Cover Story: Abortion’s battle lines
As Roe v. Wade turns 30, Georgia women have the right to choose, but not always the means
In the mid-’90s, travelers headed through middle Georgia on I-75 were greeted by a billboard boasting, “Macon — Still abortion-free!”
These days, the sign is gone from the outskirts of town. Save for the infrequent flare-up, gone too are the loud anti-abortion protests and the huge, gory photos of fetal carnage that once seemed part of the landscape outside Atlanta clinics. It’s a rare week when any abortion-related news makes local headlines or rates inclusion in a 6 o’clock newscast in Georgia; believe it or not, it’s been six years since a Sandy Springs clinic was damaged by a bomb allegedly placed by FBI fugitive Eric Rudolph. And on the national scene, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion stands little chance of being overturned any time soon, according to prominent Supreme Court-watchers.
All of which might lead one to assume, on the eve of the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, that abortion rights are enjoying an untroubled era in the Peach State. The battle, however, rages on. The open warfare of the early ’90s has been transformed into a daily struggle over women’s access to clinical services. The frontal attacks of pro-life fanatics have given way to a carefully engineered misinformation campaign designed to confuse and frighten young women into staying away from clinics. And the threat of violence always lurks in the back of the minds of abortion providers and clinic workers.
Fact is, the sign outside Macon may be gone, but its claim remains as accurate as ever. That’s not to say local women don’t have abortions, just that they aren’t getting them in Georgia’s sixth-largest city.
In rural Georgia, the nearest clinic is likely an hour or two away by car — farther, if you need a second-trimester abortion. Most places advertising abortion services instead offer only Scripture-based scolding and gruesome videos. And, in most cases, state law forbids Medicaid dollars to be used to pay for the procedure.
“Rich white women are always going to be able to get an abortion,” says Errin Vuley, executive director of Georgians for Choice. “The problem is with women who are poor, black or who live outside urban areas.”
Given these road blocks and dead ends, it’s easy to see a woman’s right to choose as an ever-shrinking commodity, like having a voucher nobody seems willing to redeem.
“Everybody has their limit,” explains Sam, a local abortion doctor with the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Midtown (who asked us not to use his real name). “The more barriers you put in the way, the fewer people will find their way around them.”
When it comes to practical restrictions on abortion rights, Georgia rates an “F,” according to the National Abortion Rights Action League, the country’s leading pro-choice lobbying group.
The failing grade seems largely based on the paltry number of clinics and hospitals that perform abortions. But, like any letter grade, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Largely because of former House Speaker Tom Murphy’s long reign, the laws in Georgia are less restrictive than in most Southern states. In Alabama, for instance, a girl under 18 can’t get an abortion unless she obtains written consent from one of her parents.
In Mississippi, the same girl would need
both parents’ consent, and would have to wait an extra day because of the misnamed “woman’s right to know” law (see accompanying story, next page). Louisiana goes still further, requiring parental consent to be notarized, barring public hospitals from performing elective abortions and declaring the state’s eagerness to ban abortions altogether, if and when the U.S. Supreme Court changes its mind. South Carolina officials have taken to harassing clinics there by citing them with minor building-code violations.
By contrast, Georgia — which requires that a minor merely tell one of her parents she’s planning to have an abortion — shines as a beacon of progressive thought. In fact, because state law allows second-trimester abortions up to 26 weeks, long the accepted threshold of fetal viability, Atlanta has become something of a minor regional destination for women seeking abortions.
The fact remains, however, that there are fewer than 20 clinics operating in Georgia: two in Savannah, one each in Augusta and Columbus, about a dozen in metro Atlanta and none at all in the entire southern half of the state. And the handful of Georgia clinics that offer the more complicated and time-consuming second-trimester procedure are all in Atlanta.
Which means that if a woman living in Albany, Valdosta or Rome needs an abortion, she’s got a long drive ahead of her — or, rather, someone does.
It’s for this reason that Helen Swanson launched the Volunteer Drivers Network. The Atlanta-based group helps women overcome the logistical barriers that stand in their path.
As the name suggests, Swanson or a fellow volunteer will arrange to drive a woman to a clinic. She waits while the patient is prepped, operated on and led to the recovery area. Then, she drives her back home. That’s it. Volunteers try to leave counseling to the clinics and political advocacy to the activists, although they usually are willing to lend a sympathetic ear.
Round-trip chauffeuring may seem almost absurdly basic as social services go, but when only the most feeble public support system exists for so fundamental a court-sanctioned right as abortion, sometimes the simple favors help the most.
“As with any surgical procedure, abortion clinics require their patients to be accompanied by someone who can wait around to drive them home,” explains Swanson, a retired nurse. “The women we help often don’t have their own transportation or someone to drive them.”
One recent client was an 18-year-old whose husband abandoned her; she already has one young child and her strict Catholic mother had vowed to throw her out of the house if she gets pregnant again. Another was a middle-class Marietta woman who called the group simply because she couldn’t imagine any friends or family members who’d be willing to support her decision to have an abortion.
Just last week, a Pennsylvania woman called to say she would be flying alone to Atlanta to end a 23-week pregnancy and needs a ride.
But the story that sticks with Swanson involved a 14-year-old rape victim in far northeast Georgia whose single mother didn’t drive. Although Medicaid assistance is available in cases of rape — more evidence of Georgia’s relative liberality — state health-care workers had failed to show up on two separate occasions to drive the girl and her mother to scheduled clinic appointments.
By the time the desperate mother found out about the Volunteer Drivers Network, her daughter’s pregnancy was so far along that a two-day abortion procedure was necessary, which in turn required a long road trip across the state. The group ended up collecting donations to put the girl and her mother up in a local hotel.
In Georgia and elsewhere, however, roughly 86 percent of abortions take place within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. After all, most women suspect they could be pregnant within the first month. At that point, where can a woman — especially one who lives in rural Georgia — turn for help?
How about the Yellow Pages, where the very first category is “abortion alternatives?” Or a sign down the street that reads, “Pregnant? Worried? Call us”? Or maybe the neighborhood building labeled “Pregnancy Help Center”? In all three cases, the woman will be in for a nasty surprise.
For the past two years, the National Abortion Rights Action League and its state affiliates have monitored the growth and tactics of so-called “crisis pregnancy centers.”
Furnished to resemble a medical office, and often located within spitting distance of an actual abortion clinic, these faux facilities typically offer free pregnancy testing to lure unsuspecting women who are considering abortion.
Once inside, the would-be patient is subjected to a heavy-handed form of Christian intervention, complete with videos of dismembered fetuses and a serving of guilt, in an effort to make her change her mind, says Beth Cope, executive director of Georgia NARAL.
“They specifically engage in deceptive practices to get women into the ‘clinic,’” Cope explains. “It’s unfair to women who are already very upset.”
Before she joined Georgians for Choice, Vuley went to several local crisis pregnancy centers as part of the NARAL investigation. At the first one she visited, in Tucker, Vuley says, she was locked in a room with a staff member’s young daughter after being told it would take half an hour to determine the results of her pregnancy test — the same kind of inexpensive, off-the-shelf test that shows results within a few seconds.
While she waited, graphic images played across a video screen, prompting the girl sitting next to her to happily chant, “Baby pieces! Baby pieces!” Vuley says she couldn’t wait to leave.
“For some women, going to a crisis pregnancy center simply makes them angry that someone has tricked them,” Vuley says, “and more determined to make up their own mind.”
Swanson further argues that all crisis pregnancy centers are implicitly founded on a faulty premise: namely, that if you can get a woman to walk through your door, you can convince her to carry an unwanted baby to term and, it is to be hoped, raise the child to be a productive, God-fearing member of society.
“In my experience, the women who come to clinics are almost always very certain about their decision,” she says.
Scattered across all parts of Georgia and outnumbering abortion clinics by more than a 4-to-1 margin, crisis pregnancy centers are commonly supported by local church congregations or deep-pocketed foundations such as the conservative Family Research Council.
For instance, the Advice and Aid Pregnancy Problem Center in Hapeville is funded in part by a nearby St. Vincent de Paul store. A local supporter just bought the center an ultrasound machine and pro-life doctors and nurses have volunteered to serve as staff, allowing the center to qualify as a medical clinic.
Center Director Terry Gibbs says they see about a dozen women a day, some of whom were expecting to be able to schedule an abortion. She adds, however, “We’re very careful on the phone not to mislead them; sometimes they will come in anyway just to have someone to talk to.”
As yet, no reliable data exists to suggest just how successful the centers have been at dissuading women from ending their pregnancies. But there’s little doubt that they are adopting ever more sophisticated strategies to market their anti-abortion message as they enjoy unprecedented levels of community support.
In a bid for legitimacy, many centers are installing sonogram machines and hiring licensed medical staff, a task certain to be made easier with the federal funding earmarked by President Bush for “faith-based initiatives.”
On the other hand, veteran anti-abortion activists Michelle and Michael Wolven still help organize weekend prayer vigils for their Catholic-based group, Helpers of God’s Precious Infants, outside the Atlanta SurgiCenter in Midtown.
Michelle Wolven, who just gave birth to her seventh child, admits that the group’s poster of an aborted fetus sometimes anger passersby, by adds: “We’re there as Christians to show people the truth.”
The ideological tug-of-war between pro-choice forces and abortion foes will likely continue for the foreseeable future, according to David Garrow, an Emory law professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and unabashed civil rights advocate.
“As a constitutional law scholar, I know the argument we keep hearing that Roe v. Wade is in jeopardy is a Chicken-Little position,” he says. The law has enough supporters on the Supreme Court to avoid being overturned any time soon, he adds.
Merriam McLendon was working as an English teacher in Birmingham, Ala., the day she stopped at a traffic light next to a clinic that was being protested by, among others, a man who persisted in yelling his self-righteous, hellfire-laced screed through her open car window.
She was reminded of when she was a 16-year-old college student afraid to tell her mother she was pregnant. Years before Roe v. Wade, she had gone with her boyfriend to visit a woman who provided illegal abortions.
McLendon remembers lying on a blanket spread out on the floor as the woman pulled her surgical instruments from a metal bucket filled with alcohol in the corner of the room.
“I’m on the floor praying, ‘Don’t let me die here. Don’t let me die,’” she recalls.
At a time in her life when she had no thought of getting involved in this abortion issue, the protester’s tirade stuck in her mind, taking form as something of a call to arms.
“After my abortion, I felt relieved, but later on, I felt guilt and I grieved, but I asked God for forgiveness and I felt my burden lifted,” she recalls. “The people who are out there screaming, ‘You’re going to hell,’ have nothing to tell me.”
The desire to help other frightened young abortion patients is part of what has led McLendon to a new career as clinic administrator at Summit Medical Associates in Morningside.
By the time a prospective patient places her first call to an actual clinic, she typically has become burdened with all manner of misconceptions about the abortion procedure, says Stacy, the patient counselor at Summit.
“About half the women I talk to have no idea what’s involved in the surgery,” says Stacy (who asked that her real name not be used). “They think it’s dangerous, or that we do a lot of cutting.”
Other misapprehensions seem to come straight from the crisis pregnancy center handbook: the notion that the vacuum-aspiration device used in most first-term abortions has suction so powerful that it can Hoover out a colon if the doctor gets careless; or the erroneous idea that a woman can never bear children once she’s had an abortion.
Then there’s the recurring news stories blaming abortions for causing breast cancer. According to most studies, abortion, miscarriage or any sudden halt to pregnancy can marginally increase the likelihood of breast cancer, but the risk isn’t seen as significant.
The myth that bothers McLendon the most, however, is the one about “abortion mills” where women are led through filthy back rooms like cattle in a slaughterhouse.
“The irony is,” she says, “that if abortions are outlawed, that’s what we’ll go back to.”
The women who eventually reach the point of coming to an abortion clinic aren’t likely to find protesters linking arms to bar the way, as in previous years. The 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which mandates stiff penalties for trespassing on clinic property or blocking doorways, is responsible for curtailing much of the protest activity and the violence it fueled, Garrow explains.
“What the pro-choice side doesn’t like to talk about is that the type of harassment we experienced in the late ’80s and early ’90s just isn’t the case anymore,” Garrow says. “Ever since the FACE law was passed, the bad guys went home or behaved themselves.”
Just within the past year, James Kopp, accused of the 1998 murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian — a New York abortion doctor who was the country’s last victim of pro-life violence — was apprehended in France. And an Illinois judge gave anti-choice extremist Clayton Waagner the maximum sentence of 30 years for sending bomb and anthrax threats to numerous clinics.
Still, while such notorious, hate-filled websites as the Carrollton-based “Nuremberg Files” are allowed to post veiled threats against abortion providers, clinic workers remain cautious. But, like McLendon, they keep showing up for work.
“As much as I would like abortion to be regarded as another medical procedure, it’ll never be that way,” says abortion doctor Sam, who works several days a month at the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Midtown. “Everyone I’ve met who does this work feels a certain calling, a dedication to all aspects of women’s health care. I can’t fathom someone who wants to be a gynecologist, but who doesn’t want to provide this service.”