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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A key issue in this year's presidential election is abortion access. For our latest edition of the series Get Political, we turn to two people who have dedicated their lives to abortion care. Curtis Boyd grew up on a farm in Texas, spent time as a minister, and when he became a doctor, he performed safe abortion care even when it was illegal. It was at one of his clinics in Dallas that he met his wife, Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, a registered nurse who went on to get her PhD. Glenna became a dedicated abortion counselor, pioneering new techniques to keep patients calm during the procedure and to guide them through a potentially difficult decision.

Today, the Boyds have spent decades providing abortion care in the face of death threats and arson attacks. Now, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, their expertise and advocacy has become all the more significant. Curtis and Glenna have written a joint memoir. It's titled We Choose To: A Memoir Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe. Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halverson-Boyd joined me a few weeks ago to discuss the book. I started off our conversation by asking Curtis about his ideas about abortion before he started providing care. Let's take a listen.

Curtis Boyd: Actually, I had experienced a major event which I talk about in the book, but it's Barbara. In high school, I was in Mrs. Broom's algebra class and it just happened that this girl was sitting in front of me. She's vivacious, friendly, very pretty. I'm new, so I'm wanting to meet people and I didn't mind meeting a girl either.

After a few days in the class, a week, I think, I'd met a new friend. I was talking with him, I said, "Huh, I really like her. I think I'm going to ask her for a date." He said, "What? No, you can't ask her for a date. She got knocked up. She's got a kid at home." Well, of course, that was it, because boys have-- if you're going to maintain your good reputation, boys have reputations, too. At least I was considered a good boy, so I had to maintain that reputation.

Of course, I'd never ask her for a date. She could only come to class for classes, could not be on campus otherwise, on the school, she became class left, no extracurricular activities. She had a bad reputation. I happened to find out the boy who got her pregnant, he had a sterling reputation, big band on campus. All this just struck me as wrong. I thought, "This is not fair. Something needs to be done about this." I think that's where it started. Later did I realize what that impact when it came up that I had an opportunity to do something about it, it was sort of, "Oh, Curtis, you said something needed to be done about this." I was just talking to myself, "Are you going to do anything about it or not?" That was the question I had to confront myself with, sort of an ethical question.

Alison Stewart: What about for you, Glenna?

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: What did I think about abortion?

Alison Stewart: Yes. What were any preconceived notions about it? Did you have thoughts about it?

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: So very different from today. The first time I heard the word abortion, I was 15 years old, and it was on the front page of the Modesto Bee with a photograph of the children's TV star who was married to a physician and had taken thalidomide and was deplaning from a trip to Sweden where she had an abortion.

I saw this word, and my mother and I always played word games, and I knew that she knew every word in the dictionary. I asked her what an abortion was, and she said, "Well, it's a medical procedure that a doctor can do when there's a pregnancy that's not meant to be." Those were her words, and that's what stuck with me. Then my mother being my mother, I got a fairly detailed description of thalidomide and its effects on the developing fetus. I thought from that, abortion was a personal, a social, a moral good for everyone involved.

Alison Stewart: How did it feel to be outside of the mainstream? You started when it was illegal, then it started to gain momentum, and then the momentum fell away. What was it like to be on that roller coaster?

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: It was like being on a roller coaster. By then, I was already in love with the work and knew in a much more real, immediate, deep way than I had when I went into it, how important it was and is to pregnant people. To say what's obvious to anybody who knows me, I have a big stubborn streak.

The rise of that opposition, it was simply happening, and I was living through it. It was really looking back over my life and our lives in the writing of the book that I allowed myself to feel the disappointment that I felt at that time, particularly for poor women, because Medicaid funding was cut off at a federal level and funding to hospitals that provided abortion was cut off. That struck me as so wrong, and I was not about to give up.

Alison Stewart: Curtis, when you were performing abortions illegally, were you ever concerned about being caught?

Curtis Boyd: Oh, yes. That was a--

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: Perpetually.

Curtis Boyd: That was a perpetual thing. It's one that I learned to suppress, because to do my work, I wanted to be present. I wanted to be doing good medical work, have good relations with the patients I was seeing. They needed to be relaxed. I could not be fearful. I didn't want them to be fearful, but it was always like I lived in constant fear in the background.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book We Choose To: A Memoir Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe. My guests are Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halverson-Boyd. I want to switch gears and I want to ask about your relationship because a lot of your memoir is about you and about how you're feeling. You tell a great story about kicking Curtis out of your clinic when you first met him.

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Would you share that story with us?

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: It was my first week on the job, this job that I--

Curtis Boyd: Very conscientious she was.

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: Well, this job that I thought was temporary. I had counseled a patient and I brought her into the surgery area, and there was a strange man there, inappropriately dressed for a surgery area. The patient I was with got scared. What she said was, "Who is that strange man? Why is he here?"

I did what any good counselor, good young feminist would do. I walked over to this guy and I said, "Excuse me, but you'll need to step out of-- this is a surgery area. You'll need to step out. The back porch is right here and you can wait there." I assumed he was there to talk as a friend with the doctor who was doing procedures that day. Curtis said, "Perhaps you don't know who I am." I, in my always charming way, I said, "I don't really care who you are. That's irrelevant. Please step out." He did.

Alison Stewart: What did you think in that moment, Curtis?

Curtis Boyd: I'm thinking, I like this woman. She's spunky. She's beautiful. She's spunky. She's obviously intelligent. She was not easily intimidated. I thought, "Hmm." I thought, "I want to get to know her. There might be something there." I acquiesced very politely and I excused myself. I thought, "That's all right. We'll meet later. She'll find out who I am."

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: He thought, "I'll put her in her place later."

Alison Stewart: Well, it took a little while for you to come around.

Curtis Boyd: No, I was in love with her and knew what I wanted long before she came around.

Alison Stewart: Curtis, do anti-abortion advocates, do they make sense to you? Do you understand what their concerns are?

Curtis Boyd: Yes, I do. I don't agree, but I don't have any great difficulty with that. I grew up among people who had strict moral beliefs. They believed in right and wrong and heaven and hell.

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: As they defined it.

Curtis Boyd: As they defined it. A democracy depends on compromise. It cannot function without compromise.

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: It also depends on respect for the opinions of others and respect for differences of opinions without demonizing anyone.

Curtis Boyd: When you come there, you think, okay, you can have different opinions. In a pluralistic society like this, we're going to have different opinions. It'll hard to get everyone to agree on anything. These are opinions. I believe this. You believe that. Because I believe this does make me right and make me a good person. Because you believe this other does make you wrong and a bad person. Either one of us may be both right, and it's our opinion. We have reasons for that.

If we wish to discuss it, we can discuss our differences if we want to, or we can say, "I don't care to do that." At least we don't hate each other. We don't want to kill each other. This is a democracy. We have to accept these differences of opinion. We don't have to agree with them, but we need to be tolerant of them. We have to come to some consensus. You can't function without coming to some consensus. You don't go to war over it. You have to change people's hearts and minds, which comes back why we wrote this book.

We don't need nothing less than to change people's hearts and minds about how to think about it and talk about complicated issues and divisive issues, that you can do them in a respectful way. You can differ. That's fine. A woman can be opposed to abortion. Doesn't bother me at all. She thinks it's a sin and I'm going to go to hell for doing them. The woman having the abortion is going to go to hell. That's her belief. I can respect that as long as she doesn't want to force her belief on someone who has a different belief.

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: We might even learn from each other if we would stop and listen.

Alison Stewart: Glenna, I'm curious. This is something I've always been curious about, and I think you're a person I can ask. People in the reproductive community, some people will say, like, "You can have as many abortions as you choose, it's no big deal." Why does it need all this counseling? Why do we just get an abortion?

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: My deep sense of that is that, actually, for some people, that really is their reality. After all of these years of meeting with patients who are choosing to end a pregnancy, for most of those people, it is an important and a moral decision. The opportunity to talk with someone who doesn't have an agenda for them, who isn't involved in their daily life, to whom they don't have to answer when they walk away, but who knows a lot and will listen, is frankly liberating.

Actually, as I was developing protocols for abortion counseling, my mother was, at that time, diagnosed with breast cancer. This was clearly many years ago. She had an old-fashioned radical mastectomy. One of the things I was stunned by as she and my father went through that whole medical experience was in all of it, no one among their caregivers ever offered either of them an opportunity to talk about how they felt, what this meant, and what impact it was going to have on their daily life. My thought at the time was counseling needs to be available as a part and parcel of most medical care.

Curtis Boyd: I'll say something. Those of you listening to us may well be surprised by our value of the fetus in the pregnancy. I put importance on it. I always show respect in the way I handle it, the way I dispose of the tissue. I do blessing ceremonies if the woman wants them. Why? Because the woman wants them. It's important to her. She wants to acknowledge that, "Yes, I cared about this pregnancy. This clinic said it was not meant to be. This is pregnancy could not be in my life, but it's not that I didn't care about my pregnancy. It just could not be."

They want to show their respect. Some women want that, need it, some don't want, don't need it. That's an individual thing, too, but abortion is a little different, some other things, because it does involve a potential human life. I think in that way, we should not be taken lightly or shown or disrespected.

Alison Stewart: Glenna, we've been having this conversation as the presidential election is underway. Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Dobbs decision. I'm not sure what my question is, but I guess I'm asking that, what are you thinking about abortion during this presidential election?

Glenna Halvorson-Boyd: One of the most hopeful things right now, given that the Dobbs decision was, frankly, devastating, was personally devastating to us. It was devastating to our staff and to women in the State of Texas, where we were working at the time. One of the things that has happened since that decision, with a presidential election on the horizon, is that not only are people who are involved in politics coming out to talk about abortion, their abortion, what it's meant to them, people are also coming out to advocate for the necessity of legal abortion in a way that wasn't happening when it could be taken for granted.

I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime, but I think the level of discussion, which has become far more personal, which is one of the things that-- the changes that we had worked for and part of why we wrote the book, why we talk so much about ourselves, which is not my way, but we need to humanize this. This is not a series of hateful, often shouted names or political talking points. This is a pregnant person's life, future, and the quality of life for any child that will be born into this world, into that situation. There's much more real conversation going on at that level than we have seen through the years of legalization.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd about their joint memoir titled We Choose To: A Memoir Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe. That's All of It. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.