“Engaging, suspenseful, courageous, and brimming with a warm heart, Take My Handwill stay with you long after the last page.”
“Civil Townsend begins her career as a nurse at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in 1970 and she wants to make a difference in her African American community. Immediately assigned to administer birth control shots to two siblings in a poor family deep in the country, Civil is shocked to discover her patients are 11 and 13.
“Further troubling is that Depo Provera is suspected of causing cancer. Although Civil agrees that pregnancy would threaten the health and future of both children, she observes the conflicting situational facts: the family receives food stamps and government assistance and trusts the hand that feeds them, including the medical establishment; and neither the caregiver grandmother nor the underemployed father know how to read. The implications of this assignment shocks Civil and she questions her role as a nurse, sworn to do no harm. But her rapport with the sisters India and Erica, and their innocence and trusting nature, capture Civil’s heart, and she takes these motherless girls into her care. Through her visits, she gets to know the girls’ grandmother, as well as their father, Mace, a handsome and intelligent man who sorely misses the girls’ mother.
“Uneasy administering a drug that could cause cancer, Civil soon disobeys her orders and ejects the contents of the shot into the garbage, determined instead to give the girls the choice to take the Pill.
“In the meantime, she arranges for the entire family to be moved out of their mud-floor cabin to Dixie Court, a group of new social housing apartments built to accommodate low-income families.
“When Civil arrives late at their cabin to announce the good housing news, she discovers the girls have been hospitalized—and sterilized, with the “informed consent” of their illiterate father and grandmother’s “x” at the bottom of a medical consent form. Clearly the family has been misled to think the procedure “temporary” and “reversible.” At the hospital, both girls suffer excruciating pain from the operation they did not understand they were being subject to. As Civil demands pain medication that has been withheld, she must face telling the girls the truth of what has happened to them: They will never bear children.
The devastation of this incident thrust upon this family without their knowledge
. . . see the entire review at NY JOURNAL OF BOOKS
