Walking in that day, I was unaware that the clinic was a Christian-affiliated institution — not rare here in Washington State where 40% of hospital beds lie in Catholic hospitals. The hospital tied her hands, she said. Because I wasn’t keeping the pregnancy, she couldn’t send me to the obstetrics department for tests. She couldn’t even give me a list of local abortion providers.

If I had known that my health clinic didn’t offer abortion care, I never would have gone there in the first place, but the laws that require religious hospitals to disclose whether or not they provide a full spectrum of reproductive care are vague and complicated. If there were more options for medical students to learn and practice the procedure, maybe the clinic could have scheduled me earlier, leading to earlier diagnosis and my physical safety.

Morgan Steele Dykeman