[Yeah, go ahead and tell me 2017 sucked. Much of it did, but it was also an exciting year for activism and major progress at the state level on reproductive rights. Please join in me in a retrospective look at all the shit that got done this year thanks to scrappy activists, in spite of everything. —MB]
On Monday morning, the Northwest Abortion Access Fund’s weekly budget is replenished, and a new hotline shift begins.
This week, Jeanie Schauerman is one of two volunteers staffing the hotline, responding to callers throughout the Pacific Northwest who need help paying for their abortion procedures. Schauerman’s been doing this work for 12 years, and her shift always starts the same way: She gets up on Monday morning, makes some coffee, and checks her phone to see what funding requests have come in since the previous shift ended on Friday. Then she corrals her pets, finds a quiet spot in her home, and starts returning calls.
Schauerman is warm and opinionated in the way of old-school reproductive rights activists—the ones who remember life before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States. In an email sent after our initial conversation, she discloses that she lost a friend to a back-alley abortion in the days before Roe: “Never again!”
Schauerman says she initially wanted to be a clinic escort—a volunteer who helps patients get past the anti-abortion protesters who frequently throng clinic entrances—but found it didn’t jibe with her work schedule. So instead, on the suggestion of an activist friend, she started working at the abortion fund hotline. She’s been answering the phone ever since. Monday and Tuesday are her busiest days.
“The first week I was on the hotline, 12 years ago, I almost quit because I had so many calls that first day, and I thought, ‘I just can’t do this and work full-time. I just can’t do this,’” says Schauerman. “And then it tapers off.”