On a slow afternoon in the summer of 2019, I took my laptop outside to work in a sunroom, the only place in my small house where I can be separated from my husband and children by a sliding glass door. I was perusing my inbox when an email from the Texas Freedom Network caught my eye. The email was intended to warn me about a monster: an extremist anti-abortion OB-GYN.
It was July in Austin, and the sunroom was not air-conditioned, but as I clicked on a link in the email I felt a chill. The page opened to a Houston Chronicle article, and my jaw dropped like Wile E. Coyote, duped by Roadrunner yet again. The alleged monster was my OB-GYN of almost a decade, Dr. Mikeal Love.
From articles in the Chronicle and Texas Observer, I learned that Dr. Love was a frequent and well-compensated activist in the movement to chip away at abortion rights in Texas. In 2011, he helped write and pass a law requiring a 24-hour waiting period for anyone seeking the procedure — and an ultrasound, which is typically conducted with a transvaginal wand, in order to meet the legal requirement of playing the heartbeat out loud. Dr. Love called these procedures “true informed consent.” While I was his patient, the Texas attorney general paid Dr. Love $46,000 to testify as an expert witness for the state in legal challenges to anti-abortion laws, according to the Chronicle.
Roe v. Wade was still in effect on the day that I learned about Dr. Love’s activism. It was two years before Texas passed Senate Bill 8, banning most abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, and a trigger law that would ban abortion if Roe was overturned. But the world had already changed. Because of the restrictions that my own doctor helped to create and defend, a person seeking an abortion in Texas had to undergo an ultrasound, listen to a clinic employee read a mandatory description of the fetus, and return to the clinic 24 hours later. Ending a pregnancy was not as simple as when I was a pregnant teenager in the ’90s.
***
In 1993, I graduated from high school early and took what you might call a “gap year” — a term that implies a space between two stable objects, though I had no intention of returning to stability. For a year, I worked for minimum wage and lived with a pack of other teenagers in a squalid apartment in North Austin. Then I moved in with my then-boyfriend, a bouncer in a downtown dance club. I felt mature when I went to Planned Parenthood to get birth control. To my surprise, the routine pregnancy test came back positive. I protested: “But we used condoms!” This was mostly true; we intended to practice safe sex. But we were young and foolish. My boyfriend had a motorcycle, and I loved clinging to him as we zipped around town, even though I had to thrust my jaw out to keep the broken helmet he’d given me from flying off my head. Nothing about my life was particularly safe.
It was like I’d been reading in a darkening room, and someone came in and turned on the light. For the first time all summer, I remembered that I was still young.
I was 17, but I didn’t need my parents’ consent to have an abortion; Texas didn’t require parental notification for minors until 1999. Still, no matter what I decided, I would need my parents’ money. So I went to their house, where we sat in the living room in overstuffed chairs that never got used. My father said: “Sarah, if you decide to have this baby, we will love him or her very much. But our child-raising days are over.” In short, if I chose motherhood, I would have to do it on my own. After months of scrambling to make rent, I had some idea of what that would mean. My parents agreed to help with the cost of an abortion, which back then was around $500.
On the day of my appointment, I rode to the clinic on the back of that same motorcycle, stifling the urge to vomit with every bump in the road. It was July 1994, and if I hadn’t had an appointment, I would not have ventured outside in the daytime heat. I’d spent all summer languishing in the air conditioning, in a dull torpor of nausea and ennui.
I was afraid of pain, but the procedure caused only slight cramping. The worst part was the loud sucking noise of the machine. (Vacuum aspiration is a common abortion procedure that, I read recently, uses five to 10 minutes of “gentle suction” to remove a pregnancy; if I’d had the internet in 1994, maybe I would’ve known what to expect.) Afterwards, I was led into a room in the back of the clinic where Pepto-Bismol pink plastic recliners were arranged in an oval. It felt like we were supposed to break out into a spontaneous support group, but the chairs weren’t close enough for natural conversation. Next to each recliner was a Sprite and a package of butter cookies, as if we had just donated blood instead of emptying our uteruses. I sat in my recliner and tried not to make eye contact with anyone else. I ate the cookies because I thought I should, then I got up to leave.
On the other side of the clinic doors, I took a breath of hot air and noticed that for the first time in weeks I didn’t feel sick. I hadn’t expected to feel like myself again so quickly; I had thought, as most of the medical literature seems to advise, that the pregnancy symptoms would dissipate gradually. But my relief was instant. It was like I’d been reading in a darkening room, and someone came in and turned on the light. For the first time all summer, I remembered that I was still young.
***
My abortion didn’t traumatize me. For many years, one of the only times I thought about it was when filling out the patient form during my annual visit to the OB-GYN: three pregnancies, two children, one abortion. That form doesn’t ask for an account of what happened between my abortion and my first planned pregnancy. But I like to remember those 14 years — when I got to be a student, girlfriend, reader, vegetarian, jaywalker, cat lady, voter, runner, yogi, bride, lawyer, friend — before this list of overlapping identities would be surpassed by the three-letter title that was bestowed on me in the delivery room before my newborn child had even opened his eyes. After I gave birth, in the fall of 2008, no matter what else I was, I was a mom.
After my abortion, I left Texas, broke up with that guy, and went back to school. I moved back to Austin in 2009 with my husband and our infant son. My parents still lived here, and they were delighted to be grandparents now that I was a married, 30-something lawyer and not a rebellious teenager who could barely take care of herself.
When I realized I was pregnant again in 2011, a midwife recommended Dr. Love. “He’s kind of quirky,” she said. “Doesn’t prescribe birth control.” I thought this was odd, but it didn’t phase me.
It pains me to admit this, but a good portion of Dr. Love’s appeal was the fact that he was named Dr. Love. Every time I told my husband I had an appointment with Dr. Love, one of us (usually me) would shake our hips and mimic a ’70s porn soundtrack. “I’m going to see Dr. Looove! Chicka-chicka-wah-wah . . .” (OK, that was always me.)
From the first appointment, I immediately liked Dr. Love. He was short, stout, and bald, with black bushy eyebrows that reminded me of stinging caterpillars. He took his time with me, never rushed, although his waiting room was always crowded. When I showed signs of early labor, he didn’t prescribe bed rest, unlike my first OB-GYN. I’d carried my first baby to term, so Dr. Love let me stay active, walking to work every day. He liked to talk about the “three Bs”: “Your baby, your birth, your body.”
After my daughter was born — delivered by Dr. Love’s colleague, a man with a forgettable name who happened to be on-call when I went into labor on a Sunday night — I continued to see Dr. Love for my annual pap smear. I had a full-time job and two small children. In the time warp that is familiar to all parents, the years went by quickly and the days were excruciatingly slow. Eight years later, Dr. Love was still my doctor and the only man other than my husband who ever saw me without my clothes.
***
I lingered in the sunroom over the Freedom Network email well past the time when I should have gone inside to start making dinner. Beyond my computer screen, the sky behind the oak branches in my backyard was turning pink and orange as I did what I should have done years ago: Googled Dr. Love. I read that he told the Texas Observer in 2018: “People use the argument, ‘It’s my body.’ Well, not really.” I remembered his “three Bs.” So much for number three.
I felt naïve, duped by my own credulity. I had directed money to the practice of a doctor who was also paid by the state to defend fetal personhood. I had even recommended him to friends, with the same caveat about contraceptives that had failed to make me question his other views.
When I heard about Dr. Love’s policy on birth control, I had assumed that he was motivated by religious belief. It had been years since I identified as a Christian, but my parents were Christians. I had assumed that Dr. Love, like them, was kind. He took Medicaid. I’d seen patients in his waiting room who looked less affluent than me. Even now that I knew more, I wasn’t sure how to feel. The complicated truth was that Dr. Love had been a good doctor.
***
In 2016, I turned 40 and stopped sleeping. Most nights I woke up and lay in bed for hours, agonizing over all the things it seemed I had done wrong in my life. Once a month, when I got my period, I plummeted. My husband got used to reading my expression when I didn’t get out of bed on weekend mornings. He would take one look at me, sigh, and find something to do with the kids.
In hindsight, it’s obvious that I needed therapy, but at the time I wasn’t ready for that. My children were 8 and 5. Other than their pediatricians, Dr. Love was the only doctor I knew. I decided to seek his help.
On the day of my appointment, Dr. Love entered the exam room with a cheery “Hello!” He looked down at the New Yorker in my lap and raised one eyebrow but said nothing. Was there a hint of disapproval? It’s tempting to re-imagine that conversation, given what I know now.
I explained my symptoms: sleeplessness, lethargy, especially around my period. I left out the wine that I drank after the one glass per night that I admitted to in his paperwork. I left out being haunted by my past at 3:00 a.m. I asked if I might be perimenopausal.
Dr. Love sat on his stool in the corner of the exam room. He looked me in the eye, like always. I was young to be perimenopausal, he said, but a hormone imbalance could happen, although (I’m paraphrasing) it couldn’t be too serious because I was thin and didn’t have whiskers on my face or come into his office looking surly. (As if to illustrate the alternative, he turned the corners of his mouth down and did a seated impression of a heavy-set person stomping into the room.)
He thinks I’m thin, I thought, savoring that remark. I didn’t mention the little notebook in which I recorded my meals and exercise every day. I didn’t mention my morning ritual with tweezers and a magnifying mirror aimed at my chin. It was only later that I imagined how the interaction might have gone differently if I hadn’t so easily accepted Dr. Love’s assessment.
He recommended that I start tracking my menstrual cycle and taking progesterone during the second half. To demonstrate, he pulled a sheet of paper from his clipboard, turned it over, and drew a diagram of my monthly cycle so that I could see where the progesterone peaked and declined, right around ovulation.
He recommended using a fertility app, but that didn’t last; the app annoyed me with its hyper-feminine pink fonts and daily messages urging me to stay positive! Instead, I tracked my cycle in the food and exercise log that had helped me overcome disordered eating when I was younger. For years, I’d logged brief descriptions of meals plus “yoga,” “walk,” or “sex.” After talking to Dr. Love, I added a number in red ink to the left of each entry, marking where I was in my cycle.
For years, I imagined asking him about my form. “Do you think I’m a murderer?”
Progesterone didn’t cure me, but it helped me get some sleep. Likewise, tracking my cycle helped me feel more in control of my life. I felt genuinely better, and I found my way to other practical decisions that improved my life. There were nights when I stopped myself from scrolling Instagram while waiting for my kids to come to dinner. I sometimes had the self-control to resist a third glass of wine. I was smugly satisfied. I’d gone to a doctor with a problem, and he had helped me find a solution.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. After a few months I got tired of the hormone’s side effects (sore breasts, constipation) and stopped taking it. I now realize that seeing Dr. Love was just the beginning of a years-long recovery process. I needed to recover my identity from the shock of motherhood in late-stage capitalist America. Eventually, I found a therapist, changed jobs, and quit drinking. I still track my cycle. That, it turns out, was Dr. Love’s best piece of advice.
***
In a detail that sounded straight out of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Texas Freedom Network accused Dr. Love of calling pregnant women “host organisms.” In the Texas Observer article that I found in my Google search, I learned that this quote came from Dr. Love’s expert testimony in a trial over Texas’s fetal burial law, in which he compared a fetus’s relationship to the pregnant person to a foreign exchange student’s relationship with their host family. The analogy was awful. And yet, Dr. Love’s words didn’t sting like they might have, if I couldn’t picture him in his office, diagramming my menstrual cycle on a sheet of paper. How ironic, I thought. I learned something essential about my body from a man who apparently thought its highest purpose was “host.”
Dr. Love retired around the same time as the Houston Chronicle article was published, so I never saw him as my doctor again. For years, I imagined asking him about my form. “Do you think I’m a murderer?” In my imagination, he would let out a weary paternal sigh, like a dad whose daughter has come home past curfew. Then he would take out a blank sheet of paper and draw a diagram of a fetus in a womb — Scientific proof, says imaginary Dr. Love, that life begins at conception.
When I called the real Dr. Love, who works as a palliative care physician in Arkansas now, he remembered me and asked if I was still practicing law. “Not anymore,” I said. “I’ve been through a lot of life changes, and in some ways you were a part of that.” After I thanked him for helping me when he was my doctor, I asked him about his work on abortion laws. He explained that early in his career he had worked at a large abortion clinic in Louisville, where he was surprised by the lack of procedures for informing patients of what they were about to undergo. He mentioned a roomful of girls watching a short video before an abortion. His work on abortion law seemed to him like a natural extension of his work as an OB-GYN, caring for women’s health. “You should know what you’re getting,” he says.
I told Dr. Love that I expect more information from my doctors now, after being his patient. Looking back, I probably should have expected more all along. If I watched a video at the abortion clinic in 1994, I don’t remember. The clinic’s procedures didn’t leave much of an impression. The part I remember, as clear as yesterday, was my relief on the other side of the clinic doors.
I didn’t need to ask Dr. Love if he thought I was a murderer. “It’s a personal choice,” he said, without waiting for me to ask about his views. “Everyone makes their own personal choices.” He mentioned a brother who rides a motorcycle without a helmet, which Dr. Love would never do, but he still loves him.
In June of 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, making abortion in Texas all but illegal. (In theory, there are exceptions to save the life of the mother, but reporting has shown that few are granted.) I went to a lot of meetings and protests that summer. At one Planned Parenthood meeting, I told an activist about my abortion. “What year?” she asked. When I told her it was 1994, I could almost hear her brain whirring backwards through layers of legal restrictions. She said: “You got in on the golden window!”
I didn’t think my abortion happened in a window. I thought I walked through an open door. I know better now. I wish I hadn’t let my guard down. I had trusted in Dr. Love’s good intentions instead of looking for a doctor who would have fought to preserve a right that I took for granted. I feel complicit in a terrible injustice.
***
Recently, I visited Dr. Love’s former hospital for a routine mammogram. In the car, I listened to the news about Kate Cox, a woman who sued the state of Texas for an emergency abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with a life-threatening abnormality. A district court judge had ruled that Cox met the medical emergency exception, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the decision – and sent a letter to doctors and hospitals warning them that they could be prosecuted for helping Cox. (Cox received an abortion in New Mexico; while she was there, the Texas Supreme Court overturned the lower court ruling, denying her exemption.)
When I arrived at the hospital, I filled out a form with my family history of breast cancer:
Maternal grandmother/ one breast/ age 73
Paternal grandmother/ one breast/ age 44
I’ve been fortunate to have such good health that I rarely think about it. But I worry. There is a sense of unpaid debt, of good luck that shouldn’t be allowed to last forever.
A gray-eyed nurse checked me in. When I couldn’t remember the name of my current gynecologist, she laughed and said it was okay.
“I used to see a man named Dr. Love,” I said. “His name was easy to remember.”
The nurse smiled. “I remember him!” she said. “He was just down the hall.”
Then she told me she used to have an OB-GYN named Dr. Casanova.
I couldn’t help myself. “Dr. Love was a nice man,” I said. “I was dismayed when I learned about his political activities.”
I instantly regretted saying anything. What was I thinking? Either the nurse supported abortion and would think I was crazy to call Dr. Love “nice,” or she believed abortion was murder and would be offended that I was “dismayed.”
She didn’t look up from the computer screen where she was entering my insurance information.
“Oh, I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
I didn’t press.
Editor’s note: Know your rights. If you or someone you care about wants to learn more about abortion, visit the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, The Lilith Fund, or AbortionFinder.Org.