A Modern-Day Scarlet Letter: How Porn Stigma Almost Claimed the Life of a Nursing Student (XBIZ)

Read the full article by Gustavo Turner at XBIZ.com 

COOS BAY, Ore. — In September 2017, a 30-year-old woman named Nicole Gililland enrolled in the selective nursing program at the Southwestern Oregon Community College (SWOCC).

Gililland, a Coos Bay, Ore. resident, a mother to two small children, had lived most of her life in between Oregon and Utah.

Gililland was a Utah native, born in Layton, an Air Force-base town near the Great Salt Lake, in 1987. Her family — with whom she was in extremely volatile terms three decades later after what she describes as a lifetime of abuse, exploitation and malice towards her — relocated to Oregon when she was ten, but she kept escaping from them and going back to her birth state.

By the time she got pregnant with her second child, Gililland had been working as EMT and paramedic for many years in Salt Lake City, but she realized that the hours and the pay of a nursing job would be much more convenient for a young mother who was the primary provider for her children.

She divorced her husband (from whom she got her married surname), returned to Coos Bay to attend SWOCC during her second pregnancy. The father of the elder child was a bohemian type (and local lothario) who was only intermittently in the picture.

A focused, ultradiligent Gililland completed the prerequisites for the two-year nursing program, which accepted her as one of 28 students. She accomplished this while going through a complicated pregnancy. By early 2018, she was making good progress towards obtaining the knowledge and credentials that would allow her to take care of her family.

This was Gililland’s world when the nursing student and mother returned from Spring Break in April 2018.

And then her whole world came crashing down.