blog columnist, Seth

And hello, blog enthusiasts.

My name is Seth, and this is the first of what I hope will be many posts on the Choice 2.0 blog. I’m honored that the fine folks at PPCNC have asked me to contribute to this site… and I hope that my postings can do justice to the amount of faith they have in me.

I’m very much a believer that you can get to know someone through their writings, and so I mostly intend to allow them to serve as the window into my head. But, with that in mind, I thought I would use this first post as somewhat of an introduction. Call it Seth 101.

I worked in one of PPCNC’s health centers for several years as first a Health Care Assistant and then as Assistant Clinic Manager, before leaving to go to graduate school in social work. My main area of interest tends to be LGBT rights, though issues of choice, reproductive rights, sex ed, etc. are very much a part of me and very important to me. I have a tendency to get very frustrated with people who lie and/or distort truths in order to scare others into believing or following them. If you’re going to see any theme run through a great deal of my postings, it’s more than likely going to be that.

I’d like to take a minute to talk about my experiences at PPCNC, because they, perhaps obviously, have very much colored how I feel about certain issues.

The funny thing about working at a Planned Parenthood (or, most likely, any reproductive rights clinic) is that it forces you to confront the issues around reproductive rights in a way that you never otherwise would. Before I began my tenure at PPCNC, I was pro-choice, but not in any sort of proactive kind of way. If someone asked me where I stood on the issue, I would tell them… but that was about it. There were no rallies, no protests, no volunteering. It was just a position I held and one that affected my life very little.

Until I started working at PPCNC. I confess that I applied for a job there mainly because I thought it sounded interesting, and that was about it. I had just finished undergrad, had moved away briefly before returning home to this area, and was bored at the job I was working. I would never go so far as to say that I was looking for meaning in my life at the time, because I definitely wasn’t. I was simply looking for something new to do.

I’m not going to bore you with the entire history of my time at PPCNC. Needless to say, there were some good moments, some bad ones, some stressful ones, and some that broke my heart(more on these in later posts.) It was unlike any job I had ever had… and, now that I’m several years removed from that experience (with the brief but notable exception of working part-time this past summer as I looked for full-time employment), I can honestly say that it’s unlike any job I ever will have again. It changed the way I look at many things, including the way I view issues of social justice. Planned Parenthood, in many ways, made an activist out of me.

Beyond the strictly personal though, one of the things that strikes me the most about my time at the clinic has to do with the people I worked with, the coworkers who were in the trenches with me each day. Individuals who work in these types of clinics are often held up to a certain kind of standard, for better or for worse. For some pro-choice individuals, they are the bravest of the brave, modern-day saints willing to risk life and limb for a cause much bigger than them. And to some anti-choice individuals, they’re generally thought of to be the worst kind of person… someone who has such a disregard for the sanctity of life that s/he spends days participating in horrible sin.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. Just as I never encountered a demon as a co-worker, I never encountered an angel either. The people I worked with were, by all accounts, conscientious, caring, passionate people who did and do care… about a lot of things. But they weren’t infallible, they weren’t always perfect, and they didn’t always love their jobs. Frustration sets in everywhere, and my co-workers were not immune. In other words, they were human.

And I think that often gets lost in the debate. The people working in the clinics every day, the people who cross picket lines, who go through trainings about bomb threats, who keep “weirdness logs” to document any strange happenings… they’re not martyrs and they’re not devils. They’re simply people, working to help women and men who are in some kind of need.

That’s the big secret that vanishes sometimes in the heated rhetoric and in the over-the-top media coverage of the issues that surround Planned Parenthood. And that’s one of the reasons why it bothers me so much when anti-choice individuals tell lies and manipulate the truth. Because it not only damages the patients in need of services… it deeply affects the individuals who are just trying to help. And that’s simply not ok with me.

So my response is generally to fight it… to work to expose the distortions and untruths for what they really are. To stand up for both the patients and employees who so often get ridiculed and marginalized. Hopefully, over the next few weeks and months of posting here, that’s what I’ll be doing. What we’ll be doing. And I’m looking forward to it.

Cheers.

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