Re: No, this isn't about credit cards rewards She might have. <a class="postlink" href="http://whatteensthinkaboutsex.tumblr.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://whatteensthinkaboutsex.tumblr.com/</a>
Re: No, this isn't about credit cards rewards My favorite from that collection of awesome quotes. "Me and my boyfriend had sex but we don’t know where he inserted his penis. How many holes do we have as a female?"....
Alright, here's the rules. You can ask anything about her job, funny people she has encountered, dumb people she has dealt with, etc etc. Keep the politics out of it. If you disagree with anything PP does, that is fine, but that is not the discussion here. Fire away at Ms Monroe!
She's probably been asked about that too... Anyway, Audrey, have you ever had a friend or relative genuinely be pissed at you for working at PP?
Yes, that Tumblr is mine. I have not updated it in a while but that still has a lot of golden moments on it. I have not. All of my friends/relatives are more or less on the same side of the political spectrum as I am. I will, occasionally, ask someone if I should not mention it if I'm meeting someone's parents etc that I think may not be into it. In the rare chance that seems like a better idea, I just stick to talking about writing. It is kind of a good social barometer, though. People's reactions when I tell them I work for Planned Parenthood can tell me a lot about how much I'm going to get along with them.
I refuse to believe any of that is real. I think I'll take willful ignorance over the alternative, which is to look askance at any teen because I have already pre-judged them to be absolute fuckwits.
First your tumbler was the first one I followed. I now have a few dozen. Thanks for that. Second Please keep updating it, it is pure comedy gold especially when mixed with drinking and an audience around a bonfire. Third how poorly educated is the average teen about sex in the area you work in. Obviously the tumbler is the notable outliers but how far are they from average. Fourth when you convince a guy with 5 kids by 4 women, with one of those women having kid #2 and #4, to get a vasectomy do you get a prize? Or community service grant? Because you should.
Less interesting: For some context, what are the actual laws around abortion where you are? Can you just come in off the street, ask for one and they charge you for the vacuum bag and labor? More interesting: What's the craziest level of protester you've seen outside?
I will try to keep updating. I think I started to get jaded and it took a lot for me to realize when something was crazy, and also we get a lot of very similar situations to the ones already posted so I didn't want it to get too repetitive. I've been trying to think of some good ones that have happened more recently to share, and one from last week is we had a 13 year old who hadn't started her period yet so she was worried that she was born pregnant because she knew that you didn't have your period when you were pregnant. Just some clarification: I work for their national chat line, not in any one center, so I talk to people from all across the country (and around the world) online and over text. After working there for so long, though, I can make some sweeping judgments about the different areas of the country. They probably wouldn't be too surprising. I live in New York, so most of the chatters I talk to from here tend to be on the more educated side. Whereas I have to scale way back to the basics when I'm talking to someone from, say, Missouri. There are plenty of places that have zero sex education, so when I say basics, I mean basics. I really, really wish we did get some kind of reward whenever we actually convince people to, well, maybe not get vasectomies, but at least start using birth control, but it mostly comes in warm fuzzies. We regularly get people coming back online to tell us that they ended up not being pregnant and thanking us for our help getting them through their pregnancy scare (especially if it was due to rape or a similarly especially stressful situation) and letting us know that they have an IUD now. There have been a couple of times when my coworkers have met people who, after learning where they worked, started hugging them and crying because we got them through some kind of crisis and they were so happy to put a face to the words on the screen. And, even more importantly, I work the night shift and I'm the manager at that time, and we created the Midnight Crew Queen where whoever had a really awesome chat like that got to wear a crown, which is clearly the best reward. So, while it can be a really stressful, frustrating, annoying job, you do get experiences like that that make it worth it.
In New York, yeah basically. You just make an appointment and that's it. The laws vary by state. Some have waiting periods between making the appointment and actually going to the appointment. Some require an information session that you have to attend a certain amount of time before the appointment. There are different parental involvement laws for minors. Some have certain requirements about the ultrasound - like you have to look at it or the doctor has to walk you through it out loud rather than just looking at it themselves to confirm how far along you are. Some have specific regulations about what information you need to provide at the appointment - and many times this information isn't medically accurate. There are also TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws which regulate exactly who can perform abortions and where they can be done, which I don't think I can expand on without getting political but there's plenty to research on your own if you're interested on either side of the debate. As for protesters/harassers, I still deal with those despite not working in a clinic. I've had the FBI track down people who make death threats against me or my coworkers, or have told us how they're going to blow up a clinic. (It's very likely they are just bored 13 year olds who aren't even that passionate about the pro-life movement, and I would absolutely love to see footage of their mom answering the door to a couple of agents looking for their kid.) We get told that we're going to hell in various ways pretty much every day. We get a lot of people pretending to be real and trying to trick us into finally revealing that PP's goal is to kidnap unsuspecting pregnant women off the street, punch through their stomachs, and rip their babies out to kill them in front of them, but we are much smarter than these people and fucking with them until they give up and call us baby killers and sign off is kind of fun. We also get a lot of stupid kids who think it's funny to spend their time talking to us about how their penis is purple and they have a baby growing in their butt, which is just annoying. We also deal with some seriously mentally ill people - like we had someone come in 300 times in a month who had zero chances of becoming pregnant but was convinced that she was. While there's no real way to prove it, there are definitely people who are using us as some kind of sexual gratification where it's just very clear that they're getting off on telling us all about how they roll around in the wet spot on the bed and think they make be pregnant, or - much more grossly - we recently had this person we were very sure was some sick fuck pretending to be an 8 year old girl whose mom was molesting her. For the most part, the harassers are just annoying and sometimes entertaining, but it's those people who pretend like they've been raped or abused that just really make me sick. I also really hate dealing with the Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion type of people.
What's the worst part if your job? What's the most satisfying part? What's one thing you wish people realized about Planned Parenthood?
...said the Jew. Is it true the female body prevents itself from being impregnated by a rapist? And if not, how many times have you been asked that stupid question since that cunt trumpeted it on national TV?
The worst part is that we're dealing with people when they're at some of their most stressful parts of their lives, and you can't help but absorb some of that stress and/or get upset about what they're going through and many, many times they misdirect their anger about their pregnancy or their herpes towards us and it's just really unpleasant to deal with them. There's also so much you can do online, and I sometimes get bummed that I can't do more to help - especially when we're talking to a woman in Saudi Arabia or India or Ghana and there's a large possibility that they're going to die soon because they thought we could help them through giving themselves an abortion. One of my coworkers works in the clinics in NYC counseling people pre and post abortions, and one of my past coworkers was a social worker who worked with actual crazy people and both of them said this job is much, much more difficult and stressful than those other jobs. The most satisfying part is when people do recognize what a fucking awesome service this is and are grateful and you realize that we really are helping people and doing something important. For a lot of people, we're the closest thing to a sex ed teacher/doctor/counselor/friend that they're going to get. This is essentially a day job for me to fill in the financial blanks for writing until I can find a full-time job a bit more closely related to what I want to do, and every time I get really frustrated or upset it's good to remember that I'm actually doing something about issues I care a lot about (women's health, reproductive rights, sex education) rather than bartending. Oh, edit: One thing I wish people would realize about Planned Parenthood is that it isn't a free clinic. While on the one hand I totally sympathize with financial struggles, there are times when people are talking to me about money that I come very close to turning into a Republican and start spouting out catchphrases like "handouts" and "entitled" and "personal responsibility." There are also, of course, all of the myths anti-PP people try spreading about it that I wish people would realize is bullshit.
I was kidding. Because I'm just real tired of people thinking he was the Messiah. No. I had ONE conversation about this shortly after that happened when I talked to someone who had just taken a positive pregnancy test after being raped and was very hopeful that it was a false positive, and I had to excuse myself to cry in the bathroom after it was over because I was so angry at these bozos.
After reading your Tumblr I get the feeling that some of those posts are just Idiot Board members fucking with you. Especially the ones that are well written with good grammar, yet they're the most retarded thing I've ever read. Also, how do get pragnent?
Homeschooling, small private schools, and religious-based sheltered upbringings are quite popular in the South and Midwest. Where do you expect teenagers are getting their sex education? I am glad there are chat lines available for them to ask questions, even if they seem stupid to all the well-informed adults here. Also, this one: doesn't seem like that dumb of a question for a teenager to ask. You guys are probably all too young to remember Dr. Ruth, but I can remember her answering questions about "getting something" from a toilet seat, way back then.