Obstetrix(7)

I ought to not care about proper anesthesia, I thought. These people kidnapped me, and even if it was Sarah who drugged me and Brandon who carried me into the minivan, the woman currently giving birth next to me was in on it and thought their need justified the kidnapping. If they had a woman they expected to need a C-section, they could have sent her to another state for the last month of pregnancy.

Unless she was also a prisoner here.

“Oh, Jesus Lord, Lamb of God, Prince of Peace,” the woman wailed, across from me. She’d known about the kidnapping. She didn’t need me. I couldn’t be sure about Joy, but I could be pretty sure about her.

“That’s right, Sister Grace Lynn,” Sarah said. “That’s right.”

I lay down on the other bed and tried to take a nap.



* * *



WHEN I WAS ARRESTED for performing the abortion, they let me turn myself in and I thought I’d get bailed out right away. I was wrong. The prosecutor claimed I was a flight risk, because if I went to Minnesota, Minnesota might not send me back. The judge set bail, but he set really high bail. And between having to wait for the bail hearing, and having to wait for my father to talk to a bail bondsman, I was in the Ward County jail for six days.

The women in jail with me were a weird mix of people who were accused of doing stuff bad enough to be denied bail altogether (there was an alleged murderer in there with me—she was charged with killing her sister in an inheritance dispute) and people who’d done stuff that wasn’t a particularly big deal but they’d failed to show up or meet their probation requirements or whatever, and now they’d been picked up on a bench warrant. Jail was very boring, and I’d listened to anyone who wanted to chat because it was a way to pass the time. There was a blond woman, young, who had been put on probation for identity theft and credit card fraud in Wisconsin. She’d left Wisconsin and moved to North Dakota and insisted, to me, that she’d thought she was allowed to do this. “Don’t they want me getting a job and supporting myself honestly? Wasn’t that the whole point of probation? I got a job! They’ve probably fired me now for no call, no show, anyway, but I had one!”

Dozing on the bed, I dreamed about the jail, and that woman—Grace Lynn’s voice was a little like hers, and I dreamed that she was telling me about Wisconsin (“It gets so cold in the winter,” she’d told me blithely—apparently she hadn’t been through one in North Dakota yet) and then breaking off to shout, “In Jesus’s name!” and, “LORD, hold me up, Lord!”

Even during my week in jail, it had felt like an absurd misunderstanding. The crimes I’d committed in previous years were all the sort of technical or accidental things you’d list out mainly to demonstrate how blameless and boring you were: I had once driven around with expired plates for four months, before noticing and paying for the renewal. I’d accidentally shoplifted garlic more than once, discovering the unpaid-for bulb in the corner of my cart as I was loading groceries into my car, and I always just chucked it in the bag without going back in to pay for it. I didn’t always come to a full and complete stop at stop signs. Somebody like me didn’t belong in prison.

The prosecutor had even agreed that I didn’t belong in prison; he’d offered a deal. No jail time, I would keep my medical license, but I would have to issue a written statement saying that what I had done was not medically necessary, and I would have to counsel other doctors to “make better choices,” I think that was the requirement. It was, honestly, a perfectly reasonable deal except that what I’d done had been medically necessary, and they wanted me to lie and say it had been wrong, and worse, they wanted me to tell other doctors not to do what I’d done.

So I’d refused. And it wasn’t until we went to trial that the possibility I could actually spend years behind bars had sunk in.



* * *



GRACE LYNN’S BABY WAS born at 10:10 p.m.—I didn’t have a watch, but there was a clock on the wall of the hospital, with a sweeping second hand for timing contractions. He was a healthy boy, born without complications other than Grace Lynn winding up with a perineal tear.

In addition to learning her name, over the course of her labor I’d learned that this child was going to be her fourth, although her second born in Harvest—Harvest was their name for the compound, which they called a ranch. Her favored boy name was Ozias, which apparently meant “salvation.” She thought they could call him Ozzy for short. Her preferred girl name was Hosanna.

Sarah gave Grace Lynn her baby to hold and breastfeed, and encouraged her to push a little to deliver the placenta. I could not stop myself from looking over the placenta once it was out, to make sure there weren’t any bits left behind; there weren’t. Sarah washed her hands and gloved up to stitch the tear, and I was able to sit there and watch her inject local anesthetic and put in exactly one stitch before I said, “Let me do that.” They do train midwives to repair first-and second-degree tears, but I know I’m better at it than most, and looking at Sarah’s technique, I did not think this was something she’d been trained on by any nursing or midwifery school. I washed my hands, donned gloves, and took over. Sarah, fortunately, took the win without protest or comment.

I had not attended a birth since my arrest more than a year ago, and I hadn’t really attended this birth, either—Sarah had. I was surprised by the rush of emotion I felt as I put in seven careful stitches. That rush of satisfaction at a job done with meticulous perfectionism, that was part of it. But also, I had missed this. And following that moment of sparkling joy of having this job back came a wave of anger that it had been taken from me, and that I was getting it back here, that I was caring for this woman because I had been kidnapped and she had collaborated in my kidnapping.