Clinic escorts wait to greet and help arrivals at Camelback Family Planning, an abortion clinic in Phoenix, Ariz., on April 18, 2024. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)
The legislature in my home state passed a six-week abortion ban. I’m not talking about Iowa, the latest state to claw back women’s rights. I’m from North Dakota, and this happened in 2013. This is the reason I’ve been an abortion nurse for over a decade.
North Dakota’s ban didn’t go into effect at the time because Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. I was a gay woman in my mid-20s without a lot of surplus time to volunteer or money to donate, but I had a nursing license. As a gay woman, abortion wasn’t something I thought about too often; but the lawmakers in my home state were villainizing and legislating abortion the same way they villainized and disenfranchised the LGBTQ+ community, so I figured it was my turn to be an ally.
A few big things have happened for queer abortion nurses in the past decade:
The Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, which led to a lot more visibility and positivity surrounding the LGBTQ+ community—for a while anyway. When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, at first nurses were celebrated and thanked, but then the reality of the trauma and burnout set in, making the lives of nurses extra tough and led to many exiting the field entirely. The Supreme Court then issued their Dobbs decision in 2022, making it clear that healthcare decisions aren’t just between a patient and their doctor, and anti-abortion lawmakers are just as anti-trans and anti-gay as they have ever been with new bans and awful rhetoric popping up all the time. Rosa Topp is a registered nurse, as well as a clinical educator at Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
In nursing school we’re told that nursing is a smart career choice because you have so many options for where you can work—but what that really meant was options within the hospital. We’re implicitly taught that working anywhere other than the hospital isn’t as important or worthy. I internalized those messages, and happily worked on an inpatient neurology/neurosurgery unit for four years.
A significant number of nursing schools and hospital systems are religiously affiliated too, which for me and many other LGBTQ+ healthcare workers often requires experiencing an undercurrent of anti-gay and anti-abortion beliefs. My own thesis in graduate school showed that abortion nurses experienced stigma from other nurses more frequently than from the general public. While abortion stigma is undeniable, queer people are already accustomed to adversity and finding joy and purpose in our own resilience.
Being a gay nurse and working in abortion has been liberating. First of all, you’d be hard-pressed to find an abortion clinic that isn’t decked out in rainbows or pronoun pins or slogans about leaving people alone and letting them live their lives.
Then there’s the matter of representation. When I was at the hospital, I’d be the token “gay one” on my unit. But now I don’t know that I’ve ever worked a shift at an abortion clinic without there being at least one other queer person in the midst. At the clinic, I can show all the tattoos I have and wear wacky jewelry and hairstyles that would elicit side-eyes or talking-tos at the hospital. And while I wasn’t sure if abortion clinic nursing would be as fulfilling as hospital nursing, I was quickly surprised.
As I should have known, the sex you have and the ramifications of that sex is deeply personal, intimate and stigmatized, whether you’re gay or not. People coming in for abortion care vary in all kinds of ways, but everyone wants to be treated like a thoughtful, intelligent person who deserves dignity and humanity. Joking around with someone who tells me she wishes she were gay while I provide high-quality medical care feels awesome.
I never disliked working at the hospital—I made some friends for life and there are patients I’ll never forget. But working at the abortion clinic has let me be the most authentic version of myself as a nurse that I can be, and I can see and feel how important the work is every day.
As of this month, 22 states have banned some or all abortions. If you’re like me and your home state has closed your local abortion clinic—well they’re probably anti-LGBTQ too, and this is your call to get involved: to volunteer, donate and fight abortion stigma wherever you can. But if you’re a queer person with a nursing license looking for somewhere to work where you can be yourself and make a profound impact, check to see if your local abortion clinic is hiring.
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