Rep. Cori Bush Changed Her Mind About Getting An Abortion At 19 But The Doctor "Absolutely Ignored Me" And Performed The Procedure Anyway
Cori Bush is a congresswoman from Missouri who is also a registered nurse and single mother. In a recent PBS interview, she opened up about a harrowing experience she had when she was only 19 years old. She went in for an abortion, but changed her mind as soon as she laid on the table. The doctor ignored her request to stop.
Cori Bush describes herself as an activist and organizer who is "leading with love, fighting for regular people." She's an outspoken supporter of abortion and many other progressive values, but in an interview on PBS, she shared a story about being exploited by an abortionist doctor who refused to listen to her request to stop the procedure.
Rep. Cori Bush Changed Her Mind About Getting an Abortion at 19, but the Doctor "Absolutely Ignored Me" and Performed the Procedure Anyway
When Bush was 19 years old, she got pregnant and went in for her first abortion. "You know that you may experience some harm or even racism in this space," she recalled about the experience. "I thought I was ready." She went through all the steps that were "almost like an assembly line." She arrived on the table and was being prepped for the procedure, but then her mind started racing.
"One, I didn't tell the father that that was about to happen," she shared. "I just felt like I needed more time. So I said, 'No, you know what, I'm not ready.'"
The nurse didn't listen to her even though she said no multiple times. But the medical providers "continued to pull the instruments" and get everything ready with the end goal of aborting Bush's baby. "No, calm down," they kept telling her, ignoring her pleas to stop the procedure. Bush said they kept telling her to calm down as if she were the problem.
She said she was looking elsewhere in the room to see if there were anyone who would listen to her. But as she looked around, they placed the instrument inside of her and started to kill her baby in her womb. The interviewer then asked why she thinks they didn't listen to her.
"The same as other times where I haven't been listened to by a provider or medical staff," she said. "I was a young black woman...multiple times I felt like it was, 'Oh, we know better. We know better.'"
The pinned tweet on Bush's Twitter page promotes the "reproductive freedom tour across Missouri," which supports access to abortion for women everywhere. The disconnect is difficult to see. Bush claims that she wasn't listened to because of the color of her skin, but there are plenty of accounts from women of different races about how they were ignored by abortionists. The issue is the predatory nature of the abortion industry in general, but Bush doesn't quite get there with her argument.