THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW
IF ever you wanted a walking advertisement in support of legalised abortion, take Glenda Bateman. Fifteen years ago, while working in Johannesburg as a student nurse, she fell pregnant after dating a student doctor for just three months. To put it delicately, it seems a too large condom slipped, and bingo!
The couple agreed they were not ready to settle into domestic bliss, but abortion was illegal and they wanted to keep the matter private, so could not turn to any of the numerous doctors of their acquaintance. After several weeks of deliberation and vacillation, Bateman set off in her battered blue Mini for her home town in Natal.
She had an appointment with a white farmer in Cato Ridge, known by hundreds (maybe thousands) of local lasses who found themselves faced with the prospect of single motherhood. “At first I thought I could have coped with being a single parent, but it would have been difficult to continue my studies,” she explains.
We are sitting sipping tea in a tiny kitchen at the offices of Marie Stopes International, perched on the 11th floor of a building in downtown Johannesburg. The British-based charity is famed for providing reproductive health care worldwide, but was also not averse to doing a little abortion on the side long before the procedure was legalised in South Africa.
Bateman (34) is remarkably candid about an episode in her life which she now admits to having blocked from her memory until about two years ago, when she joined Stopes. It was while comforting a young woman who had undergone an abortion that she inadvertently blurted out her own experience – it felt like therapy.
She went home and told her husband about the weekend in Natal when she suffered a botched backstreet abortion, carried out by a man whose medical experience emerged from cattle breeding, though he claimed to have had medical training. The farmer’s method was to induce labour by inserting a catheter up the cervix and into the uterus. The result? An apparent miscarriage which could then be dealt with at a hospital.
But Bateman left the catheter tube inside for too long. “We were supposed to take it out as soon as bleeding started, but I went to a braai that night and forgot.” The following morning she woke up in pain and with a terrific temperature. “I knew at once that it had become septic and that I had an infection.”
She was rushed to hospital, where suspicious doctors and nurses bombarded her with a battery of questions about the cause of her condition. She held her ground over a three-day stay in hospital and the case was recorded as a miscarriage. Bateman and her young doctor parted soon after. He subsequently “came out of the closet” and accepted his homosexuality.
So it was just as well they had not gone the shotgun-wedding course – though Bateman says they had lunch recently and he expressed regret about having missed out on “perhaps his only chance of fatherhood”. She went on to marry and have three other children.
“I did what most women who terminate do. I just blocked it from my mind and got on with my life,” she says. “It was gone; finished; over.” At least until her first child was born. The baby girl died within a week and a flash of doubt entered her mind. “Thankfully I never once thought God was punishing me for the termination. I gave my new-born daughter back to Him, grieved and continued with my life.”
But does a woman ever really forget? She pauses, smiles sadly and replies: “No, I don’t think she does. Most like me just go into denial until something triggers the memory.” She quotes studies in the United States that show many women reach their 50s and then begin to deal with the issue of a terminated pregnancy.
I was therefore surprised to hear Bateman argue so passionately in favour of abortion. She insists on a woman’s right to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy. Eyes glint with anger, even through slightly tinted spectacles, as she talks about abandoned or neglected children – invariably black ones.
“It was all right for wealthy white women who could afford to fly abroad or pay privately for abortions even when it was illegal, but it was my black sisters in the townships who had to bear children they could not afford or did not want to keep.”
Her soft, almost girlish voice takes on a steely edge as she argues the rights of women not to be saddled with children they cannot care for. “Even worse were those forced through desperation to go the unsafe backstreet route, and all the dangers that entailed.”
It was because of the health risk women were taking that Marie Stopes opened its first office in South Africa in 1993, initially doing male and female sterilisation. The following year it quietly carried out the first abortion.
“We got referrals from doctors in state hospitals who were sympathetic,” she says. “We were careful and discreet, but if anyone questioned us we simply denied it.” Initially there were more white clients than black, but as word spread and the centre of town became more Afrocentric, the ratio shifted to 40:60.
As it costs about R600, most women are able to save or borrow money for the procedure, which takes only one hour from start to finish. “We often get women coming in during their lunch time and going straight back to work,” says Bateman. The whole things begins to sound rather like a factory assembly line: register, counselling, abortion, rest, depart.
There is the obvious danger that some people will begin to view this as an alternative to contraception. Which is why the clinic also offers family planning advice. Staff handle about 60 people each day, including pregnancy tests, pap smears and contraceptive information.
“Do you want to see a procedure?” she asks suddenly. Er, no thanks. I politely decline with a smile. “It’s very quick you know, just a couple of minutes.” Yes, I’ve heard. Just a quick suction and Bob’s your uncle. But really, I’d rather not.
Talk of manual vacuum aspiration (sucking out the foetus with a huge syringe) was making me queasy enough. I knew that just down the hall young women were being “done”, feet in stirrups. Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust was blasting from the radio in one of the three “operating” rooms tastefully decorated in cheery floral peach and blue.
When all is quiet, we set off in that direction. Bateman produces some of the instruments used, chief among them the syringe, looking suspiciously like an oversized cake icing piper. I always thought they used some electrical equipment similar to a mini vacuum cleaner. She demonstrates how it works and I squeeze my legs together at the prospect.
“It’s not as painful or messy as people think,” she says brightly. “We only help clients between six and 12 weeks, so there isn’t much to take out.” Apparently six weeks produces about two teaspoons, or a nose-bleed full.
Bateman, who worked for the Methodist Church before joining Marie Stopes, is proud she has been able to help so many women make what is perhaps the most difficult decision of their lives. “It’s not easy, but the relief on their faces when it’s all over is incredibly satisfying.”
But what about the emotional toll on her? “I really believe that I can care for every single woman who comes through our doors. I don’t ever want to feel too numb to care.”
However, the best moment is when a client comes in for a test and is happy to be pregnant. “It’s not often, but boy, it feels good and we all go around smiling for a while.”