“We Never Made Assumptions”: A Lifetime Dedicated to Providing Abortion Care

Five years ago, when Curtis Boyd, MD, and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, PhD, RN, set out to write a book about their lives and 50-year-career providing abortion care in Texas and New Mexico, Roe was still the law of the land. But their book, which was published in September, made its debut two years after that landmark case was overturned and just a few short months before Donald J. Trump will retake the White House. As they explain in the Afterword of We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe (Disruption Books), the work they devoted their lives to, expanding access to abortions, is being undone—and once Trump is back in power, that reversal will only accelerate. We can expect that Trump will seek out ways to impose international abortion bans like the global gag rule, and his supporters would like to see him enforce the Comstock Act, which would ban mailing abortion pills. Knowing all of that, Glenna’s question in the Afterword hits hard: “Why did we bother?”

It can really start to feel that way. But as the Boyds remind us, the 2022 ruling overturning Roe isn’t the end of the story, and neither are Trump’s electoral wins. “Abortion has been with us ‘since the dawn of time.’ It will not go away,” writes Glenna.

At the same time, as new ProPublica reporting makes clear, we can expect that more people will suffer and die as access to abortion is further limited and as health care is criminalized. For that reason and many others, they feel, we have a duty to tell our stories and document history. These stories will serve as an important counterweight to the onslaught of bad news that is sure to come, while ensuring future generations can pick up the torch and light the way forward.

In early October, I spoke with Glenna and Curtis about their new book.

We Choose To chronicles how they met—Glenna started working as a counselor at the abortion clinic in Texas where Curtis was the abortion provider, one year after the Roe ruling—and built a life together, ultimately running abortion clinics in the Southwest together before retiring earlier this year after the sale of their Albuquerque, New Mexico clinic, Southwestern Women’s Options. Before Curtis met Glenna in early 1974, he provided abortions in a small town in Texas through the Clergy Consultation Service (CCS) while abortions were still illegal, and he would sometimes provide abortions beyond the “acceptable” pregnancy limit to ensure very few, if any, patients were turned away. “Seeing women through this underground network broadened my understanding of what it meant to be a woman in the 1960s and strengthened my belief that I was doing the right thing,” says Curtis. After abortion became legal, Curtis’s abortion clinic, the Fairmount Center, became the first legal clinic in Texas.

Early in her career, while working as a nursing resident at a halfway house, Glenna helped two other residents—in 1970 and 1971—to access abortion care. Glenna raised funds for their care and coordinated their travel to the Feminist Women’s Health Center (FWHC) in Los Angeles, where care was legal. So when she was looking for a new job and saw an opening at the Fairmount Center, she applied for the open counselor position and was hired by an administrator on the spot. Because abortion care was still fairly new as a field, Glenna discovered that “no one knew what abortion counseling should be—or could be” and that she would have to create her own approach. While Glenna was establishing a “psychosocial” counseling method that was rooted in treating people as they deserve to be treated—with dignity and a sense of empowerment—and benefited their patients and clinic staff alike, Curtis was pioneering a second-trimester abortion method to minimize surgical risks, the dilation and evacuation (or D&E) method. (I previously interviewed Dr. Curtis Boyd for my book with Renee Bracey Sherman, Liberating Abortion, which we also discussed in our interview.)

For all of their professional achievements, including serving as founding members of the National Abortion Federation, a professional organization for abortion providers, one of the most delightful stories in the book was how they met. During Glenna’s second week, she tried to kick a bearded, flower-vested, bellbottom-wearing Curtis out of the clinic because she was concerned his appearance was making the patients uncomfortable. He was only amused and didn’t tell her that it was his clinic; she found out later that day that the hippie rattling her patient was the doctor. But that first encounter did not get in the way of them eventually developing a strong bond, first as colleagues, creating a counseling training program together, and later as wedded partners.

Curtis and Glenna’s story—of love, of triumph, of accepting what is amid the uncertainty of our lives—serves as an important reminder of how we may not sunset our work on a win, but that is why we must learn how to face our losses, which are all but certain on the path to liberation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Regina Mahone