Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Abortion Street
At a nondescript office building in Dallas, two sides wage endless war over an unresolvable question.
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Sylvia grows impatient with the questions and finally interrupts. Since she kept taking birth-control pills after becoming pregnant, would there be something wrong with this baby? (The Muñozes do not use “embryo” or “fetus”; they talk about “el baby.”) Daneille says she will ask the doctor and leaves the room. The Muñozes show me a photo of their child, a round, laughing little boy dressed in short pants and a jacket and a bow tie, his hair slicked precisely over his forehead. Daneille returns with the news that taking the pills poses very little risk, but Sylvia’s concern about the baby’s health causes the counselor to reopen the questioning. If it weren’t for that worry, would Sylvia want the abortion? Sylvia and Felipe look at each other intently. “There is no money,” Felipe says finally.
Then Daneille picks up a plastic model of the female reproductive system and begins to explain the procedure. Sylvia nods impatiently and says something to her husband. “She says she remembers this from the last time,” he tells Daneille.
The counselor gives a start. She’s had another abortion? Yes, Sylvia answers, here, last year. Daneille repeats her question: If this baby could be born normal, would they want it? They look at each other again, and then look away. In unison, the answer is no.
After teaching Sylvia what to do if she misses two birth-control pills again, Daneille is ready to take her down for lab work. Will Felipe stay with her? He shakes his head swiftly, embarrassed and offended. Annoyed, Sylvia asks if I will go with her, and I agree.
While Sylvia waits to give her blood sample, Daneille collects the fee. Sylvia reaches into a change purse and pulls out a wad of cash, $250. Sharing a small anteroom with two other women—an unmarried schoolteacher here for a second abortion, a morose mother of one here for her first—she tells me she is nervous.
About half an hour later we go downstairs into a room that is cold by design, to make the surgery go easier. Sylvia shivers when Daneille tells her to get undressed and slip into a paper smock. “My side hurts,” Sylvia says, placing her fingers over her abdomen. Then lying on the table, she tells me she is worried about what her sister will say. “She’s going to think I’m crazy,” Sylvia says.
Lea Braun, the doctor who is one of the clinic’s owners, enters and begins a pelvic exam. A graying man with the practiced weariness of a public-health doctor, he says that Sylvia’s pain is probably a cyst, aggravated by the pregnancy, that will most likely dissolve.
With a clank, Dr. Braun opens a bag of sterilized instruments on a metal table. Sylvia begins to tremble from an injection of painkiller and epinephrine, a drug used to keep the patient’s heartbeat steady. While Daneille tells Sylvia that the procedure will go better if she breathes slowly and deeply, Dr. Braun inserts a speculum and cleans the walls of her vagina with a Betadine solution. Then he inserts a tube and turns on a machine, which, roaring to work, sucks the life out of Sylvia. Blood and tissue beat against the walls of a once-clear tube, like rain lashing at a windowpane, filling a plastic container. Sylvia writhes on the table and cries out; the color drains from her face. Her body goes rigid, as if she fears that the machine might devour her as well. “Just a few minutes more,” the doctor says.
When the abortion is over, Daneille and Dr. Braun leave us alone in the room again. Sylvia lies under the drape, pale and limp. When she gets up, she leaves behind a puddle of blood. Soon a nurse enters and directs us to a small, dim recovery room, where there are easy chairs and heating pads, cold drinks and cookies. Four women—one in each corner—are quiet, in varying stages of pain. Detached, Sylvia nibbles on a cookie.
By now, it has grown dark, and the clinic is closing. As I say good-bye, I know that the Muñozes will go home to the one child they feel they can properly care for, and I know that this abortion may help them escape the grip of abject poverty. But this knowledge does not stop another feeling, as persistent as the chill in the parking lot that night: that somehow I have stepped into the landscape of a common, everyday nightmare.
The Horror Show
The White Rose’s waiting room lacks the bustle of Routh Street; the cramped, harshly lit entry is empty when I arrive. I am there as a patient under an assumed name—when I called to make an appointment as a reporter, I was brusquely turned away. (“That’s your problem,” snapped center co-director Gerri Everts when I told her I was trying to examine the abortion conflict from both sides.) I am seen immediately by a kindly woman who escorts me to a small office in the back. She is middle-aged, slight, and prim in her long skirt and pearl-buttoned sweater. Pushing aside a paperback of some works by Catholic theologian Thomas Merton, she asks me a few questions: my address, my job, my “boyfriend’s” name. The woman asks how I feel about abortion, and I tell her the truth: I am ambivalent. Then she asks me for a urine specimen for the pregnancy test. When I return she takes me into a small room that has a television with a slide carousel on top, explaining that the center likes to offer a short presentation while women wait for their test results. Then she turns on the projector, turns off the light, and leaves me alone.
What follows is a cross between a fifth-grade hygiene film and Nightmare on Elm Street. The presentation is Socratic in form—at crucial intervals, a young woman, her back to the camera or her face obscured, poses the big questions, like “Isn’t the fetus just a bunch of cells?”
In the first portion a male narrator tells of recent deaths from abortion, of abortions on women who were not pregnant, of the calamities of a perforated uterus, of high fever, thrombosis, or brain damage. Next, he personifies the fetus: “He already knows what he likes to eat,” he asserts, “At sixteen weeks he can sense pressure, pain, and respond to sound. He swims with a natural swimmer’s stroke.” I’m instructed that “fetus” is wrong; “young one” or “baby” is correct. To prove that a fetus is separate from—as opposed to a part of—the mother, it is compared to an astronaut floating in space, connected to the capsule by long tubes.
On the beginning of life, the film leaves no room for doubt: “Fertilization is the greatest and most meaningful time of life,” it states. “At fertilization the total human being is there.” The real horror show follows: bloody fetuses piled in trash cans, photos in which tiny limbs can be seen protruding from what looks like coarsely ground round.
After the film, the woman comes back into the room with the news that I am not pregnant. Then she asks a few more questions about my boyfriend and urges that we marry, suggesting that life is so much easier when one is “protected,” She gives me a pamphlet that warns against premarital sex—it recommends channeling sexual energy into sports. I rush to my car when the interview is over, like a child escaping a perverse carnival sideshow.
I understand my unease better after a counselor at Routh Street directs me to a woman I’ll call Isabel Wallace. An eager young woman of 26 with shimmering dark hair, Isabel, who comes from a strict blue-collar family, is married and has a 20-month-old daughter. Like Sylvia Muñoz, she became pregnant when she twice forgot to take her pills. Overwhelmed by the responsibility of one child and concerned about tensions in her marriage, Isabel knew she wasn’t ready to have another child. Although her husband longed for more children, he told his wife, “I want what you want.” It was a doubly difficult decision because Isabel’s parents are devout Catholics active in the right-to-life movement. Her parents had often told her that women who had abortions were stupid or just couldn’t keep their legs together. At the State Fair Isabel’s mother asked her to give $1 to the right-to-life booth—in return, she had received a pin of tiny silver feet. It is still in her closet at home.
Isabel had made one call to Routh Street for information. She called again from work, but she was nervous and did not recall the name of the clinic; she looked under “Abortion” in the Yellow Pages and found a place at the address she remembered. She got the White Rose. When a woman answered, Isabel said that she had spoken to them about an abortion earlier and wanted to come in now. Could the abortion be performed that day? Yes, the woman told her, if her pregnancy test was positive. She was quoted a price of $300.
The day Isabel went to the center, she told the woman who greeted her that she had come for an abortion. The woman did not inspire confidence. “She looked like she needed counseling,” Isabel told me. “She was red-eyed, like she’d been crying for days.” Isabel went through the same steps I did. After the slide show, the woman came back with surprising news. “Congratulations, you’re between nine and a half to twelve weeks pregnant,” she said. Anxiously, she was cradling some books close to her chest. As Isabel tried to steady herself—she was convinced she was only seven weeks pregnant—the woman put the books down, open to pictures of three-month-old fetuses, and slid them across the table to Isabel. “Don’t you ever think of your baby?” she asked. Then she asked Isabel if she would consider adoption. “I cannot carry a baby for nine months and then give it up,” Isabel said. “I’m a mother, I can’t do that.”
The woman then agreed to call the doctor to arrange the abortion. She disappeared for twenty minutes and then started in again. “The doctor is busy now,” she said. Then she demanded: “Why do you want to give this baby up?”
“Listen, my husband’s intro drugs and we’re getting a divorce,” Isabel told her, starting to lie.
“Have you thought about turning your husband in to the police?” the counselor challenged. When Isabel resisted, the woman tried another tack. “You don’t think you could work now and take time off when the baby comes?”
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