Seeking Absolution In The Recovery Room

While conducting ethnographic research in an abortion clinic in the early 2000s, Lori Freedman was struck by how many of the patients, mostly Latina women, turned to their nurses for spiritual comfort and forgiveness:

Beatriz and Claudia starkly challenged my own unexamined assumptions that religion and abortion mixed like oil and water. I marveled at their easy confidence that they could help these women spiritually. There is no script for such moments, certainly no mainstream religious scripts that so readily grant women who get abortions forgiveness in such reassuring ways. In fact, data show that women who get abortions are likely to keep it a secret precisely because they fear they will receive harsh disapproval. They fear they will be judged and that the people that they care about will see them as less than what they were.

Ironically, for these patients, the abortion clinic may be one of the few safe spaces to seek spiritual counsel.