Susan Storm Richards

There is a Planned Parenthood my bus passes by on 16th Street. I don't usually notice it when I'm on the bus, but I walk down there often enough, and occasionally there are escorts standing outside with fluorescent orange vests on ready to help someone in, as well as one or two dour-looking folk who hold up pro-life signs or pray with their rosaries. One older white woman I've seen more than once. She's creepy.

A few semesters ago, I was in my school's asylum clinic and represented a Central American woman who was a victim of domestic violence. DV is a controversial ground for asylum--we lost at our first hearing and our appeal has been pending for six months now--so we had to gather as much evidence as we could to show there was some kind of political angle to it. So I tracked down an anthropologist whose research was on gender violence, and she gave us a great affidavit describing the invisibility of women in Central America after the civil wars of the last generation.

She wrote about how in Central America, in its hierarchy of violence, domestic violence is at the very bottom, incongruous as it is with the more public narratives of wartime massacres and gang violence. And so women have no communal space to find shelter, no space to find solace except the space in her bedroom between her husband and herself, which is of course no space at all.

On my bus this morning, going down 16th Street, for some reason I looked out the window as we passed Planned Parenthood. The traffic happened to keep us stopped there for a moment. There were three pro-lifers there this time, and two escorts, and a young couple trying to get in, being hassled by one of the pro-lifers. My first instinct was to roll my eyes at the pro-lifers and think, jesus, just let the girl live her own life. As the pro-life man kept bugging the couple, the two other pro-lifers got down on their knees and started praying.

But then I looked at the couple as they tried to fend off the man politely, avoiding confrontation. The man was talking directly at the girl, as her boyfriend nodded his head and looked the same way I probably do when I try to get off the phone with a telemarketer without hanging up on them. And what I could not help but notice was the boyfriend's hand on the girl's back, maybe not pushing, but certainly nudging her forward, trying to get her past the pro-life man.

And I thought, that sucks. A lot. Being literally caught between a crazy old man who was probably telling her she was about to commit murder and her clueless child of a boyfriend who was probably scared out of his mind of being a daddy. It was like watching both sides yell at each other, over and above the most important player in this tough, tough game that no one can win.