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In winter 2021, I met Izabel and Fuchsia at Aquatic Park in Berkeley. Fuchsia suggested the park because it’s next to I-80. She thought the freeway background noise would be a good security measure. I’d interviewed each of them before, but now we were getting together to see what insights a triangle might produce. Fuchsia wore a Black Lives Matter tee. Izabel wore a KPFA cap and black-and-blue-striped socks on the outside of her stretch pants. We sat in the grass facing each other.
The two recalled how their initially large group quickly split into a couple of smaller ones, made up of about eight people each. Izabel and Fuchsia couldn’t remember if they were always (or ever) in the same group, but over the years, their work overlapped.
Linci taught the groups. “There was a curriculum,” Fuchsia recalled. “It was a progression. We learned how to do a pelvic exam and how to size the uterus. We learned sterile technique. At some point, they introduced the jar and tubing and syringe, and we learned menstrual extraction. Oh gosh, we learned a person could be pregnant, and we could still remove the menstrual cycle.”
Izabel described what the aha! moment was like: “We realized we were practicing so that we would be able to end early-term pregnancies. And that really lit me up. I was like, Oh yeah we are, because this world is not safe for women.”
Then, Fuchsia told me, the groups got cooking. Group members would rotate hosting at their various communal houses. Meetings were once a week or two. As they arrived, people would chat a little as friends. But then, Izabel remembered clearly, someone would promptly announce what they were going to study that day. Each meeting started the same way: “First we would practice doing speculum exams or pelvics,” Izabel said. “Like doing scales, you’d do them over and over and over again.”
Group members would pair off and find a sunny corner. Each person would do an exam on their partner. “Where are the ovaries? People would describe it as a flitter across your fingers,” Izabel recalled. “I did it for years before I felt any flutter.” Fuchsia remembered doing pelvic exams at most meetings and was still able to describe the exam in detail:
Doing an exam—it’s so cool! First you find the cervix. You insert your fingers. You basically stabilize the cervix from underneath. On top, you press on the uterus. You’re scooping; the non-pregnant uterus is the size of a walnut. You’re holding the cervix underneath, and you’re pressing on the belly. You’re trying to capture the walnut between your hands. And you’re getting a sense of the distance between the fundus and the cervix. The fundus is the top of the uterus. You might be scooping and nothing’s moving. That means you’re not on the uterus; you’re just pressing on the belly. But then you go here, and all of a sudden, it moves. Okay. That means you’re pressing on it. And then you go to the side—here’s the edge. At first, it’s totally vague. But then you do a few more, and you’re like, oh, okay. Textbook is straight, but the uterus could be folded over. So at every meeting, you would try to do several pelvic exams. Because you’re going to feel different things. And then one day you might be like, oh, it’s not a walnut…it’s a plum. Or oh, it’s a mandarin. Or oh, it’s an orange. The pregnant uterus gets bigger. At first, it’s just getting an idea of what you’re feeling between your two hands. You’re translating what you feel to a mental image of the uterus. And then a pregnant uterus. You compare your theoretical how-big-it-should-be to the dates the person reports around the pregnancy.
Fuchsia continued, “I remember unpacking the idea of the ‘retrograde uterus,’ that problematic language women often hear from gynecologists. ‘Oh, your uterus is tipped or tilted.’ There’s nothing wrong with that! The uterus can be in different positions and that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong or bad or ‘retrograde.’ There’s just natural variation.”
Then the group would come back together and circle up to study the topic of the day. One topic was sterile technique. Another study topic was lidocaine injections. Group members practiced drawing up lidocaine with a syringe, then sticking a piece of soft fruit, like a plum. Then they practiced injecting it into each other’s cervixes.
At first, I didn’t understand why you would need to numb the cervix as everything I’d read said that on or close to the first day of your period, the os is open enough to allow for a thin plastic canula to pass through for a menstrual extraction without pain. But Izabel and Fuchsia weren’t learning that type of ME—they were learning how to administer local anesthetic and how to sound the uterus and dilate the cervix. They were learning how to do tissue evaluation. Their group was learning something much closer to the clinical procedure for abortion.
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