What would women do without brave doctors like this? Yet another hero:
After medical school, he bought a big house and a nice car and overstuffed his refrigerator the way people from poverty do, but those satisfactions soon seemed empty. He dated but never quite settled down. Inspired by Gandhi’s idea that the Gospel should appear to a hungry man in the form of bread, he went to work in a food pantry. But gradually, the steady stream of women with reproductive issues in his practice focused his mind. He thought about his mother and sisters and the grandmother who died in childbirth and began to read widely in the literature of civil rights and feminism. Eventually he came across the concept of “reproductive justice,” developed by black feminists who argued that the best way to raise women out of poverty is to give them control of their reproductive decisions. Finally, he had his “come to Jesus” moment and the bell rang. This would be his civil-rights struggle. He would serve women in their darkest moment of need. “The protesters say they’re opposed to abortion because they’re Christian,” Parker says. “It’s hard for them to accept that I do abortions because I’m a Christian.” He gave up obstetrics to become a full-time abortionist on the day, five years ago, that George Tiller was murdered in church.
Now he rushes around all the time, flying from Chicago to Philadelphia to Birmingham, where he picks up a car at his brother’s house and drives to the pink building in the artsy district of Jackson, where he proceeds down a hall lined with women waiting on plastic chairs to the saddest little desk you’ve ever seen—actually part of a hutch ripped from its base and turned to the middle of the room, raw wallboard showing. The women now come in one by one, asking questions they didn’t want to ask in the group.
“Can I call and change my mind?”
“Can I go back to work the next day?”
“Can my mom be in the room with me?”
The oldest woman of the group says she has a son who’s nineteen and a daughter who’s seventeen, and she just had a baby two years ago who died of a heart defect. “She came home and everything,” she says in a mournful voice. Plus she’s anemic but not taking drugs for it. And she has asthma. And possibly a touch of bronchitis.
Another woman asks how long it will take before she can wear tampons again. “I know this sounds so selfish and everything, but I’m going to the beach next week—don’t think I’m a selfish person!”
Several women say they’ve always been against abortion, but they’re not emotionally or financially ready to have a baby. “I just wish that people that are so against it could understand,” one says. “These old men out here protesting do not have vaginas or uteruses.”
“Preach,” Parker says.
“It just makes me so mad!”
Parker’s beaming again, grinning wide. If this happened to men, he says, abortion would be free and they’d pass out free Super Bowl tickets and have public ceremonies to celebrate our brothers who went through the tough decision. He wishes more women had her righteous indignation instead of shame.
When the skinny Army veteran comes in, Parker tells her she made his day with her offer to contribute. Most women are just relieved to get it over with. They never want to see this place again.
“Actually, I want to apply for a job,” she says.
“You should,” he says.
“I will,” she replies. “Even if I don’t get a job, I’ll still come back and volunteer. I just want to be a part of this.”
