follow us for a few more steps, but she’s not allowed through the door with us… Just keep walking, we’re almost there…”). That clinic was in a shared office building and didn’t have its own parking lot, so the protesters get literally inches away from patients’ faces, interjecting their bodies between the women and the front door like roadblocks, and the women or I had to basically run the protesters over to take a single step toward the door.

Time and again, they said the most ignorant, racist, cruel things, anything to scare patients away or to try to provoke a reaction out of the escorts. And it seemed to me that when they sensed that the woman might be more vulnerable — because of her age, or her demeanor, or the protesters’ (often obviously racist) best guess at her immigration status — they became extra vicious. It still turns my stomache to remember.

Once during one of my shifts they were shouting at a patient, an East African immigrant approaching the clinic with her East African male companion, “You don’t have to kill your baby just because your boyfriend is making you. Or is he your pimp?” Fuck. You. Asshole. 

The woman looked completely mortified, and I tried to hustle her inside, away from their cruel taunts, while she was still in shock. “Just ignore them, they say stuff like that all the time, they’re terrible people but you are being really brave, we’re almost there…” I could see the young man she’d been walking with consider and finally decide against decking the older white lady who’d just called him a pimp and his companion a prostitute. Instead, he stopped there in the middle of the sidewalk and told her, in a voice full of disgust and pain, “She’s. My. Sister. You are… not good people. You make Jesus mad.”