I'm not a big political activist.
Who's body?
Our body!
But this is one way in which I can actually push back
against the political tide.
The supreme court has overturned Roe v Wade,
they have eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion.
I should be able to get an abortion no matter what,
no matter when and nobody else has anything to do with that.
Well I'm in my mid-50s,
I've been a high school teacher for a couple of decades now
and one of my great passions for the last several years is flying airplanes.
His name is Buzz.
The previous owner's daughter named him Buzz,
after Buzz Lightyear from the movie Toy Story
and when I got the plane it came with a little Buzz Lightyear keychain.
And I like the name and I like the keychain so ...
I had flown as a kid, because both of my parents learned to fly.
We lived in the middle of nowhere, western Kansas,
and it was just a group of cattle farmers and wheat farmers
that bought some 1952 airplane I think it was.
A pilot can take off from any airport
and for the most part without even talking to air traffic control,
without having to file a flight plan,
without having to get any sort of governmental approval,
take off in their plane and fly to any one of these thousands
of airports around the country.
And it seems appropriate to me
to use that freedom I have to help people
whose much more fundamental freedoms, the freedom of bodily autonomy,
is being infringed.
People who need abortion care and can't access it easily
because they don't live in the city that it's offered in,
are also not near public transportation hubs, like bus stations,
train stations and major airports, but everyone in this country
is within half an hour of an airstrip that can land small planes,
which is where Elevated Access's pilots come in.
Let's say they're in Oklahoma there's no available clinics near them,
it's outlawed in Texas,
it's surrounded by states that are in a similar situation.
Let's say they are going to Wichita, Kansas for a one-day procedure.
Flying there commercially would take about, like eight hours,
because they have to fly to Texas first and then wait for a layover,
but with Elevated Access they can go there and back
within the same day.
So that it cuts a journey from basically three days away from home
to maybe six hours away from home.
When I'm asked to do a flight,
I don't know who my passenger is, I don't know why they are making this trip.
I am given my passenger's name, I I don't even know if it's a true name or not
and the person's weight,
because I need to know that in order to calculate weight balance for my plane
figure out how much fuel to take etc.
I guess in a way I'm sort of the Uber of the skies.
There's no reason a pilot would need to know why someone is traveling,
what kind of procedure they're getting,
just like commercial airlines don't know why we're traveling.
the smaller amount of people who have
personally identifying information about our clients, the better.
And so I make arrangements about where to meet my passenger,
they show up there
and I talk to them a little a little bit about the flight we're going to make
and we hop in and give them some instructions about the plane.
what to expect and I fly them to where they need to go.
Our typical client I would say is a woman of colour who is a mother
to one to three children.
They are very low income, if any income.
Some of them are fleeing domestic abuse situations.
They know they need the abortion, they know they need the healthcare
and they've made the decision to have one
and all we do is step in and make sure that they can get there.
I mean I think there are some states that
would go so far as to try to make it criminally illegal
to even help someone get the healthcare that they have a right to.
And there are a lot of people that have very, very strong anti-abortion feelings,
and so I suppose by doing this I have risked subjecting myself
to harassment, and I think all of us need to take some risk
to help preserve the rights the rights of our fellow citizens.
When I get to wherever the destination is we land
and taxi to the small office, I help my passenger get out of the plane
and say goodbye.
And within a couple minutes I'm back up in the air heading back to home
or wherever and she's off to do whatever it is she needs to do.
We've always had abortion care,
the human species has always had abortion care.
So no matter what we're going to find a way to have an abortion that we need.
Until the religious extremists are kept out of my healthcare,
until the patriarchal misogynists are kept out of my healthcare,
it's really dangerous.
I'll probably be doing this for the rest of my life.
Hopefully so that my kids don't have too.
It feels important to me to use the privilege I have as a pilot
to help other people.
this is something that I need to do.