Thanks to my inability to finish anything in life save for Minimum Chips and myself off, visit this I let an entire website called The Sponsored Lady become weed-choked.
I’ve been trying to salvage some of its more obscene team fruits and voila, sickness this ‘product review’ of the foods available to ladies following the termination of their pregnancies.
Goods Received: 5 x Abortion
Cost to Sponsored Lady: $0 -$200 per procedure
Payment to Sponsored Lady: Nominally $0. But, hundreds-of-thousands of dollars saved in child-rearing costs.
There are many common injustices women of the developed world endure. Perhaps chief among these is the very, very poor available variety of post-abortion snacks. Feminism has been regrettably silent on the matter of Women and Post-Termination Amuse Bouche. Until now.
As a young lady, I was very thankful to receive a subsidised, legal abortion in my nation’s first established termination clinic. The experience was a good one. If I have any assets at the time of my death, I may very well leave them to the Preterm Foundation in Surry Hills, NSW. And, I will request they use my riches for a buffet that lacks not in assortment and quality.
Although I am grateful to the counsellor, the doctor and the miracle of local anaesthetic, I was not so grateful for the post-curette snack. It was, as I recall, Jatz crackers. As this was the late eighties, I’d probably been hoping for a Parma ham foccacia with garlic mayonnaise.
Perhaps I should have gone private? This was the sensible decision of our newest Sponsored Lady, Anchovies Rinehart, who writes,
Having your uterus scraped clean will really work up an appetite. Luckily for you, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of carefully chosen post-abortion food in store for you. I recommend skipping the general anaesthetic, so you can start the eating right away.
“You’ll get to choose from a range of desserts, snacks and drinks,” she continues in the mien of the sensibly insured.
None of it is even shaped like a foetus, so there’s no uncomfortable moments of crying or vomiting.
Of all these treats, Rinehart, “went for the Assorted Creams and a splash of Milo to dip them in.” Our bold little heroine then bravely availed herself of another patient’s repast!
The girl in the next bed was moaning about pain or grief or whatever so I grabbed her plate of Kool Fruits as well.
In the end, I was full as a goog! They even let me take some of the biscuits with me, so I shared them with my boyfriend in the car and we didn’t even have to buy Maccas after.
Well, nice for some. Wish I’d been so lucky as a freshly dilated teen in the streets of Surry Hills. But, I’m hardly alone in enduring poor canapés. When our own Valerian Solanas took her prize-winning snatch to the vacuum, she was forced to eat one of commerce’s worst yeast-based pastes.
The year was 2000, I was living in London, land of Brit-pop, New Labour and free NHS abortions.
After a faintly disappointed look and a generous handful of free condoms from the lady doctor at Violet Melchett clinic, (named after a Victorian lady whose husband subsidised her infant welfare centre; I think the clinic might have been stretching the definition of her original vision by the year 2000), I was referred to a lovely middle-class clinic in the suburb of Richmond.
In the old Victorian mansion, a television in the waiting room played a convivial interview with former model Jerry Hall on a mid-morning magazine show. All eyes – most of them 10 years younger than mine – gazed fixedly on said program. Ms Hall, then wife of Mick Jagger, had recently spawned a child at the age of 41. “How amazing,” gushed the interviewer. “And at your age!”
Ms Hall agreed it had been a shock but drawled, “Well, I wasn’t going to have an ABORTION” in her husky Texan foghorn.
Cue ABORTION.
I very much enjoyed the initial six or so seconds of general anaesthetic before waking with a bap-sized sanitary pad surgically taped to my undercarriage and a nurse urging me to drink something. Then the horror began. In the “recovery room” my fellow patients and I were told we “had” to eat something before we could leave.
Sandwiches were distributed. This being the UK, where the sandwich is King, I had high hopes. A Pret a Manger prawn and cress? Perhaps something simpler for the post-surgery stomach. A lightly warmed tomato baguette or a small version of a ploughman’s?
No. Instead it appeared the nurse had popped down to the local Greggs, bought some of yesterday’s bread and hastily knocked up half a dozen Marmite ‘sandwiches’ in the staff tea-room. Marmite ‘sandwiches’ that we HAD TO EAT BEFORE BEING DISCHARGED.
I still can’t taste Marmite without flashing back – visions of Jerry Hall, pubic hair mottled surgical tape and stale bread clagging in the back of my throat.
Of post-termination food, Solanas powerfully says, “It’s something no woman should have to face.”
These are stirring words that will foment the Sisterhood to fight for quality victuals.
Perhaps of the very sort our dear mascot, Sara LeeChocolateBavarian describes.
“It’s a testament to tradition and good manners that even after your Propofol-enhanced ‘dilate & curette’ the Brits still know to provide guests with a proper afternoon tea,” she writes.
Bavarian was tending to her reproductive health in Britain where she was, she says, “greeted with a charming B&B style selection of both sweets and savoury sandwiches. “
Oh my!
There were biscuits, small cakes on a charming tiered-cakestand, quality teas, coffee and Hobnobs. Whether this was for legal rather than altruistic reasons was here nor there, as staff encouraged me to avail myself of the convention-centre style seating, put up my feet, watch Babs Windsor shriek “now GERROUTTA my pub!” on Eastenders, and chow right down on this doily-festooned buffet of treats until I was deemed clear enough of mind to take a Black Cab.
This contrasted badly with Bavarian’s Australian culinary abortion experience. As if the Twilight Vigil crowd that hangs around some of our better known clinics like methane in a priest’s confessional wasn’t bad enough,
Years earlier back in Erskineville, on a jaunt escorting a mate terminating the consequences of an ill-considered fusion of the Beast with Two Backs, I witnessed a room of women wheeled out from procedure only to receive lemon cordial and a Choc Wheaten. There was more colour and movement in the first half of Awakenings, the aesthetic was at best ‘Soviet’. It was as depressing as the checklist of “mental distress” symptoms on a clipboard one is obliged to complete to receive the service.
“We fought hard for our reproductive rights,” says Bavarian.
“It seems only fair they should come with asparagus rolls”.
